Certainly, Apple is on a winner with the quality of its new screen. It's the first thing customers will notice in retail stores. It's clearer, colours are richer and deeper, and text looks razor sharp. You see the difference when you place the new and older iPad side-by-side.
Technically, the iPad has gone from having 786,000 pixels with iPad 2 to 3.1 million pixels on the same-sized 9.7-inch display, a fourfold increase. Its 2048 x 1536 pixel display with 264 ppi puts it ahead of pixel density on rival tablets such as Samsung's Galaxy 10.1 Tab, which has 1280 x 800 pixels over 10.1 inches.
The net effect is everything: photos, video and web pages rendered by Safari look better, and this lifts the overall user experience. The gadget's screen quality is rivalled only by the iPhone 4S, which has an even denser 326 pi, but on a much smaller screen.
Where the iPad 2 did video at near 720p resolution, the latest iPad displays full 1080p high-definition video.
To drive the higher resolution screen, the latest iPad has a faster A5X processor with quad core graphics, which Apple says offers a fourfold increase in graphics capability. This performance increase is exactly what's needed to drive four times the number of pixels to the screen in each frame of every second of video.
So, despite the fourfold resolution, video playback is still smooth. Using our graphics benchmark, the new iPad delivered 6767 frames at 60 frames a second, compared to 6078 frames at 59 frames a second for the iPad 2, which is comparable. But the new model returns four times the number of pixels per frame.
Despite this vastly increased graphics capability, there seems to be little grunt left over from the new A5X processor to improve general performance. So don't expect the loading of web pages or apps to be faster than before.
Our benchmark, which measures computational speed, returned 850-890 megaflops a second (millions of floating point operations a second) for iPad 2 and upward of 890 megaflops a second for its successor. That's not a big difference, so buyers moving up from the iPad 2 will see little improvement in responsiveness and application execution.
The back-facing camera on the iPad is now a respectable 5 megapixels instead of about 0.92 megapixels, and it can shoot full 1080p HD video. Image and video quality seemed fine. Of course, you can import your even higher resolution 8-megapixel iPhone 4S snaps to the iPad if you want to use iPhotos and iMovie on the bigger screen.
Despite the fourfold increase in screen resolution, battery life on the new iPad works out at about the same as the old one, thanks to a higher capacity battery in the new iPad. An hour of watching video on the iPad 2 consumed 7 per cent of its battery; on the new iPad it was 9 per cent. The new iPad delivers 10 hours of video in a single charge, but the iPad 2's battery lasts longer.
We noticed that the new iPad can get warm on the back with prolonged use. It's 8 per cent heavier than iPad 2 (652g to 601g for WiFi models) and thicker, 9.4 mm compared to 8.8 mm.
Despite this increased thickness I could still use many of the same accessories as iPad 2, such as Belkin's wireless keyboard. It fitted snugly in the sleeve.
The SIM-enabled version of the new iPad is branded as WiFi + 4G, but it does not connect to Australian 4G LTE networks, only 3G ones and faster HSPA and HSPA + variants.
The new iPad's ability to use dual channel HSPA+ on Telstra's 3G network should return up to 20Mbps download speed. We managed to get download speeds of 12-13 Mbps and upload speeds of 0.5-1 Mbps but this was inconsistent. In our first tests we were lucky to register more than 5Mbps download in several Sydney suburbs.
The inconsistency seems more a network issue. The iPad seems capable of higher 3G download speeds.
However Apple's decision to confine its 4G upgrade to mobile networks in the US and Canada that use the 700 Megahertz frequency has not helped. Otherwise download speeds could be up to 40 Mbps, based on HTC's Velocity 4G on the Telstra network.
Apple chief executive Tim Cook said last month that with $91 billion to dip into, the company had more money than it needed. It's a pity it didn't use a fraction of this to roll out an 1800Mhz 4G regional model that could be used in Australia and parts of Asia, as Samsung has done for its 8.9-inch tablet.
Of course, the benefits of tablets go beyond hardware, and Apple has done a great job optimising some apps for the HD screen. These are available for the iPad 2, but not at full HD splendour.
At $5.49, the iPhoto iPad app is a steal. It's an extremely intuitive photo management and editing app and Apple has gone to considerable lengths to make editing photos with your fingers intuitive yet powerful.
My only criticism is that you need iPhoto on your Mac to make full use of it. For example, to add events from older photos you need to add them first to your Mac then sync to your iPad. This is cumbersome if you have a Windows PC. Full management functionality should be available independently of syncing these days.
I liked a new feature in iMovie that lets you create movie trailers from your clips. You chose a pre-defined template such as a Bollywood Movie or Expedition preview, add your clips, write some text and press the button. Garage Band has a function to compose melodies using a full string orchestra. You'll love this if you're a classical music buff. Connect your iPad to speakers to enjoy the full effect.
The upgrade of iOS includes a dictation key on the keyboard that you can use in all apps offering text input: email, Notes and word-processing apps included.
I found the dictation accuracy a bit flaky, but Apple says the text-to-speech engine improves as it learns the user's voice: we'll have to wait and see.
In the end, if you love a higher resolution screen on an iPad, you won't be disappointed. It is exceptionally good. But if you're looking for faster mobile network connectivity or a quicker iPad then, on our testing, the new iPad doesn't seem to perform much better than its predecessor, but that may be of little import.
In any case, the new iPad offers a high quality and well-designed user experience that is ahead of the competition.
2 comments:
nice post
Offshore Software Development Company
good to see about ipad
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