The iPad Air Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 29, 2013 9:00 PM ESTDisplay
In building the iPad Air Apple shrunk all elements of the tablet’s design, including the thickness of the display. We’re still dealing with a 9.7-inch 4:3 2048 x 1536 IPS LCD panel with true RGB stripe rather than some weird subpixel structure. Viewing angles are still great, and overall the display remains the best you can get at this size.
The iPad Air continues Apple’s recent history of shipping color calibrated displays. Color accuracy on my iPad Air review sample is better than on any previous iPad I’ve ever tested, in fact it’s more accurate than any other tablet I’ve ever tested. The numbers are easily backed up by images that show a vibrant and, more importantly, accurate display.
The iPad Air gets pretty bright at 426 nits, although black levels aren’t all that impressive at 0.44 nits. Overall contrast ratio is in line with what we’ve seen from previous iPads. My only complaint on the display front is I would like to see Apple laminate the cover glass to the LCD display. Reducing reflections would go a long way towards improving the usability of the device, not to mention the impact that would have on improving display quality in dark movie scenes.
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Kvaern - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Have you actually tried using iOS 7?As dugbug wrote then this behavior has changed dramatically, for the better, in iOS 7.
errorr - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Well Anand did call it out in the review as a major problem with any background process running. I don't think they have the algorithms just right yet.Spunjji - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
DERP DERP DERPSeriously, somebody needs to set a filter to automatically change your posts to that.
errorr - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I think he kinda answered that as a yes. It seems as if the iOS memory management algorithms need some work and may not be tuned for 64bit yet.tipoo - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
I think they kind of mislead with the GPU. THey said at the 5S launch that the A7s GPU was twice as fast as the A6, then at the Air launch that it was twice as fast as A6X, so I assumed the Air GPU was twice as fast as the 5S GPU. Clearly not the case.tipoo - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
But I was right about the SRAM at least, yay :Ptipoo - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
This interests me a lot, the Wii U also has an SRAM block and a smaller denser eDRAM block than the 32MB big one on its die, I wonder what that does for performance. Main memory bandwidth is pretty bad for a console, but it has a lot of levels of caches seemingly.et20 - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Why did you assume that?That would have made sense only if A6X was twice as fast as A6, which is clearly not true.
tipoo - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Ah, I think I was mistaken then. Still, 2X the iPad 4 vs 2X the iPhone 5 would seem to imply a bigger delta than anything real world is showing, but it's much closer now that I see the A6X performance.mavere - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Apple never claimed the 5s's A7 was equal to the A6X. Their performance guidance was always fluffy and vague within the *same* product line, so trying to extend it across lines is ridiculous. People misled themselves.