First Impressions: Apple iPad Air 2 Tablet in Review
For the original German article, see here.
It is here! The new iPad Air. We want to give you our initial impressions of the review sample before the in-depth review follows in a couple of days. The big changes are happening on the inside. The predecessor is still the tablet reference and we expect nothing else from the Air 2. Apple put some work into that, listened to some feedback and once again significantly improved the performance. The battery runtimes are supposed to be identical. The issues of iOS 8 are supposed to be fixed by iOS 8.1, but we already had problems with the first benchmark.
The biggest competitors for the iPad Air 2 are probably the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.5, Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet, Microsoft Surface 2 and the upcoming Google Nexus 9.
Initial Impressions
The case of the Apple iPad Air 2 does not really differ from the predecessor. It is only slightly thinner with a height of 6.1 millimeters vs. 7.5 millimeters. It is also slightly lighter and only weighs 444 grams in the heavier LTE configuration. The aluminum body feels good in the hands and is a haptic highlight. Less convenient are the sharp edges that create the transition to the screen. Potential buyers shouldn't worry about the torsion resistance. We are pretty sure you can bend the Apple iPad Air 2 if you try really hard, but that shouldn't be a problem during everyday use.
Apple also improved the connectivity and finally introduces ac WLAN for its tablet. The LTE modem only supports transfer rates of up to 150 Mbps (Cat. 4). We would have expected the newer Cat. 6 standard, which can be twice as fast, from a high-end device. Bluetooth 4.0 is not up to date anymore, either.
NFC is not officially included, but the iPad Air has the NFC chip, only without the according antennas. This means you cannot use the tablet to pay in a store, but it seems that the NFC chip is required for Apple Pay. The security was also improved by Touch ID, which means that Apple's fingerprint scanner is now available in the tablet as well.
Cameras & Multimedia
Something changed in regard to the cameras. The front camera is the usual FaceTime version that we already know from the iPhones, but the main camera was improved significantly and now takes pictures with up to 8 MP. It seems that Apple uses a combination of the cameras from the iPhone 5s and 5c since the aperture (f/2.4) is similar to the 5c, but the camera of the iPad Air 2 can record slow-motion videos with up to 120 fps. This means it probably cannot keep up with the camera of the iPhone 6, but at least it is flush with the case. There is still no additional light or flash.
Display
According to the specifications, the display did not really change. It is still a 9.7-inch screen with 2048x1536 pixels. However, Apple says they reduced the distance between the panel and the glass. This was actually a criticism in the review of the iPad Air where you could quickly see a ghost effect. A short test already shows that this issue was almost completely eradicated.
Otherwise, we will have to wait for the measurements to see if there are further differences. We hope that the color-space coverage in particular has been improved if Apple wants to compete with Samsung. We will publish the first results in the following days.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Brightness Distribution: 92 %
Center on Battery: 423 cd/m²
Contrast: 693:1 (Black: 0.61 cd/m²)
ΔE Color 2.86 | 0.5-29.43 Ø4.89
ΔE Greyscale 2.37 | 0.5-98 Ø5.1
88% AdobeRGB 1998 (Argyll 1.6.3 3D)
Gamma: 2.43
| Apple iPad Air 2 2014 PowerVR GXA6850, A8X, 128 GB eMMC Flash | Apple iPad Air 1 2013 PowerVR G6430, A7, 16 GB eMMC Flash | Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 Mali-T628 MP6, 5420 Octa, 16 GB eMMC Flash | Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet Adreno 330, 801 APQ8074AB, 32 GB eMMC Flash | Microsoft Surface Pro 3 HD Graphics 4400, 4300U, Hynix HFS128G3MNM | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Screen | 22% | -4% | -1% | -26% | |
| Brightness middle | 423 | 473 12% | 290 -31% | 461 9% | 355.3 -16% |
| Brightness | 427 | 442 4% | 291 -32% | 437 2% | 338 -21% |
| Brightness Distribution | 92 | 90 -2% | 87 -5% | 89 -3% | 91 -1% |
| Black Level * | 0.61 | 0.41 33% | 0.59 3% | 0.33 46% | |
| Contrast | 693 | 1154 67% | 781 13% | 1077 55% | |
| Colorchecker dE 2000 * | 2.86 | 2.82 1% | 2.37 17% | 3.55 -24% | 4.72 -65% |
| Greyscale dE 2000 * | 2.37 | 1.45 39% | 2.03 14% | 2.58 -9% | 6.53 -176% |
| Gamma | 2.43 91% | 2.47 89% | 2.45 90% | 2.78 79% | 2.17 101% |
| CCT | 6941 94% | 6768 96% | 6521 100% | 6342 102% | 6707 97% |
| Color Space (Percent of AdobeRGB 1998) | 88 | 100 14% | 59.37 -33% |
* ... smaller is better
Performance
The manufacturer surprised us a bit with the Apple A8X processor. The Californians actually waived the dual-core chips and now integrate a triple-core processor clocked at 1.5 GHz. The amount of memory was doubled to 2 GB. The advertised performance advantage of 40% is easily surpassed in the multi-core tests, but the advantage is not as big in the single-core benchmarks.
Apple claims that the GPU performance compared to the first iPad Air was improved by 150%. We cannot confirm this statement yet, but the performance advantage is definitely enormous and can even beat the Tegra K1. We are actually not quite sure what GPU is used by Apple. The most probable speculation is the PowerVR GX6650; maybe we will have a definitive answer in a couple of days.
| Geekbench 3 | |
| 32 Bit Single-Core Score (sort by value) | |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 | |
| Apple iPad Air 1 2013 | |
| Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet | |
| NVIDIA Shield Tablet P1761W | |
| 32 Bit Multi-Core Score (sort by value) | |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 | |
| Apple iPad Air 1 2013 | |
| Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet | |
| NVIDIA Shield Tablet P1761W | |
| 3DMark | |
| 1280x720 offscreen Ice Storm Unlimited Score (sort by value) | |
| Apple iPad Air 2 2014 | |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 | |
| Apple iPad Air 1 2013 | |
| Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet | |
| NVIDIA Shield Tablet P1761W | |
| Microsoft Surface 2 | |
| 1280x720 offscreen Ice Storm Unlimited Graphics Score (sort by value) | |
| Apple iPad Air 2 2014 | |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 | |
| Apple iPad Air 1 2013 | |
| Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet | |
| NVIDIA Shield Tablet P1761W | |
| Microsoft Surface 2 | |
| 1280x720 offscreen Ice Storm Unlimited Physics (sort by value) | |
| Apple iPad Air 2 2014 | |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 | |
| Apple iPad Air 1 2013 | |
| Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet | |
| NVIDIA Shield Tablet P1761W | |
| Microsoft Surface 2 | |
| Peacekeeper - --- (sort by value) | |
| Apple iPad Air 2 2014 | |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 | |
| Apple iPad Air 1 2013 | |
| Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet | |
| Microsoft Surface 2 | |
| Octane V2 - Total Score (sort by value) | |
| Apple iPad Air 2 2014 | |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 | |
| Apple iPad Air 1 2013 | |
| Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet | |
| NVIDIA Shield Tablet P1761W | |
| Microsoft Surface 2 | |
Energy and Battery Runtime
The runtime of the Apple iPad Air is supposed to be up to 10 hours if you browse the web via WLAN. The runtime is one hour shorter when you use the LTE connection. We will check Apple's claim over the next few days since both the processor and the graphics solution are much more powerful, but the battery capacity was reduced by 15% to 27.6 Wh. This means Apple had to reduce the power consumption of the panel dramatically to meet the advertised runtimes.
| Off / Standby |   0 / 0.1 Watt |
| Idle |  1.2 / 5.1 / 5.4 Watt |
| Load |
7.9 / 11.1 Watt |
    
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Key:
min: ,
med: ,
max: Voltcraft VC 960 | |
Preliminary Verdict
The Apple iPad Air 2 leaves a great first impression with small drawbacks, even though this is complaining on a very high level. We don't expect any bad surprises during the review, but the latest device from Cupertino won't surpass the display of the Galaxy Tab S 10.5. In terms of performance, it will be neck and neck with Nvidia's Tegra K1 SoC.
As usual, Apple follows its own path and therefore it shouldn't be a surprise that you don't always get the latest communication modules, USB or even a slot for memory cards. The configurations were adjusted to the iPhones and the 32 GB version is not available anymore. The entry-level price was raised by 10 Euros (~$12). Still, the iPad Air 2 is a good package and definitely feels very good in terms of ergonomics and design. The tablet is on a good way to defend its top position.
We will update this article over the next couple of days and add our latest insights, measurements and benchmarks. Stay tuned!
