The iPad Air Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 29, 2013 9:00 PM ESTBattery Life
With the iPad Air Apple moved to a 32.4Wh battery, a significant decrease from the 42.5Wh unit in the 3rd and 4th generation iPads. The smaller battery doesn’t come with a change to Apple’s claim of 10 hours of battery life, which implies a reduction in overall platform power. I confirmed a substantial reduction in platform power in my crude measurements earlier in the article. Although it’s possible for the iPad Air to draw substantially more power than the iPad 4, our earlier power data seems to imply that it’s unlikely given the same exact workload. Our battery life tests agree.
We'll start with our 2013 smartphone/tablet web browsing battery life test. As always all displays are calibrated to 200 nits. The workload itself is hidden from OEMs to avoid any intentional gaming, but I've described it at a high level here.
Our web browsing workload came in at exactly 10 hours of continuous usage - an improvement compared to the iPad 4. Battery life on LTE was good as well, consistently delivering just under 10 hours of usage. The fact that both LTE and WiFi tests deliver similar results tells me that we may be bottlenecked by some other component in the system (perhaps display?).
I've been running the same video playback test for a while now, although we're quickly approaching a point where I'll need to move to a higher bitrate 1080p test. Here I'm playing a 4Mbps H.264 High Profile 720p rip I made of the Harry Potter 8 Blu-ray. The full movie plays through and is looped until the battery dies. Once again, the displays are calibrated to 200 nits:
Video playback battery life also improves slightly compared to the iPad 4. Apple’s battery life claims aren’t usually based around video playback, so exceeding their 10 hour suggestion here shouldn’t come as a shock. Apple’s video decode power has always been extremely low.
Our final cross-platform battery life test is based on Kishonti's Egypt HD test. Here we have a loop of the Egypt HD benchmark, capped to 30 fps, running on all of the devices with their screens calibrated to 200 nits.
Our 3D battery life rundown test shows a substantial improvement in battery life over the iPad 4. IMG’s PowerVR G6430, running a moderate workload, can do so more efficiently than any of the previous generation GPUs in Apple’s SoCs. Much like the A7’s CPU cores however, there’s a wider dynamic range of power consumption with the G6430. Running at max performance I would expect to see greater GPU power consumption. The question then becomes what’s more likely? Since the majority of iOS games don’t target the A7 (and instead shoot for lower end hardware), I would expect you to see better battery life even while gaming on the iPad Air vs the iPad 3/4.
Charge Time
The iPad Air comes with the same 12W USB charger and Lightning cable that we first saw with the iPad 4. Having to only charge a 32.5W battery means that charge times are lower compared to the iPad 3 and 4:
A full charge takes a little over 4 hours to complete. The adapter delivers as much as 12W to the iPad, drawing a maximum of 13.5W at the wall. I still think the sweet spot is somewhere closer to 2.5 hours but that’s another balancing game that must be played between charge time and maintaining battery health. It’s still so much better than the ~6 hours of charge time for the iPad 3 and 5.69 hours for the iPad 4.
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darkcrayon - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
You actually used the aspect ratio of the Surface as an advantage over the iPad? The 16:9 aspect ratio is fairly poor in landscape mode for "computing" tasks (not enough vertical real estate, same problem on modern desktop computers except at least there is so much more physical space there to make up for it), but it's absolutely comical in portrait mode. The iPad's aspect ratio is far more versatile for portrait or landscape, doing any kinds of tasks people typically do on computing devices. Video is the only place it's not as good, because it makes the video smaller. But it's funny you'd mention a bunch of supposed "power user" features for a device incredibly (comparatively) poor for viewing standard documents.YuLeven - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
'Is far worse than 16:9 for video watching'I did not say that 16:9 makes 16:9's tablets better, I said it's better for video watching. Is there any lie about it?
Wether scrolling more when reading a document rends a tablet poor for that, it's up to you to decide. On my personal opinion, software has more to do with document viewing prowess than the aspect ratio. And if it stents to writing, well, actual multitasking is a bless.
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As you can see my post is about things that other tablets do better and that do not receive attention on an iPad review, despite of in other tablets reviews lots of features of the iPad are brought as an comparition standard.
ADGrant - Saturday, November 2, 2013 - link
16:9 is only better for video if you hate black bars. a 4:3 tablet is better for document viewing because, in portrait orientation, the aspect ratio is similar to that of a paper document.guidryp - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
The iPad is a tablet, you seem to have bought into the Microsoft argument that tablets should be laptops.Really they shouldn't. Microsoft takes the tablet idea and does a mashup that is a poor laptop and a poor tablet.
If you want a laptop, buy a laptop, if you want a tablet buy a tablet. You get a better experience that way.
YuLeven - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
In which part Windows tablets feels like a poor tablet experience? Have you actually used Windows 8.1/RT as a tablet?It feels great. The gestures are simple, the multitasking is easily handled with fingers.
Or perhaps you're refering to the type cover? Well, if that's the case you should notice that's optional and the onscreen keyboard on Windows is superb.
Real multitasking, with two apps at once plus background apps as in a desktop, is alone enough to the Windows RT to be a contender to Apple's offerings. Compared to that, the iPad feels more or less like a toy/media consumption only device.
Atom Windows 8.1 devices and Windows RT hardly are 'poor tablet and laptop mashups'. They are tablets, weigh like tablets, behave like tablets.
Tablets shouldn't be laptops, but also, tablet's shouldn't be a device that strongly limits you due lack of capability of bringing new ways to interact with the device.
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The iPad wins handsdown on apps number, but not necessarely that is a definitive feature for everyone. After all, pandora feels better using the browser version - which can run on the background, no need for paying for the premium account/app in order to listen your musics while you do other stuff -, facebook also feels better on browser. The list goes on.
guidryp - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Why does Surface suck as a tablet?Bigger, heavier, nearly useless for portrait orientation with 16:9 screen.
Do a Google Image search on the Surface. You likely have a hard time finding an image of it being used in portrait mode, because it is nearly unusable in that mode.
In fact you have a hard time finding image of it used as a tablet at all. It is mostly used as a laptop.
YuLeven - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Heavy and big? It's as thick and heavy as an iPad 4. Is the iPad 4 useless? Don't mistake the Surface 2 for the Surface Pro 2.And yes, it is made for landscape mode. Do is the Nexus 10 and Galaxy Note 10.1, are they fail as tablets in some extent? Tablet does not equal portrait usage.
ADGrant - Saturday, November 2, 2013 - link
Once you add the keyboard the Surface is about twice as heavy as an iPad Air and it doesn't have any apps.KoolAidMan1 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
It is useless in landscape mode too. 16:9 is bad for small screens and it is terrible for web browsing on a tablet 10" or smaller.YuLeven - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Well, I see your point. You don't like it. But considering that the last numbers show us that two thirds of the tablet shipments in Q3 2013 now belongs to Android (which is 16:9 in 99% of the cases) and others (which include Windows, also 16:9), I can wonder that for a massive chunk of the consumer basis 16:9 orientation isn't such an issue that makes its devices 'terrible'.