Apple iPad (3rd gen) review

The most important part of any tablet, whatever the quad-core brigade may try to persuade you, is the screen. 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.

We’re sure all manufacturers understand this, yet few are in the position to make such bold strides as Apple. Following the iPhone 4’s leap with its “Retina” display, the new iPad (not, confusingly, the iPad 3) has a similarly groundbreaking 1,536 x 2,048 panel – that’s four times the iPad 2’s 768 x 1,024 resolution in exactly the same 9.7in diagonal, and it’s higher even than many 27in TFTs. Apple calls it “resolutionary”, a word that makes us queasy, but the sentiment is spot on.

Retina, take two

The quadrupled pixel count doesn’t quite give the same pixel density as the iPhone 4 – it’s 246ppi compared to the smaller screen’s 326ppi – but it puts it way ahead of any other tablet on the market. Asus will soon release its 10in Transformer Pad Infinity, with a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution, but that’s as close as we’ve seen.

The biggest beneficiary is text, which is so sharp that you genuinely can’t see the pixels any more, and provided the originals are of suitable quality, the same applies to images as well. In fact, the new iPad acts like a magnifying glass on every medium-resolution logo or banner ad you may have hoped no-one would notice, which may have web developers scrambling to update their assets.

There were only a handful of Retina-optimised apps at launch. Apple has curated a section of the App Store to highlight them, and those we tested did a fine job of showing off the improvement. Flight Control Rocket and Real Racing HD 2 look superb, and the updated Kindle app shows the new iPad is a very capable ebook reader too.

Colour saturation is also superb, and our subjective opinions were backed up by the figures: we measured brightness at 426cd/m[sup]2[/sup], with an excellent contrast ratio of 906:1. Put simply, the new screen is a revelation, and if you find you’ve stopped actively marvelling at it after an hour or so, a trip back to an iPad 2 will be a shock to the system – it’s a lot like watching standard-definition video on a Full HD television.

Keeping its looks

Beyond the screen, you’d be hard-pressed to notice anything physically different from the iPad 2. The case is a millimetre or so thicker, and its 652g weight is 50g heavier than before – just about noticeable when you hold the two versions in each hand, but the extra weight is for a good reason, as we’ll see later. The new iPad also gets noticeably warmer in the hand than its predecessor did when running demanding 3D apps or video.

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 bigger changes are inside, but they aren’t earth-shattering. The new Apple A5X chip remains dual-core and clocked at 1GHz, but it now features a quad-core GPU. Teardowns have revealed 1GB of DDR2 RAM, up from 512MB last time.

If that sounds unimpressive, we should make clear that even with the higher resolution, the new iPad is every bit as responsive as its predecessor. It ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in 1,803ms, a decent score. Infinity Blade II and Real Racing HD, two of the most graphically impressive optimised apps, ran smoothly even with a lot of action onscreen. Only a few times did it stutter very slightly under pressure, but never seriously enough to affect gameplay.

Flat battery?

The screen and GPU will certainly put much more strain on the battery, yet Apple claims the new iPad will last about the same as before: ten hours of Wi-Fi web surfing. How? The battery already took up a large proportion of the case – picture a thin, flat pack stretched across the rest of the components inside the rear of the case – but the cells are now physically 70% larger than before, and the total capacity is up the same amount, from 25Wh to 42.5Wh.

We ran our tablet battery test – enabling flight mode, reducing the brightness to a low but usable level, and leaving a video podcast looping – and the new iPad lasted 12hrs 32mins. That’s down from the iPad 2’s 16hrs 49mins, but it’s streets ahead of most tablets on the market.

Better snaps

The iPad’s camera has long been an area of complaint, even though the very idea of using a bulky tablet as a camera is faintly ridiculous. While the front-facing VGA camera remains unchanged, the rear camera has finally been upgraded to use the same lens as the iPhone 4S, albeit with a lesser 5-megapixel sensor.

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’s not a bad camera at all as tablets go.

New issues

If this all sounds like a glowing endorsement of Apple’s latest hardware so far, it is, but there’s one new concern that needs addressing. We’ve already seen the rising download footprint of some Retina-optimised apps, with Pages up from 95MB to 269MB and iMovie rocketing from 70MB to a huge 404MB. Some of that is admittedly down to additional features, but higher resolutions mean bigger apps, not to mention bigger downloaded newspaper and magazine issues in Newsstand.

This would be fine if the iPad’s capacity had risen with its pixel count, but it hasn’t. The new iPad still comes in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB flavours, at the same prices as last year’s model, which means the £399 entry model is starting to look risky. If you like music and movies, and do a bit of tinkering with iWork or other larger apps such as GarageBand (which is 1.1GB on its own), it’s easy to imagine that 16GB being quickly swallowed up. Clearly, it depends on your usage and for some that may not sound like an issue, but we’d strongly suggest you consider the 32GB model even if it means paying £80 more.

Your new iPad?

Beyond that, there’s not much else that puts us off the new iPad. Android owners may sneer at the lack of a quad-core processor, but it’s more powerful where it needed to be on the graphics side, with a larger battery to match, and there’s no need to physically redesign a tablet that remains so popular.

And then there’s the incredible screen. The phrase game-changer is overused, but it’s hard to think of any better expression; after all, the way things are done both on the web and in the App Store will have to be updated. Sites and apps that don’t optimise for its higher dpi are simply going to look out of date.

If you already own an iPad 2 – or to a certain extent the original iPad – the core tablet experience remains similar, so 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 difference for the upgrade.

If, on the other hand, you’re on the hunt for your first tablet, it’s very difficult to recommend anything else. The new iPad’s screen isn’t only a joy to use, it makes other tablets feel dated by comparison.

Detail
Physical
Dimensions	186 x 241 x 9.7mm (WDH)
Weight	652g
Display
Primary keyboard	On-screen
Screen size	9.7in
Resolution screen horizontal	2,560
Resolution screen vertical	1,536
Display type	Colour touchscreen LCD
Panel technology	IPS
Core specifications
CPU frequency, MHz	1,000MHz
Integrated memory	16.0GB
RAM capacity	1.00GB
Camera
Camera megapixel rating	5.0mp
Focus type	Autofocus
Built-in flash?	no
Built-in flash type	N/A
Front-facing camera?	yes
Video capture?	yes
Other
WiFi standard	802.11n
Bluetooth support	yes
HDMI output?	no
Video/TV output?	no
Software
Mobile operating system	iOS 5.1