iPad Air 2: Vulture chews on new Apple tablet

Air to the tablet throne?

Fillip glass

In the more recent benchmark workout using instead OpenGL ES 3.0 – here known as the Manhattan test – the Air 2 played at 24.5 fps. Not quite butter-smooth perhaps, but a major step change from the first Air’s 9.0 fps – more like 2.72x faster in this example.

As a side note, render quality has subtly headed in the right direction too. According to GFXBench, the first Air had macroblocks with a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 2392. Air 2 nudges this figure up gently to a PSNR of 2570.

Available in gold and silver finishes

The screen experience of the Air 2 has been vastly improved by two seemingly small changes. There’s an extra anti-reflective coating on the surface now which goes a long way to answering the age-old criticism of all and every glass screen – the glare from reflected ambient light.

In use, it’s apparent that reflections have been drastically reduced (by 56 percent, says Apple) and out in bright daylight you notice a lot more of what’s on the screen; and a lot less of your own reflection. What you do get is a faint purplish tint to brighter reflected point sources like overhead lamps, which become far easier to ignore.

Yes, you still get reflections, but they're definitely less distracting

The original iPad Air has an alumino-silicate front glass laid over the TFT panel, with a tiny gap between the two. New Air 2 sees that outer glass intimately bonded to the LCD sub-assembly, eliminating the air gap. Look carefully and you may see that the old LCD lies maybe a millimetre below the surface; that’s been reduced to almost nothing so now it seems like you’re nearly touching the screen image. This new screen is also a tad more sensitive, responding more sympathetically to the lightest of finger touches.

On a tactile level, the fingertip experience becomes rather like the first iPad with Retina display, which is to say it feels like you’re tapping real, solid glass rather than a plastic panel. Of course this may also mean costlier repairs since a crack to the screen means a whole new TFT assembly rather than a replacement glass cover.

The screen brightness greatly improves outdoor viewing

Put side-by-side, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the iPad Air 2’s screen is brighter. Being the curious sort I measured this new panel and found it actually does have a much higher maximum luminance of 344 cd/m2, where the iPad Air peaked at 259 cd/m2. That extra brightness would be over the top when used around the home, but it really comes in useful when you step outside on a bright sunny day, so you can still read from the screen.

Contrast ratio goes up too. Where the iPad Air under test could muster 575:1 from its IPS display at maximum brightness (and around 500:1 at mid-level settings), the iPad Air 2 was now hitting 850:1, and still in excess of 700:1 at half-brightness.