iPad 2 (iOS 6)
NoahDesign 8
One of the first things you’ll notice about the iPad is how sleek it looks. This can be attributed to the taper all the way around the device, which makes it look thinner than it actually is. The iPad 2 feels extremely solid. There is no flex even when you twist it vigorously back and forth. The aluminum back looks great, but is quite slippery. Holding your iPad at the slightest angle with flat hands puts it in jeopardy. The speaker is placed at the bottom left, right on the taper. It can be easily muffled if you’re resting the iPad in your lap. The speaker placement isn’t much of a problem when the device is sitting on a flat table, though: the sound, although it is being projected onto the tabletop, is at enough of an angle to bounce off and still come through fairly clearly. When holding the iPad in landscape mode, there’s a good chance your hand will muffle the speaker. The iPad is relatively comfortable to hold, although the slippery aluminum back, which I mentioned before, forces you to grip the tablet a bit harder than you would others. It is worth noting that the display and back meet to form an edge, due to the taper. This could be problematic if for some reason your hands are pressing into the side of the iPad. Otherwise, I don’t think you’ll find this problematic. Display 6 I found the display on the iPad alright, despite the outdated resolution. Contrasts are very good, colors a little saturated, but I appreciate this on smaller displays. If you are really picky about displays then yes, pixels are visible if one looks closely, but it is not noticeable in everyday use. Text has slightly jagged edges, if you take the time to look very closely. Games look very good for the most part, except that while playing Infinity Blade II pixels were noticeable in some of the landscape, and most architecture had jagged edges. After using the iPad for a while, the display started making my finger drag; a terrible annoyance during certain games. User Interface 8 iOS is very straight forward. On the lock screen there are no shortcuts to apps or the like, just a button to the right of the slide-to-unlock function, which switches from your lock-screen wallpaper to an interesting, rather random slideshow of your screenshots. I personally found this feature rather worthless. While listening to music, the lock screen displays the album art, and double clicking the home button brings up the music controls. You can Tweet and post to Facebook from the notifications bar, an awesome feature for social freaks. Another feature I like is that while using an app, one can swipe with four fingers to the left or right, and it will switch to the app on that side. The multitask bar is very good. Being able to open by simply pulling up with four fingers from anywhere on the screen feels very intuitive and natural. The shortcuts to the left of the multitasker I found to be very useful, especially the brightness slider. Battery Life 9 Ever since the first iPad, battery life has been a strong point; the iPad 2 is no exception. You should be able to get two days of surfing the web, gaming etc. before plugging it into the charger, unless you plan on doing a long gaming session, or are going to use it for ten hours straight of other activities. Social 6 The video chat is equivalent in quality to the normal camera: terrible. Whatever I was viewing looked horribly grainy, and color reproduction was wrong much of the time. If you’re planning on Facetiming or Skyping a lot, look elsewhere. The keyboard is plain, which is rather unsatisfactory. Nothing exceptional but nothing was actually bad. The lack of an integrated function like Swype or Gesture Typing is disappointing, especially on a tablet, where typing with your thumbs is tiring, and for those with smaller hands almost impossible. The split keyboard option does address the problem of people with smaller hands, but it is rather disorienting, and I never got comfortable with it. Also, the keys become much smaller in this mode, which I found increases the amount of typos. It is very unfortunate that Swiftkey is not available for iOS. iMessage is very simple, it does what it’s meant to do, without any bells and whistles. I did not find any disappointments. On the right side of the space where one would type in the contact’s name is a handy button that gives access to all your contacts, making the info on people you’ve never written before easy to find. Videos and pictures are easy to attach. The stock email app is excellent; messages are easy to manage, and you’ll have all the features found on desktop email. Deleting, moving and marking multiple emails is a breeze with the Edit button. Gaming 6 Gaming performance is, in a word, passable. There was some lag while loading scenes in Infinity Blade as well as some while loading screens in Real Racing 2 HD, but none during actual gameplay. Therefore, I found that it did not detract from the overall experience. There was no lag while playing Infinity Blade 2. Most games were eye candy, although during Infinity Blade II pixels were noticeable in some of the landscape, and most architecture had jagged edges. Antialiasing would be nice. After using the iPad for a while the display became warm, making my finger jerk and glide unevenly across the display, a real problem when frantically doing swipe attacks during Infinity Blade, and while using the “touch to steer” configuration in Real Racing 2 HD. Playing the much more graphically demanding “The Dark Knight Rises” was not such a blast, with consistent lag while grappling from place to place, as well as some while performing kicks and punches. Web Browsing 8 Browsing the web is very enjoyable; scrolling and pinch-to-zoom are smooth. In general pages loaded quickly, even when using a coffee shop’s wifi, with multiple other people connected. There is occasional stutter while scrolling, but it was not persistent and therefore I don’t think it detracts from the overall experience. The best feature is the ability to send web pages to Mail, iMessage, Twitter, and Facebook as well as the ability to add it to the homescreen, and naturally print, copy, bookmark and add to reading list. All this is in one menu, making it very hassle-free to share something. I highly recommend installing the Google Search app, as I found that it is better than the stock Safari in many ways. It does not, though, have the ability to share web pages in nearly the number of ways that you can on Safari, so if you find yourself sharing pages a lot, you’ll probably want to stick with the latter browser. But if you only do so occasionally, the Google Search app still lets you share to email, as well as an option to open the page in Safari. Media 5 People don’t take pictures on their tablets for a reason. Using the 0.92 megapixel camera indoors is basically impossible; even fully zoomed out, pictures look terribly grainy. Zoom in all the way, and whatever I was trying to take a picture of became almost unrecognizable. Outdoors was slightly better; with no zoom pictures were ok, but zooming in made the picture worthless. The front facing camera was equally grainy. Songs sound slightly tinny; Bass is sadly lacking, a problem found on the majority of mobile devices, and layer-heavy songs are muddy. The speakers are loud enough to fill a small room. Overall, though, the speakers on the Galaxy Tab 10.1, while smaller, provide louder and more accurate sound (which isn’t saying much). The display is really nice for watching movies. The colors are slightly saturated, but I appreciate this on a smaller display. |
DanielDesign 7
I would describe the iPad’s design as beautiful, but not necessarily practical. It’s made of aluminum, keeps buttons and ports to a minimum, and is just classy. You probably won't break it if you're careful at all, but you’ll want a case or some sort of scratch protection. Aluminum also gets warm faster than other materials, which could make for an annoying interruption to an otherwise perfectly good gaming session. Plastic buttons disappoint me, but they’re certainly not below standard. The bezels are rather large, which kinda seems pointless, but the extra void can come in handy at times. The iPad is really the only large tablet that can be used in landscape or portrait for almost anything, and it’s almost always cool both ways. I definitely appreciate that, but the tradeoff is having to watch full screen movies to fill the screen, and nobody wants to do that. There’s a lot of missing hardware that Apple probably could have added to the design, but they’re betting you’ll prefer a simple tablet over one that has an IR blaster and USB. Display 6 The iPad 2 has a screen that's worthy of more pixels. 132 is a low number when it comes to ppi, and it really shows. Individual pixels and jagged edges are pretty easy to make out; it still does it’s job, of course, though it’s difficult to justify when far better screens are available. Color reproduction was accurate, but not very vibrant. It was bright enough for most circumstances, but it's still not good enough for much out-door use. Viewing angles were solid, but I’ve seen better. The display alone is reason enough to stay away, especially when you can get a retina iPad for just a little more money. User Interface 8 iOS is essentially all about apps. It’s home screen is entirely apps. There’s about half a dozen things it can do without opening an app. Apple legitimately claims the best tablet app selection. It's the way to go if you want high quality apps, but be prepared to covet some of the basic, nifty features on your buddy’s android or windows tablet. The basic goal of iOS is to get out of the way so you can go straight to your apps. And the apps truly are the best in town. There's almost half a million apps that are specifically built for an 8" or 10" device, and I almost always felt like the app designers used the space well. It's a hard choice, but ultimately you’re choosing between the features and convenience of Android or Windows, or the simplicity and app collection of iOS. Battery Life 9 Yep, time to talk about Apple Juice. Apple has a history of terrible battery life and great battery life. Luckily, every iPad has been fantastic with battery life, even as they get slimmer. I don’t think I ever used up the entire battery in one day. Unless you’re an extremely heavy user that counts on it for everything, charging it once a day will easily be sufficient. Chances are you’ll go two days more often than one. Social 6 Every social network has a free app, it seems. There's even other mail apps if you don't like the vanilla Mail setup that comes with the iPad. The keyboard is by far my favorite virtual keyboard when it comes to tapping away normally, but unfortunately that’s all you can do. No trace typing, no voice dictation, nada. I'm crossing my fingers that a future iOS update will have some kind of swype functionality, but it doesn't seem to be on the top of Cupertino's bucket list. The front camera is grainy and low quality, but it’ll do for a video chat in a pinch. iOS has some nifty Facebook and Twitter features, but nothing super unique. iMessage works pretty much like normal texting, the only major difference being that you can only message fellow Apple people. It's an unfortunate restriction, there should be a way to integrate Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, third party texting apps, email, X-Box live messages... (okay, maybe I'm just dreaming here, but it would be nice). Mail works. It's one of the more simple email apps, but unlike iMessage, it’s got great third party client integration. And some good features beside, but you might find it worth your while to check and see if your email provider has an app (like gmail or hotmail) you might try using it to see if you like it better than the stock mail app. Personally, I liked the Gmail app better in some ways. You get an iCloud email address if you want it, I’ve been tempted to pick up “[email protected]”, but that would probably be a little dweebish. Gaming 7 Most games run very smoothly, a couple stuttered a little, but for the most part the GPU kept up very well. Games like The Dark Knight Rises looked okay, but I’ve seen much better. Large games took a while to load, and I’d recommend always closing the rest of your apps while gaming. The app store has plenty of great games to choose from, you’ll have a hard time complaining about selection. The main problem here is that mobile games are getting more and more demanding, especially with the new 64 bit mobile processors, and the iPad 2 is an old tablet with an old SOC. Long story short, you won't be able to play the best new games coming in the future, which may be reason enough to get a more modern tablet. Web Browsing 8 Scrolling is very smooth on the iPad, you’ll notice it most in web browsing. However, loading seemed kinda slow, which is probably due to the outdated processor. Safari still lacks some cool features, but it’s also got some great features, including probably the best reader mode I’ve used. It’s hard to complain much about web browsing on the iPad 2, there’s some quirkiness since web pages are generally designed for desktop computers and laptops. Probably my biggest feud is the lack of a unibar, but apparently that’s coming soon. Media 5 Ah, entertainment. I don’t blame you if this is the only reason you’re thinking about buying a tablet. The problem is, the iPad 2 does some things fine, and other things terribly. The camera, for example, is for decoration only. The pictures I took with it were extremely grainy and low resolution. The only real use for the cameras is cheap entertainment via photo booth with some impressionable friends. Viewing photos is one of the decent things, since the iPad’s screen ratio is the same as most photos. However, if you’ve read our review of the screen, you’ve figured out that viewing anything isn’t gonna be that great. It's best to prop the iPad on a table somewhere and run a slideshow, hoping nobody gets close enough to see the pixels. Movie watching is horrid. You're not even watching in 720p, and those black bars are huge. Reading a book feels great in either portrait or landscape, but text is pixelated. Tablet speakers have a long way to go before they’re really any good, and the iPad’s speakers are just fair in comparison to the best tablet speakers. Basically, everything is fairly enjoyable, but it’s hard to recommend the iPad 2 for any media usage. |
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