iPad Air 2 review

iPad Air 2 

Since our original review of the iPad Air 2, Apple has launched a 9.7in iPad Pro and dropped the price of the iPad Air 2 by £50. Below are some things that are worth considering before you splash out on an iPad Air 2. Click here for the iPad Pro reviews.

Related: iPhone 7

The first thing to consider is that the iPad Air 2 is still £150 cheaper than the 9.7in iPad Pro, so if your budget doesn't stretch to the £499 Apple is asking, then you can stop reading this and skip to the review below. If money is burning a hole in your pocket and you're tempted, read on...

The iPad Pro runs Apple's latest A9X processor. In the 12.9-inch iPad Pro it provided stonking processing performance and we can't expect much less from it in 9.7in form factor. Equally good will be the upgraded screen that supports Apple's genuinely Impressive Pencil. It has a maximum brightness of 500nits and also supports the wide DCI P3 colour gamut, for richer and more vibrant colours.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the new display is that it supports Apple's own True Tone technology. True Tone will see the screen change colour temperature based on what light source it's under. This means under soft, warm lighting, whites will look equally warm, while under artificial lights you'll get a purer white. The net effect of this is that you'll get accurate colours no matter your lighting conditions, which will be very handy for those working in colour-sensitive professions.

As if this wasn't enough, the new iPad Pro has a massively upgraded camera that equals the iPhone 6S, 6S Plus and SE – quite when you'll have the opportunity to take a decent shot with your massive tablet remains to be seen, but it's a nice-to-have, we suppose.

It'll also work with the Smart Keyboard that was launched along with the original iPad Pro. There are four incredibly loud speakers, too, which is a marked improvement over the iPad Air 2.

WHAT IS THE IPAD AIR 2?

If you're short of time and need to get off then all you need to heed is this, the iPad Air 2 is the best tablet we've ever reviewed. Apple has done it again and improved on the already excellent iPad Air (that's remains on sale for a lower price) from 2013.

It is brilliant but don't expect it to do anything new or anything different. The iPad Air 2 is still a tablet, not a tablet/laptop hybrid, and so it won't quite serve as your fix for both productivity and entertainment like, say, the Microsoft Surface Pro 3. On the other hand it's a lot cheaper, and the Apple app store has a superb array of quality apps that let you do pretty much anything you want. Pair the iPad Air 2 with one of the better third party keyboards and it becomes a swiss-army knife of tablets.

The iPad Air 2 is a stunning tablet when it comes to design. Even thinner an lighter than its predecessor, Apple has managed to pack blistering performance and 10-hour battery life in a tiny package. The screen has been improved too, in ways that make it a joy to use.

The headline feature on the iPad Air 2 and the iPad mini 3 is Touch ID – a feature that lets you unlock the tablet using your fingerprint. It’s about a lot more than that, though. Touch ID on the iPad Air 2 is all about Apple Pay and making it easy for you to purchase securely online at the touch of a button. Apple Pay is only available in the UK and US only at the moment, however.

The other thing to consider right now is that a new iPad is on the horizon. A new version is expected to launch in October, as is a larger iPad Pro model.

IPAD AIR 2: DESIGN

The first iPad Air looks fantastic – the sleek aluminium design a departure from its chunkier predecessors. It’s a tablet that's easy to handle, but that also has a refined air (no pun intended) of quality.

No reason to change what's working, so Apple has kept a similar design for the iPad Air 2 – only it's even better.

The iPad Air 2 is ludicrously thin at just 6.1mm, and light, too, at 437g. That’s a whole 1.4mm slimmer and 32g lighter than last year’s tablet. It’s not an unhealthy skinny, like some Sony tablet. The iPad Air 2 is rock solid – the aluminium back feels strong and has a slight grain that makes it easy to grip.

SEE ALSO: Best Tablet Round-up

There has been one casualty in Apple’s pursuit of a supermodel figure. The iPad Air 2 is the first iPad without a mute/rotation-lock switch. It’s a sacrifice we’re not fussed about much. You can still easily mute the Air 2 by pressing the volume down button for a second, and lock the screen rotation via the settings menu.

Other than that, the controls are similar to previous models. You get the volume buttons on the right edge and the power button at the top – easy enough to access and use.

The Lightning port for charging and data transfer is at the bottom, flanked by the stereo speaker grilles. It’s not the best location for the speakers, as you can muffle them with your hand while holding holding the iPad Air 2 in landscape mode. We’d prefer front-facing speakers like the ones on the Nexus 9, although in every other respects the iPad is a much better tablet.

There’s been a new colour added to the space grey and silver versions and it's gold. It’s not a blinging back-of-an-old-mercedes-tissue-box gold, though. It's a light gold, almost champagne in colour, and the front bezels are white. Our favourite colour remains the space grey, but it's a matter of taste only.

IPAD AIR 2: TOUCH ID

Touch ID is Apple’s fingerprint scanner. It works by securely storing your fingerprint on the device, so you can unlock the iPad Air 2 with a simple touch. It’s super-slick but it’s less useful on the iPad than it is on the iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus. Phones are unlocked a lot more often and are used one-handed, so it’s a neat feature on the iPad Air 2 rather than an essential one.

Apple has now allowed developers to hook into Touch ID so these days you can secure all your data on Evernote, for example, behind the peace of mind of your own, unique, biometrics.

Apple’s key reason behind adding Touch ID it to its latest tablets, though, is Apple Pay. Unlike on the iPhones, which come with NFC, you won’t be able to use an iPad to tap and pay in a physical store. You can use it to buy things online, though.

Add your credit card details to the iPad Air 2 and you'll be able to use Touch ID to make purchasing dead simple. There are some limitations, though. Currently Apple Pay only works via apps, so you won’t be able to make purchases through a browser.

The other problem is that it’s not available in all regions yet, although you can now use it in the UK as well as the US.

IPAD AIR: SCREEN

Some observers have wagged a finger at Apple, citing a lack of recent innovation. Looking at specs alone, it also looks like its devices lag behind Android ones. Specs can be misleading, though – Apple champions user experience. To this end it's made the sort of improvements to the IPS LCD screen that we like to see.

There’s no increase in the 2048 x 1536 resolution. It’s the same Retina pixel density the iPad 3 wowed us with in 2012 and it’s still more than adequate. You’ll have to put the iPad a couple of inches from your face to notice any pixelation. But having the same resolution doesn’t mean that this is the same screen. Apple has made some important changes to it since the iPad 3 to improve colours and contrast ratios, especially this year.

A number of panels combine to create the final display. Most screens have small air gaps between each panel, but on the iPad Air 2 these are fused together. Not only does this make the screen thinner, which helps the design of the tablet, but it also helps to reduce reflections. And this is where Apple's really made inroads.

Apple claims a 56% reduction in reflectivity of the iPad Air 2 by bonding the display and adding an antireflective coating to it. It’s an improvement that we didn’t realise we needed until we got it.

The light above the iPads reflects a lot less on the iPad Air 2 compared to the mini 3

It makes a huge difference. Whether you’re using the iPad Air 2 on a sunny day in the park or just in a room with awkward lighting, the screen manages to keep reflections to a minimum. This helps you enjoy reading content online or watching a movie more than ever before.

The iPad Air 2 trumps its predecessor with its colours, too. They're bright, accurate and vivid, while contrast is greater, too, with deeper blacks and more detail in dark scenes. There’s only one area where the iPad Air wins out, and that’s with the whites. The Air 2 we looked at had a light pinkish tinge. It was faint, though – just a little worse than its predecessor, and only a minor issue.

Apple also claims that the responsiveness of the display has improved, leading to quicker reaction speeds. iPads have never had a problem in this area and we haven’t been able to notice any difference between the iPad Air 2 and the Air before it.

All in all the iPad Air 2’s screen is brilliant, with the bonded display looking almost painted onto the glass. This is a big step up from previous iPads and only the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 and its Super AMOLED screen can eclipse it.

IPAD AIR: SPEAKERS

Supporting the iPad Air 2’s credentials as a superb multimedia tablet are its stereo speakers. These pack a punch and are much louder than those on last year’s model. They’re better in other ways, too. Dialogue is richer, voices sound accurate and there’s a mite more bass. Stereo separation remains poor, though, because the speakers are so close together.

Related: Best Headphones

This is easy to forgive, however. The speakers, coupled with the great screen, make the iPad Air 2 a perfect tablet for watching movies on the go.

IPAD AIR 2: PERFORMANCE

The 64-bit A7 processor introduced on the iPhone 5S was altered to provide a power boost to last year’s iPad Air. Called the A7X this chip was similar in performance to the A7 – up 5-10% in our benchmark tests.

This year Apple has gone further and designed a processor specifically for the iPad Air 2. The A8X has a tri-core CPU running at 1.5GHz and a quad-core graphics processing unit coupled, for the first time, to 2GB of RAM.

If we play Specs Top Trumps the iPad Air 2 looks a shadow of top-end Android tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 and its 2.3GHz quad-core processor. Don’t let that fool you, though. The iPad Air 2 is the most powerful tablet we’ve ever tested – and that’s including Nvidia’s Shield Tablet that packs the great new Tegra K1.

And while the processor is key to that performance, Apple has also ensured that iOS 8 can make the most of it. Metal lets developers take full advantage of the quad-core GPU, while the new iOS programming language, Swift, means apps can hook into certain features such as Touch ID.

Some observers have even compared the iPad Air 2's performance to a desktop PC. In some respects they’re right. The A8X processor performs a few tasks faster than PCs just a few years old, but the question is: do you need all that power? If you intend to use your iPad as a productivity device then you’ll appreciate it. Even if you don’t, you may find yourself using it more as a laptop replacement than you anticipated.

During the launch of the Air 2, Apple showed off a video-editing app called Replay that lets you create slick-looking videos with ease. The iPad Air 2 powered through the edits.

There are clear benefits to be had from the extra performance, but let’s see how it stacks up against the competition.

The iPad Air 2 scores an excellent 4,509 on Geekbench 3. To put that in some context, the next fastest tablet we’ve reviewed, the Nvidia Shield, scored 3220 – that’s 40% faster. That also makes the iPad Air 2 almost 70% faster than the iPad Air. That’s some impressive work in just a year.

And the wins keep coming with a 3D Mark Ice Storm Unlimited score of 21,797. That’s 33% higher than the Shield and almost 50% better than the first-generation iPad Air.

The iPad Air 2 is astonishingly fast – so fast, in fact, that you might not know what to do with all that power. Not that we’re complaining, of course. The extra grunt means that this is a tablet you can use for more than just checking out the latest memes and Facebook. It future-proofs the Air 2 to some degree.

There’s also been an upgrade to the co-processor, now called the M8. This handles all the sensor data from the iPad Air 2, such as the accelerometer and the new barometer. The reason that Apple favours a co-processor is that it uses much less power than the main processor, helping the battery to last longer.

IPAD AIR 2: CONNECTIVITY AND FEATURES

Except for Touch ID and Apple Pay, there’s not much to differentiate the iPad Air 2 from its predecessor in terms of connectivity.

You get a 3.5mm headphone jack along the top edge, while the Lightning connector port, which charges the iPad Air 2 and transfers data, is at the bottom. Bluetooth 4.0, AirDrop and AirPlay are all present and the Wi-Fi has had a boost.

The iPad Air 2 has two antennae to the first-gen’s one and uses 802.11ac technology, leading to Wi-Fi that’s twice as fast as before.

If you’re out and about you can opt for the 4G/LTE version. The iPad Air 2 comes with support for 20 bands, so you’ll be able to use it pretty much anywhere in the world.

Of course, you can forget a microSD card slot – Apple's never included one in a product and wasn’t about to start with its flagship tablet. That means that if you want extra storage for all your favourite songs, pictures and films, you need to choose the right storage option at the time of purchase.

As with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Apple has dropped the 32GB option for the iPad Air 2. Instead you get 64GB and 128GB, or you can opt for the meagre 16GB model. If you do plump for the latter, be aware that iOS 8 takes up 5GB of the 16, leaving you with just 11GB to play with.

IPAD AIR 2: IOS 8

The iPad Air 2 comes with Apple’s latest version of its mobile operating system – iOS 8.1.

iOS 8 has had a bit of a troubled launch. Some users have experienced Wi-Fi and battery life issues, but the pick of the bunch was a bug that deleted iCloud data when resetting a device.

Thankfully iOS 8.1 appears to have resolved most of these glitches, and the additions have changed it for the better.

Even though iOS 8 looks almost identical to iOS 7, it comes with a bevy of new features. Here’s the whistle stop tour.

Messages

The messaging app has had a makeover, and now lets you send voice messages as well as using third-party keyboards such as SwiftKey. Group messaging has also had a nip-and-tuck, letting you leave a conversation or choose not to be disturbed by it.

AirPlay and AirDrop

AirDrop lets you easily share files with other nearby iOS devices that are using iOS 7 and above. AirPlay requires you to have bought into another part of the Apple ecosystem – Apple TV. You can wirelessly stream from your iPad Air 2 to your home entertainment system via Apple TV.

Family Sharing

A brand-new feature of iOS 8 is Family Sharing. This lets members of the same household browse and download each other’s iTunes, iBooks and App Store purchases. You can have up to six family members participating, each with their own Apple ID. In a nod towards user profiles, parents can create Apple IDs for children with an Ask to Buy feature. This ensures mums and dads don’t get lumbered with hefty app purchasing bills. You can add more restrictions via the Settings menu to keep them away from inappropriate content.

iCloud Drive

Like most cloud storage solutions, iCloud Drive enables you to back up all the important information on the iPad Air 2 online. This makes it accessible from any device, including your PC.

Continuity

Continuity is the most interesting new iOS 8 feature, but to take full advantage of it you’ll need an iPhone and Mac computer with Apple’s latest OS X Yosemite. Not only can you pick up calls from your iPad Air 2 or MacBook when it’s on the same Wi-Fi network, but you can also use Handoff. This is a feature that lets you easily start work on one device and continue on another in an instant.

For an in-depth look at the new version of Apple’s operating system, read our iOS 8 review.

Finally we need to consider the App Store. There are now more than 675,000 apps made for the iPad – no other tablet ecosystem comes close. Whether you enjoy gaming, working on a tablet or have a niche need then the iPad delivers.

IPAD AIR 2: CAMERA

Apple claims that iPad users really value the camera. During iPad Air 2’s launch Tim Cook explained that the iPad is perfect for photography because the large screen makes for a great viewfinder. He has a point, but we still can’t help feel like photographing with such a large device is ridiculous.

Still, if taking photos on your iPad is something you like to do, you’ll be very pleased to hear that the iPad Air 2 now comes with an 8-megapixel iSight camera. It's similar, but not identical, to the one on the iPhone 6. This makes it a big step up from the 5-megapixel affair on the iPad Air, and the photos tell the story.

Colours from the Air 2 (left) were more accurate than the original Air

In good light the higher resolution provides more detail than before but the real benefit comes when the lights go down.

As you can see from the pictures of the trees, the Air 2 shot (left) shows a great deal more detail and vibrance in the leaves and branches. Our low-light test shot below also shows that the iPad Air 2 handles dingy conditions better – colours are more vivid and there’s less noise around the text.

Aside from the improved picture quality, the iPad Air 2’s camera comes with a few new tricks. You can now use burst mode, which takes continuous shots so you don't miss that fast-moving action picture. But the pick of the bunch is the slo-mo video that takes Full HD video at 1080p. It’s slick, easy to use and delivers fantastic results. Dual microphones also mean that captured audio is better than before.

The front-facing FaceTime camera is the same as the one on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. It’s still 1.2 megapixels, but Apple claims it's improved the low-light performance by more than 80%. It works. Video calling, even in a dark room, works well.

IPAD AIR 2: BATTERY LIFE

Some of that incredible 6.1mm thinness has come by reducing the size of the battery. It's gone from 8,600mAh to 7,340mAh in the iPad Air 2. Apple claims that battery life hasn't dropped because it's made key improvements to the efficiency of the processor. We put it to our own tests to find out if it still lasts 10 hours of constant use.

We conducted like-for-like tests and found that the iPad Air 2 lasted almost the same time as its predecessor, despite the smaller battery. We played the same standard-definition video on both tablets. After three hours of use, the iPad Air 2 dropped 22% battery compared to 21% on the first-gen Air. So battery life has taken a minor hit, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the large reduction in capacity had led us to believe.

In normal day-to-day use the iPad Air 2 lasts the advertised 10 hours. That included two hours of gaming, three hours of video streaming over Wi-Fi, and five hours of Wi-Fi web browsing, with some hours of standby in between. Screen brightness was set to around 60%, which we found to be adequate both indoors and out.

One hour’s charge provides 30% of the battery, two hours gives 60%, and the battery was fully charged after three and a half hours. This is on par with the previous iPad Air.

The battery life on the iPad Air 2 is solid, rather than outstanding. Would we have traded a little of that thinness for some extra stamina? Probably, but it still lasts long enough for most people, and as long as competitor tablets.

SHOULD I BUY THE IPAD AIR 2?

Buying an iPad Air 2 depends on which iPad you currently own. If you have a first- or second-generation iPad then it’s a no-brainer – the iPad Air 2 is miles better in every respect. It’s also much lighter and faster than the iPad 3 or 4, even if the screen improvements are less marked.

If you have an iPad Air, though, it’s unlikely you’ll appreciate the Air 2 that much more. Yes, it’s faster, thinner, lighter and comes with Touch ID, but the iPad Air is still an excellent tablet.

Then there’s the question of price. The 16GB model costs £399/$499, the 64GB £479/$599 and the 128GB £559/$699. Add £100/$129 on top of those prices if you want 4G connectivity. The lack of a microSD slot means the best option for most will be the 64GB iPad Air 2.

There are cheaper 10-inch tablets around, but none offer such a rich app marketplace. You can do more with the iPad Air 2 than with any other tablet on the market.

VERDICT

The iPad Air 2 is another triumph for Apple. The design and screen have improved in all the right ways, and the new A8X processor is nothing short of astonishing. This is still the best large tablet around.

SCORES IN DETAIL

• Battery Life8
• Design10
• Performance10
• Screen Quality10
• Software & Apps9
• Sound Quality8
• Value8
  

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