Review Ipad 3

 

Apple iPad 3 review (Spring 2012)

hen Apple unveiled the new iPad in the middle of March 2012, many of the features weren't much of a surprise. We were greeted by a high-resolution Retina Display, improved graphics performance, a better camera and faster connectivity.
What was more of a surprise, however, was that the price remained identical to the previous iPad 2, while the price of the iPad 2 was cut significantly and remained on sale. This presents consumers with a series of dilemmas: for existing iPad owners, is the new iPad worth upgrading to? For those who are looking to buy their first iPad, is the new iPad worth the extra money over the now-cheaper iPad 2? Is it worth upgrading to from the original iPad?
All are valid questions, and over the next couple of pages we intend to give you the answers based on four weeks of testing. You've read the reviews on release date, but how does the device actually perform over a month?
Design and Retina Display
Switched off, the new iPad looks almost identical to the iPad 2. Its sleek aluminium rear complements a glossy capacitive touchscreen, a single front button for returning you to your home screen from any open app, and a mute switch and volume rocker on the right-hand side. It has increased in weight slightly, by around 50g. It's also 0.6mm thicker, but most cases will still fit, and indeed Apple's Smart Covers from the iPad 2 work fine on this new model.

From top to bottom: New iPad, iPad 2, original iPad

The real design difference is, of course, the 9.7-inch Retina Display. It has a resolution of 2,048 x 1,536 pixels, which is higher than Blu-ray, higher than the top-end MacBook Pro, higher even than an 62-inch Full HD plasma telly. But because the pixels are made smaller, they fit into this tiny-by-comparison screen. The result is screen clarity and sharpness that no other tablet we've seen comes even close to matching. Combine this with the fact that the iPad supports some of the best viewing angles on the market, looking at the device from a metre or so away makes it look almost like a glossy, printed page.
Text is sharp as a pin, and photographs look incredible: skin, eyes and faces show glorious detail, gardens full of flowers and trees are superbly defined, and buildings as good as pop out of the screen. Compared to the previous model, it's like making the jump from VHS right up to Blu-ray, skipping DVD entirely. If you can remember the first time you laid eyes on an HDTV, this will impress you equally and for the same reasons. We were grateful that we've always kept high-res photographs when importing holiday and days out snaps from our cameras, because it makes looking at them again quite different to sifting through them even on a laptop.
We browsed some old festival photography from 2010 and flicking through the 100-or-so moments of bands, beer and campsite sunsets was so much closer to the feeling of browsing through an old photo album. It's weird how something as seemingly boring as a high-pixel-density screen can alter the feeling of something so affecting as browsing photos.
There are downsides to this, however. With such huge levels of detail on offer, an image of average resolution is going to have its shortcomings in full view. Old photographs compressed a few years ago for our modest hard drive sizes now have their grainy artefacts ever-more visible. The same is true of apps and games: they were designed for lower resolutions, so when the new iPad blows them up from what was essentially standard definition to high-definition, they don't look as good as apps designed with Retina Display graphics.
For apps, this should not be seen as a problem. Any app developer not wanting their apps falling forgotten into the black hole of Apple's vast app catalogue will update their wares with higher-resolution art as soon as they can. With every passing week, you will likely notice more and more of your apps getting free updates with better-looking artwork. Indeed, many have already upgraded, including Facebook, Amazon Kindle, Netflix and Evernote.
If that last factor is a major purchasing hurdle for you, it should only be an issue if you have an iPad 2 and are thinking of upgrading immediately. If this is your first iPad, don't let this put you off. Many apps look terrific already, and the rest will follow soon.
Text, however, will almost always be perfect. Words and fonts on web pages, in emails and within iBooks and Kindle books are rendered by the iPad itself. This means it will draw them at Retina resolution on the new iPad, and that means they're pin sharp. Go back to an iPad 2 afterwards and text looks blocky and fuzzy in comparison. If you're looking for an iPad primarily for reading, this clarity of text should be a key factor to bear in mind.
It's worth noting that the E Ink screen of Amazon's Kindle will always be a better performer in direct sunlight because it uses different technology to the iPad's LCD display, but in most circumstances reading on the iPad is comfortable for a few hours. For exclusively reading books, an E Ink reader remains a more affordable, if less attractive, alternative.
Graphical horsepower
The new iPad's main processor remains mostly unchanged, even though the name of the chip it runs inside has had an update: it's now the A5X processor, instead of the A5 seen in the iPad 2. The difference largely focuses on graphical capabilities. To drive a screen resolution so massive, Apple had to introduce a faster, quad-core graphics processor alongside the main CPU.
This is another aspect of the new iPad that will effectively get better with age: as more apps upgrade their graphics to Retina resolutions, they'll be able to take advantage of the new iPad's significant graphics upgrade, delivering better visuals without a performance hit.
The result in most cases is much more detail on-screen. Take Epic Games's iPad poster child, Infinity Blade 2. On the iPad 2, the game looks good but jaggy edges (known as aliasing) around the outline of characters and stems of grass are clearly visible. On the new iPad, edges are smooth, outlines are more refined and background detail is increased.
Whether this affects your gaming experience depends on how important graphics are to your enjoyment. Certainly the game still performs admirably on the iPad 2 -- it just looks better on the new model.
The App Store itself remains the strongest of any mobile ecosystem. The phone-based Android Market now offers excellent competition to the iPhone, but its tablet offering is still weak. RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook is weaker still, and Windows Phone / Windows 8 is yet to reach the market. For another year (at least) it remains a fact that the iPad has the widest selection of tablet-specific meats on on its app menu.
Cameras
Another big area of improvement between the iPad 2 and the new iPad is the rear camera. The lens used is identical to that of the iPhone 4, both in terms of resolution (five megapixels) and the number of lens elements (key to image sharpness). However, despite this, the new iPad will capture video in 1080p HD resolution, whereas the iPhone 4 maxed out at 720p.
The difference between the iPad 2's rear camera and the new iPad's isn't just resolution (one-megapixel vs five-megapixel, respectively), but also image quality. Pictures taken with the new iPad's rear camera are radically better than before. Their larger size, combined with a better image sensor, allows for more detail to be captured. Colours are excellent and detail is well above average when compared to a decent 2012 smartphone's camera.

It's not a replacement for a good digital camera, mind -- for a tablet or a phone the quality is excellent, but a dedicated shooter will give better results overall. Most important is that the camera is well suited for holiday snaps, providing you don't mind holding up a 10-inch tablet to take them. Just keep a regular compact or DSLR around for the memories you're going to want to print out and frame.
While recording video, the new iPad performs excellently. The 1080p recordings are smooth, with bright colours and the image stabilisation works well. Again, a dedicated camcorder will beat the iPad into the ground, with larger optics making for strong optical image stabilisation instead of digital stabilisation, a better zoom, more memory and better sound recording. But the iPad's camera*is still great for capturing and sharing short clips.
Worth noting also is the lack of updates for the front-facing camera. It has remained identical to its predecessor, offering only standard-definition video for FaceTime videocalling. Apple introduced FaceTime HD on its recent Mac computers and it looks terrific. Sadly, that's not made the move to the new iPad so only standard-definition FaceTime is on offer here. The FaceTime service has evolved nicely, mind you. Full-screen video calls over Wi-Fi to other iPads, iPhones, iPod touches and Macs cost nothing and are integrated so deeply into each device's operating system that they're far easier to set up and use than something like Skype.

Don't miss: Sample photos taken with iPad camera

Additional software
Apple makes a number of apps for the iPad that don't come preinstalled, but cost a few pounds extra: iPhoto for photography editing, iMovie for video, and GarageBand for music. This review is aimed at covering hardware performance but it's worth mentioning these apps as they really do have a significant effect on how good the iPad is.
iPhoto is arguably one of the best photo editing applications for any mobile device, alongside Adobe's Photoshop Touch. It costs £2.99 and offers desktop-like home image editing, including obvious tools such as cropping, straightening and contrast adjustment, alongside more advanced editing features such as skin smoothing, white balance to normalise skin tones, red eye reduction, control of shadows and highlights, vignettes for darkening corners and more. It's no Aperture or Lightroom, but an optional (£25) SD card reader means the iPad can copy pictures from your camera, edit out any pesky blotches or bad colour balances and share them to the web, meaning there's little need to take a laptop on holiday at all.