The most important part of any tablet, most of people may say it is the screen. But unlike any internal component, the screen is what you’ll still be noticing a week after your purchase, the part upon which all of your attention is focused. Upgrading it is the most effective way to improve any tablet.
The biggest advantage is the text, so sharp that you can’t see the pixels any more. The same applies to images, provided the originals are of suitable quality. In fact, the new screen acts like a magnifying glass on every medium-resolution logo or banner ad you may have hoped no-one would notice, which will have web developers desperately scrambling to update their assets.
Apple has curated a section of the App Store highlighting the first Retina-optimised apps, and those we tested did a fine job of showing off the improvement. Flight Control Rocket and Real Racing 2 HD look superb, and the updated Kindle app shows the new iPad is a capable ebook reader as well.
Beside the screen, you’d be hard-pressed to notice anything physically different from the iPad 2. The ipad 2 case is a millimetre or so thicker, and the device’s 652g weight is 50g heavier than the iPad 2 – only noticeable when you hold the two in each hand. But the extra weight is for a good reason, as we’ll see later. Everything else is in the same place, so the volume rocker and rotation lock are still on the right edge as you hold it in portrait mode, and the headphone socket and power button are on the top edge.
The biggest changes are inside, but they aren’t earth-shattering in their scope either. The new Apple A5X chip remains dual core and clocked at 1GHz, but it now features a quad-core GPU and teardowns have revealed 1GB of DDR2 RAM, up from 512MB last time.
The new internals put more strain on the battery than their iPad 2 predecessors, yet Apple claims the new iPad will last for as long as before, offering ten hours of Wi-Fi web surfing.
The picture quality is high, with improved clarity and sharpness, and decent if not particularly vibrant colours. And the iPad will now finally shoot solid, detailed 1080p video, with the screen doing a wonderful job of showing off the resulting clips. Image stabilisation is quite apparent, along with a rolling shutter effect, but it isn’t a bad camera at all as tablets go.
iPhoto brings a few clever innovations to tablet-based editing. You can, for example, tilt the tablet to straighten a photo, and simply brush over areas with your finger to apply effects such as desaturation, darkening or sharpening – offering finer control than Snapseed’s selective adjustments.
Beyond that, nothing else puts us off the new iPad. Android tablet owners may sneer at the lack of one of the latest quad-core processors, but the iPad is more powerful where it needed to be on the graphics side, with a much larger battery to match. Plus, there was no real need to physically redesign a tablet that remains so very popular.
Really, the new iPad is all about the incredible screen. The phrase “game-changer” is an overused one, but it’s difficult to think of a more appropriate expression; after all, the way things are done on the web, in Newsstand and in the App Store will have to be changed. Sites and apps that don’t optimise for its higher pixel pitch are simply going to look out of date.
If you already own an iPad 2; if you avoid looking at any new iPads, you could carry on as before. But when you’ve seen that new screen, it will be hard to resist the temptation to stick your old iPad on eBay and pay the cash difference for the upgrade.
