Design & Feel
When you first take the iPad Air out of its box, you’ll feel just as amazed as you did when you picked up your iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, or iPad mini for the first time — particularly if you’re upgrading from a full-size iPad.
Apple has made outstanding improvements to its size and weight, and they result in a 9.7-inch iPad that, for the first time in three years, you won’t mind holding onto for hours on end when playing a game, watching a movie, or reading a book. It’s comfortable to hold, even in just one hand.
Like every iPad to date, the Air’s design consists mainly of a large glass panel sat inside an aluminum shell. But the full-size iPad has never been this beautiful. Like the iPad mini, it has stunning diamond-cut, chamfered edges and narrow bezels that seem to place more focus on the display between them. It also has stereo speakers that are better placed and look much nicer.
I’ve been testing the black iPad Air with that gorgeous space grey finish, which doesn’t chip and scratch like last year’s black iPad mini and iPhone 5. I prefer a black display when it comes to the iPad because it’s nowhere near as noticeable as a white one when you’re watching movies and TV shows or playing games. If you happen to go with a silver model, though, I’m sure you’ll be just as pleased with its looks.
It’s astonishing how the minds at Apple managed to pack all of the Air’s internals into a slender package without making compromises.
It’s quite astonishing how the minds inside Cupertino managed to pack all of the iPad Air’s components — its Retina display with 3.1 million pixels, and a 64-bit A7 processor — into such a slender package without making any compromises. The iPad Air still has the same 10-hour battery life you’ve come to expect from an iPad.
Yet again, Apple has raised the bar and set new standards in hardware design with the iPad Air. And yet again, its competitors won’t be able to match it.
Killian Bell is a freelance writer based in the U.K. He has an interest in all things tech and also covers Android over at CultofAndroid.com. You can follow him on Twitter via @killianbell.
7 responses to “iPad Air Is The Full-Size iPad You’ve Been Waiting For [Review]”
The best tablet ever. Could have been even better with TouchID which people are now saying they can’t live without. Entering a password or drawing a gesture to unlock your phone is so 2012. Might have to wait for the 2014 iPad Mini with Retina, 64GB and TouchID.
quite/quiet… same thing.
seriously, do you guys even bother reading back the shit you write?
WRITING IS REVISION. learn it. live it.
Thx for the nice review!!!
What I’m missing: Touch ID, 32GB for the base model, 2GB of RAM (I don’t like spec sheets but 1GB wasn’t enough on the iPad 4, kicked out apps way too soon, let alone 64bit apps will consume more RAM on average), and I’ve heard the display isn’t laminated and has no anti-reflective coating like most of apple’s recent displays (iPhone 5, rMBP, thin iMac).
These are huge letdowns, but overall its a great product. I’ve always thought of the older iPads as being clunky, to the extend that I never bought one. But the thinness and lightness of the Air make it so much more usable, I’ll go get one.
I’ve ordered the iPad Air but I have not received it yet. My iPad 3 has always been a bit heavy in bed, digging into my chest as I lay reading over time. I expect the lighter weight to correct that. On the couch it has never been an issue.
Another reason I’m upgrading is the charge/sync port. Since I’ve had an iPhone 5 it has been a nuisance going from one cable to another and I will very much like unifying that into one cable.
The increased speed of 4-5 times faster will be welcome as well. Some HD videos I’ve downloaded would stutter and the comic book reading app I use (Comic Zeal) unpacks archives of pages and resizes them if they are too big and there are noticeable delays I expect to be lessened or eliminated. These speed issues have always been there.
So for weight, unified cable, and drastically increased speed I justify the upgrade, all of which will affect my experience profoundly.
The hardware ecosystem of iMac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple TV is truly a marvel that keeps getting better as time goes on. I don’t think enough is written about how each makes the others better. Case in point is the iPad working with Logic Pro X, not only echoing features and acting as a remote but also adding features — I hope this extensibility moves forward, adding a separate visual touch interface and additional features to other apps as well. I would like to see an article comparing other hardware ecosystems from Android and Windows and how they match up to Apple’s unified system.
I agree. Anyway I’ll waiting for 2 GB of RAM, touch ID and a better screen.
Wow, that would be quite a device indeed! I would LUV LUV LUV!!! <3<3<3!!!!