iPad Air review : The best tablet gets better

The best tablet gets better

It’s right there in the name: The most important trait of the iPad Air is that it weighs only a pound. For a company that obsesses over making devices thinner and lighter, it must have been torture for Apple to spend nearly three years making a series of iPads that were better than their predecessors, but not smaller. Now it has.
Nearly every aspect of the iPad Air is thinner and lighter than the previous model (the fourth-generation iPad). That includes the battery, which is smaller—and less capacious—than before. Battery life, on the other hand, is pretty much the same, thanks to the improved power efficiency of the iPad Air’s A7 processor.
At the same time that the iPad got thinner and lighter, it also got more powerful. That A7 processor allows the iPad Air to run roughly twice as fast as the previous-generation iPad, opening the door for new apps that can bring power traditionally reserved for “real computers” to the tablet.

A familiar look

It’s fair to say that the iPad Air takes its design cues from the iPad mini, which was introduced a year ago. The bezel around the new iPad’s screen has been reduced in height and (more dramatically) in width. Like the mini, the Air comes in two color choices: a white front with a silver back, or a black front with a dark gray back. Also like the mini, software makes sure that stray thumb touches on the display next to the narrow bezel are ignored. I’ve never have a problem with holding the iPad mini by the narrow bezel and never noticed any trouble on the iPad Air either.
The iPad’s display itself is unchanged from those of the previous two models: It’s a 2048-by-1536-pixel display, with a density of 264 pixels per inch. That’s what Apple calls a Retina display, with resolution so high that most people can’t perceive the individual dots that make up the image. The iPad Air also features the same 4:3 aspect ratio used by all iPad models (and old-fashioned TV sets), giving it a less extreme rectangular shape than many competing tablets, which tend to use the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio.

Fastest iPad ever? Of course

The iPad Air is powered by the A7 processor, the same chip used in the brand-new iPhone 5s. It’s a fast, 64-bit processor that does indeed blow previous iPads out of the water.
The Geekbench speed-test app showed the iPad Air to be faster even than the iPhone 5s. (The iPad Air’s A7 runs a little faster than the iPhone’s, owing to its larger battery and possibly its greater ability to dissipate heat.) And it was almost (but not quite) twice as fast as its predecessor model, the fourth-generation iPad. Essentially, in a year Apple has almost doubled the speed of both the iPad and the iPhone. Not bad.