iPad Air review: Still going with iOS 10

The original iPad Air had a great run, but it’s now been succeeded by both the iPad Air 2 and iPad Pro 9.7. You also can’t buy it directly from Apple any more. That doesn’t mean you should stop reading, though, as you can still buy it from other online retailers. In fact, with some selling it for as little as £300, it’s still around £80 cheaper than the entry-level Air 2, making it a good budget option if you don’t want to fork out for the latest model.

You won’t be left behind in terms of features, either, as Apple’s confirmed that the Air will be getting an update to iOS 10 when it launches on 13 September. This brings several new software tweaks to the Air, including a split-view Safari mode, allowing you to run two tabs simultaneously, as well as a revamped lockscreen. You’ll even be able to delete all those pesky Apple apps you never use as well, freeing up loads more space for the apps you actually want. I’ll be updating this review with more information about how iOS 10 runs on the Air as soon as it’s available, but for now, you can read about all the new features in our in-depth hands on with the iOS 10 developer preview.

Build quality

Adopting the Air moniker used by the company’s super-light laptops really makes sense here, as the iPad Air is staggeringly light. At just 469g (Wi-Fi version) it’s 183g lighter than the 652g iPad 4. That’s a staggering 28 per cent lighter, which is even more impressive given the iPad Air has the same size screen. The new iPad Air 2 is lighter still admittedly, down to 437g, but the 32g drop isn’t anywhere like as radical – you’ll barely notice the difference once you’ve slipped it into a rucksack or satchel.

In order to get the weight down, Apple had to make iPad Air smaller and thinner than its predecessor. In simple terms, the Air takes its design cues from the iPad Mini with its thinner bezel and slimmer case. It shouldn’t be underestimated how much work this takes, as Apple’s managed to make the iPad Air a lot smaller than the outgoing iPad 4, reducing width from 188mm to 169.5mm (a 10 per cent reduction) and depth from 9mm to 7.5mm (a 16 per cent reduction), while height remains roughly the same. The newer model slims down again to just 6.1mm, but the other dimensions remain the same. The bezels are significantly thinner than before, but Apple’s excellent thumb rejection means you can grip the tablet from the side and not interfere with the touchscreen – even if your hand slips off the bezel and onto the display.

As we’ve come to expect from Apple, the iPad Air is made from a single piece of aluminium, with a glass front. Available in Space Grey and White to match the colours of the iPhone 5S, the iPad Air, alongside its successor (which barely changes in terms of outward appearances) is the best-looking tablet around. More than that, it also feels extremely tough and durable thanks to its metal construction, giving it a major advantage over the countless plastic Android tablets also vying for your cash.

Screen

Although the iPad Air still has the same size 9.7in screen as used in all full-size iPads since the original, the reduction in the size of the case means that it looks bigger. That’s no bad thing, as the screen is the most important thing about a tablet.

Apple has kept the same 2,048×1,536 Retina resolution, originally introduced with the iPad 3. Although this is no longer the pinnacle of screen resolution, with some Android competition hitting 2,560×1,600 or even 4K resolutions, it’s almost to the point where that doesn’t matter. On a screen this size, held at an average tablet viewing distance, it’s tough to spot any differences in day-to-day use. As Apple says regarding its Retina buzzword, it’s a resolution at which you can no longer see the individual pixels. As a result, everything looks incredibly sharp and detailed.

As we’ve come to expect, the screen is also one of the best quality. Viewing angles are superb thanks to an IPS panel, meaning you can hold the tablet at pretty much any angle and still see what’s onscreen clearly. It’s bright, measuring 387.68cd/m2 in our peak white brightness tests, making it usable in pretty much any lighting conditions. Image quality is still incredible, too. Colours are rich and vibrant, despite only measuring 90.7% in the sRGB colour gamut test, with dark blacks and bright whites, which really helps bring out the quality and detail in any photo. We measured the screen with a very low black point of 0.4510cd/m2, meaning dark images look black rather than a washed out grey, and without buying a tablet with an AMOLED screen it’s difficult to go lower. A contrast ratio of 860:1 proves Apple has improved the panel over the outgoing iPad 4, although it falls behind the superior iPad Air 2’s 1015:1 score.

No TouchID

One surprising omission from the iPad Air was the lack of the TouchID fingerprint reader, which is now included on the new iPad Air 2. Currently, this reader is just used to unlock the phone and make app store purchases, but the long-term plan would seem to be to use this technology for authentication for a wide variety of applications, such as online payments.

As it stands, the iPad Air just has a traditional Home button; it’s not a big loss day-to-day. If you really want Touch ID then you’ll have to spend the extra £80 for the Air 2. The only people that will miss it are iPhone 5s or iPhone 6 owners that are already completely used to unlocking their device with a fingerprint – for everyone else tapping in a password is still perfectly acceptable.

The iPad Air uses the A7 system-on-a-chip (SoC) that it introduced with the iPhone 5S. It was the company’s first 64-bit mobile processor, which means that the tablet is capable of handling more data and running more complicated apps. For example, we’ve seen the iPad Air running full CAD software, scaling and editing complex 3D models – that’s impressive on a desktop computer, let alone a tablet.

New processor architecture also means that there are larger general-purpose registers and more of them than with previous Apple chips. This means that the processor needs to spend less time dealing with relatively slow system RAM, speeding up apps whether they’re 32-bit or 64-bit.

The A7 has a dual-core CPU. While there are plenty of quad-core CPUs out there, it’s not the number of cores that are the most important thing, or how fast each core is, but how each core is actually used. With that in mind, the A7 is impressively fast. Even now, months after the chip was introduced, it’s on par with some of the chips in newer Android devices. It managed to complete the Sunspider JavaScript test in just 402ms – that’s an even faster score than the iPhone 5S. The slight discrepancy is because for the iPad Air Apple has upped the clock speed from 1.3GHz to 1.4GHz, which is most likely because the iPad Air’s larger case allows for better cooling.

A second part of the A7 SoC is an improved graphics core. With previous iPads Apple had to create a special version of its mobile chip with quad-core graphics; so, the iPad 4 got the A6X, which was a modified version of the A6 used in the iPhone 5. This time around, the A7 is plenty powerful enough as it is, so it comes with the regular graphics core as used in the iPhone 5S.

Again, this is the fastest that we’ve ever seen. We ran the 3DMark Ice Storm benchmark, which maxed out on the Ice Storm and Ice Storm Extreme tests. In the Ice Storm Unlimited test, it got a score of 14,281, which is higher than most devices get in the lower tests. It’s safe to say that no matter what game you want to play, the iPad Air is plenty fast enough to handle it.

Needless to say, the iPad Air is lightning fast in day-to-day use. All of the animations in iOS 7 are super-smooth and the system is always responsive. Android may have made a lot of headway in recent years, speeding up its OS and making it smoother, but the iPad and iOS are still out in front.

As with the iPhone 5S, the iPad Air also has the M7 motion coprocessor. This low-power part receives data from all of the iPad’s sensors. This means that the iPad knows if it’s stationary, if you’re walking or if you’re driving. The data can be used in clever ways. For example, if you put your 4G iPad down and there’s no signal, the M7 knows it’s not moving and there’s no point in hunting for a signal. At the moment there aren’t many uses for the M7, but with the technology there and open to app developers we expect to see it used more and more.

Battery life

One of the main reasons that Apple was able to get the weight of its tablet down was because it installed a slimmer battery. Thanks to the more power-efficient A7 chip, Apple has said that the new model has the same battery life of the iPad 4, quoting 10 hours of web browsing. Apple is typically quite conservative on its battery life figures, so this is really the minimum that we’d expect. Our tests showed this assumption to be true in our video playback test, with the iPad Air lasting 12h 24m hours. By any standards that’s impressive, but for a large-screen table that’s so thin, it’s fantastic, particularly as that’s more than two hours longer than the iPad 4 lasted in the same test.

Using the tablet for months, we have to say that it rarely needs charging, lasting for days of use at a time. That’s brilliant news, as you can carry this tablet with you everywhere and know that you’ll still have charge. It’s worth mentioning that you should use the 2.4A USB charger that’s provided in the box (or another high-power charger), as the iPad is incredibly slow to charge off an iPhone or similar low-power charger. Using the model in the box dramatically cuts charge times, plus you can use the same charger to quickly charge your iPhone.

Wireless and 4G

Apple has upgraded the 4G chip in the Wi-Fi + Cellular version of the iPad Air, so you can now use the tablet on any 4G network in the UK. That’s great news if you want the fastest mobile data. It should also be good news when 4G roaming eventually comes in, as the iPad Air will run on most European networks, too.

There’s no 802.11ac wireless networking, but Apple has fitted dual antennas to its 802.11n chip (dual-band), adding MIMO for the first time. This gives a headline speed of 300Mbit/s, but MIMO also means better reception, so you should get a good signal in most parts of your home.

Although the iPad Air shipped with iOS 7, it has since been upgraded to iOS 8, you can read all about this in our full iOS 8 review. You get interactive notifications to easier deal with the stream of alerts; Continuity so that you can take calls from your iPhone on your iPad and respond to text messages. You also get Automatic Hotspot connection with your iPhone, making it far easier to share a connection between your two devices and bringing a new lease of life to Wi-Fi only devices.

iWork and iLife

Buy an iPad Air today, or in fact any iOS device, and you get a free copy of iWorks and iLife. With the iWorks productivity suite, you get the Pages word processing app, the Numbers spreadsheet, and the Keynote presentation app. In this version all of the files are compatible with the desktop version of the apps, so you can create and edit documents anywhere on any Apple device. With the option to save to iCloud, too, you never have to be without your files.

It also shows how the iPad is moving from just a device that’s for consuming content to one that’s also there to create content. All of the iWorks apps have had a major interface overhaul, both in-app and desktop versions. We’ll bring you a full review of the suite soon, but we think you’ll be impressed at how easy it is to create on the iPad. That’s quite important, as it means that you can now really get some work done on your iPad, rather than struggling with apps that attempt to recreate the Microsoft Office interface, which is hard to use on a touchscreen device.

It’s great to see iLife included for free, too. This suite includes iPhoto for editing and managing your photos, iMovie for editing and creating films, and Garageband for creating music. Of the three iPhoto has had the least changes, although it’s still a great touch-based tool for tweaking and editing photos. New to this version is built-in integration with the print store, where you can order standalone photos, posters, panoramas and photo books.

With iMovie you get new transition effects, advanced audio editing and the iMovie Theater, where you can save edited clips to iCloud, so you can view them later on the web, via iOS devices and through Apple TV. It turns the iPad into a capable and powerful editing device. Thanks to its large screen, we love editing videos on this tablet, pulling in a video shot on other devices. To do this you have to save photos and videos to the iPad camera roll.

Garageband has also had an update, including a brand-new interface, support for 32 tracks on 64-bit devices and an incredible new intelligent auto-drummer, which you can set to perform tricks and fill-ins automatically.

App store

Of course, there’s a huge range of apps available in the App store. While Android, via the Google Play store, has been catching up, there’s no denying that the iPad has the largest and best-range of apps available for it. There’s everything in there from productivity to the latest games (even games for your cats!). Thanks to the quality control that goes into the App Store, you know that everything will run properly on your tablet, too.

The camera is the one part of the system that hasn’t been upgraded, and the same 5-megapixel sensor from the iPad 4 is still used. Comparatively, this is getting a little out-of-date. For the resolution it’s not too bad, producing clear, well-exposed photos in bright lighting conditions. If you think you’ll use the camera a lot, then this is one area where the new iPad Air 2 is clearly ahead of last year’s model, as it has the new 8-megapixel camera from the iPhone 6.

In our test, the iPad Air produced near-identical results to that of the old iPad 4 camera. That’s to say, that outside in bright lighting, shots are well-exposed and colours natural. However, the resolution means that shots can lack detail. It’s also not very good in low-light, with plenty of noise creeping in the image. We get that most people probably take shots with their camera, which is why Apple put a lot of attention and work in the large-sensor 8-megapixel sensor in the iPhone 5S, but a small upgrade in the iPad Air wouldn’t have gone amiss.

The iPad Air (top) produces very similar results to the iPad 4 (bottom)

We also put the iPad Air through our standard photo tests, using our still-life setup of a toy train and cuddly toys inside a photo tent. Again, our tests showed that the iPad Air’s camera is very similar to that of the iPad 4, producing near-identical shots in all of our tests.

As we’ve come to expect from this sensor, the best results were in our brightly-lit test shot. As you can see from the image below there’s very little noise in the picture, and there’s plenty of detail throughout the shot. The train looks great, and the camera’s correctly picked up all of the colours in the scene.

It’s when we start to lower the light that the camera’s limitations come into play. In our low-light test shot, noise is a bit more of a problem, but the real problem is that the detail starts to go. As you can see from the shot below, the fur on the monkey and chicken lacks the full detail. The shot becomes a little soft and the fan at the top-left starts to blur into the background. These photos are perfectly usable online, but they lack the detail that, say, a high-end smartphone can produce.

Moving to the dimly-lit shot, which is very hard for even the best camera to deal with and you can see that the shot is full of noise. Colours vanish and there’s very little detail in the shot. As it stands, shots at this level of light aren’t very good to use anywhere.

Apple has upgraded the Facetime camera in the front of the iPad Air, moving to a 1.2-megapixel sensor with larger pixels and backside illumination, which is the same as the iPhone 5S has. Improving this camera makes more sense, as a lot of iPad users are more likely to use FaceTime rather than take photos.

Video

Video quality is pretty good from the Air. It’s capable of shooting Full HD video (1,920×1,080) and the quality is pretty good in bright-lighting, capturing plenty of detail. Quality starts to deteriorate in poor lighting conditions, which is bound to be a limitation of the comparatively-small sensor. However, for most situations, the Air does a great job. In fact, thanks to its relatively large size, keeping the iPad steady when shooting is easier than on an iPad – you can read our tips on shooting better video for more help. There’s no Slo-Mo mode, as with the iPhone 5S, which is a shame, although you can edit slow motion video shot an on iPhone on an iPad, at least.

Conclusion

The iPad Air is still one of our favourite tablets. It takes everything that the old iPad 4 did and does it better, in a smaller case. However, it’s the smaller size that really starts to confuse matters. Before, the choice between the iPad and iPad Mini was based on the compromises that you wanted to make: the full-size iPad was more powerful and had a larger, higher-resolution screen; the iPad Mini was smaller and easier to carry, at the expense of performance and screen resolution.

Now, with the newly renamed iPad Mini 2 (previously the iPad Mini with Retina Display), you can have the same resolution and performance, so the choice you have to make really comes down to size. If you travel all of the time and want a tablet that you’ll barely notice you’re carrying, the iPad Mini 2 is a clear choice, especially at just £239 inc VAT. If you carry your tablet less often and want the benefits of a larger screen, the iPad Air is the clear winner and it’s not actually that much bigger. In terms of size, price and performance the iPad Air is still our favourite tablet.