The full-size iPad loses a lot of weight, but none of its appeal
One of the most persistent criticisms of previous 10in iPads was that they were too heavy. The iPad 4, for example, weighs 650g – a heft that quickly becomes a burden when held for long periods of time. That has all changed with the new iPad Air – Apple’sew latest full-size iPad weighs just 469g.
This is a significant weight reduction and you’ll feel the benefit immediately – this iPad is far more comfortable to use than previous models.
Apple has achieved this weight loss by reducing the size of a number of components, most notably the battery. Although the battery is smaller, there isn’t a significant drop in battery life compared to the iPad 4. Both achieved nearly 12-and-a-half hours when playing videos continuously, making the Air one of the most durable tablets we’ve ever tested.
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The Air looks like a larger version of the iPad Mini, with narrower left and right borders (when vertical), a chamfered edge and rounded corners. It’s marginally less rigid than the iPad 4, but we could only bend it slightly when we exerted a lot of pressure.
Despite the slimmer borders, the Air was easier to use than we expected. We tend to rest our thumbs on the borders when using the tablet, but the screen is clever enough to recognise that our thumbs are passive, rather than actively pressing onscreen controls, and thus it ignores them. It’s not perfect, but it felt less error-prone than the iPad Mini’s thumb-rejection technology.
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We were greatly impressed by the screen’s image quality. The screen itself is almost blindingly bright at its highest setting, while text looks very crisp, thanks to its high resolution of 2048x1536 pixels. Contrast and colour accuracy were so good that we could spot flaws in our photos that we’dimissed on other devices’ screens.
The Air doesn’t have a fingerprint sensor like the iPhone 5s, but it comes with the same A7 processor as the 5s, which helps to make it one of the fastest tablets we’ve seen.
It breezed through our demanding 3D graphics tests and loaded and scrolled through complex websites quickly and smoothly. The iOS 7 operating system and various apps rarely, if ever, became sluggish or unresponsive.
The Air, however, lacks the 5s’s excellent camera. Shots taken in bright daylight were quite good with reasonably accurate colours and sharp details, but low-lit shots were too blurry and noisy. We don’t recommend relying on the Air as your main camera.
We’ve already covered some of our favourite iOS 7 features (as well as those aspects that irritated us) in our iPhone 5s and 5c reviews These pros and cons are replicated in the iPad Air.
Like the two new iPhones, the Air comes with a useful crop of surprisingly sophisticated apps – the Microsoft Office-compatible iWork suite and the iLife suite for editing photos, music and videos. Projects you create in these apps, apart from music and videos, can also be worked on in the Mac versions of the same apps, which are included free with new Macs.
There are a few deficiencies in the iPad Air that it’s inherited from older iPad models – there’s no SD card slot and no option to swap the onscreen keyboard for one of your own choosing, as you can with Android devices.
However, there are loads more quality apps optimised for the iPad than there are for Android tablets. If an SD card slot and a greater scope to tweak the operating system are important to you then you should buy the Sony Xperia Tablet Z.
Otherwise, the iPad Air is the better big-screen tablet thanks to its excellent battery life, lighter weight, sturdy build quality and superb high-resolution screen.
