“Should you buy the iPad Air? ” David Phelan writes for The Independent. “he first thing you notice about the iPad Air is the gadget’s new design. It’s been updated to match the iPad mini, released a year ago. This means boxier corners and a back cover coloured to match the front bezel. It’s an altogether snazzier look, with a chrome Apple logo in the middle of the lighter coloured iPad, previously called white, now silver, while a black logo sits in the middle of the darker one, called Space Grey.”
“This is the thinnest full-size iPad yet. And even that’s not the real reason the design is improved. It’s now much lighter. It weighs 478g instead of last-season’s 662g. This is the real killer improvement,” Phelan writes. “Of course, that’s not the only upgrade on the new iPad. It now has the same processor [64-bit Apple A7] as the iPhone 5s. This seemed ludicrously over-powered for a phone (though who’s complaining?) and is certainly more than fast enough here. It means that the things you’re used to doing on an iPad happen more quickly now. The whole thing just feels faster. And it means that as more complex and demanding apps are devised (and you can bet they are in development now), the iPad Air and its smaller sibling the iPad mini with Retina display will be able to handle them with ease.”
“Apple’s key advantage is that it makes the hardware and software, so they can work together flawlessly. So the new iOS 7 operating system dovetails with the iPad in every way, down to the matching of iPad case colours to the system palette,” Phelan writes. “Its spiffy new styling may be enough to persuade you to upgrade. The faster processor is cool and will become more useful as more apps arrive. But above all, this is the super-light iPad, the most portable iPad, the most powerful iPad.”
Read more in the full review here.
MacDailyNews Take: The most portable iPad is the iPad mini, not the iPad Air.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Enzos” for the heads up.]