Which brand tablet to choose ? iPad or Lenovo Tablet
There are some many brands of tablet in the market. Seems Ipad enjoy the largest share. Will other company like Levovo can grasp the share in the coming furture ? Other tablet manufactory still needs work harder.
When Steve Jobs plopped down on the couch, minutes after showing off the iPad for the first time, he said, “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop and so much more capable than a smartphone.”
Four years later, as I watch the YouTube video of the iPad’s debut keynote on the incredibly thin iPad Air 2, that sentence makes my brain ache. Laptops now have touch screens, smartphones are huge and powerful, and tablets now have keyboards. At least, those tablets made by the competition.
Apple ’s newest tablet, which goes on sale this week starting at $499, remains true to Jobs’s tablet ideals. It’s the best tablet you can buy—especially if you want to read headlines on the morning commute, watch “Frozen” in the back seat and create intricate “Minecraft” metropolises after dark. If you’ve been waiting to replace an older iPad, now’s the time.
But as I hold the thin piece of glass that would have been unimaginable five years ago, I look over at the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 and Galaxy Tab S 10.5 and feel like I am missing something. How this iPad stacks up depends entirely on where you plan to take it—and what you want to do with it.
Home Alone
There’s still no tablet I’d rather cozy up with in bed or on the couch. In those situations, the 6.1mm Air 2 really lives up to its name.
At 6.1mm, the Air 2 is easier to hold with one hand than previous iPads and any other full-size tablet. DREW EVANS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
No, we aren’t at the point where it feels like you’re holding a feather, but there is a substantial difference between grasping the 0.96-pound Air 2 and any of the earlier iPads with one hand. I even noticed a difference between it and last year’s original Air. Apple has squeezed down the svelte case so much that it feels as if you’re holding nothing but a screen.
The iPad Air 2 is also far more manageable than Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S 10.5, and its premium aluminum build and soft curved edges top Samsung’s slimy, dimpled plastic cover.
With the lightweight Air 2, you’re more likely to avoid that always painful iPad-on-the-face-fall when you nod off to sleep on the couch. Still, in most situations the smaller iPad Mini is less cumbersome to hold up.
For the things I do when I’ve got my feet up (read long articles I’ve saved in Pocket, sift through Twitter, watch back-to-back episodes of “How I Met Your Mother”), the iPad still beats the competition. The apps are better and more numerous, and they look great on the Retina display.
The Air 2’s anti-reflective screen is a great outdoor viewfinder for the new 8-megapixel camera. DREW EVANS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
And shopping online can only get better with the iPad Air 2’s new Touch ID sensor, as soon as more places allow you to use a finger scan instead of a password or credit-card number. And why hasn’t Apple used Touch ID to create multiple iPad user accounts, since the tablet is so often shared among family members?
The Great Outdoors
The new Air’s display addresses one of my biggest complaints about previous iPads: You can finally see the screen outdoors. A thinner display with an anti-reflective layer means unless the sun is really beating down, there’s no need to pitch a towel tent over the screen while sitting by the pool. (Unfortunately, the new iPad Mini 3 doesn’t have the improved screen.)
In my outdoor test, the Air 2 beat last year’s Air, Samsung’s Tab S and Amazon’s previous Fire HDX, displaying a more even balance under both sunlight and shade. Outdoors, it only loses to a bona fide e-reader like the Kindle Paperwhite. But you’ll still have to crank the brightness all the way up to see the screen in the sun, which will run down the battery faster.
That anti-reflective screen also makes a great, though admittedly ginormous, viewfinder for snapping nature shots with the revamped 8-megapixel camera. It takes much crisper shots than before, and in many cases, ones as good as those I can take with my iPhone 6. But I won’t bring my iPad to some mountain peak, as some Apple promo shots suggest. My phone’s camera is the fastest one for me to grab. And it has a flash for low-light situations and took clearer photos of a speedy pig I met in a New York City park. (Relax, it was on a leash.)
Apple boasts that the iPad Air 2’s camera is good enough to take on a scenic mountain hike. But iPad buyers might want to put a case on it first. APPLE
Besides, when I set the iPad Air 2 down for a second on a bench, it slid off and hit concrete, shattering the screen. Sure, I’m to blame, but if Apple wants me to climb every mountain armed with nothing but an iPad, ruggedness should be as important as anti-reflectivity.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
For commuters and travelers, the good news is the Air 2, despite being 18% thinner than the previous Air, still manages to deliver 10 hours of battery life. I didn’t even take the charger out of the box until after I used the tablet for an entire cross-country flight and then a nonstop morning of checking email and writing.
Battery-wise, when it comes to streaming video, the Air 2 and its greatest Samsung rival are pretty evenly matched. At max brightness—where the Air 2’s screen is brighter than the 10.5-inch Galaxy Tab S—the Samsung lasted nine hours where the iPad ran only six. However, when I set the brightness to 50%, the iPad pulled ahead of the Galaxy. (I recommend using auto brightness unless you really need to step it up.)
Improved wireless connectivity is another boon for road warriors. The Air 2 has a faster wireless chip, which, in my testing, loaded Web pages a hair quicker than its predecessor. The cellular model (which, as usual, costs $130 more than its Wi-Fi counterpart, but has dramatically improved 4G LTE) is pre-installed with an Apple SIM that makes it easier to switch service providers, both domestically and abroad. It should be easier for you to use T-Mobile here in the U.S., then buy some gigabytes on the U.K. wireless carrier EE if you happen to be visiting London.
Career Opportunities
If you’re like me, though, you’ll still lug your laptop on business trips. Even as a basic work companion, the Air 2 doesn’t do nearly enough to keep up with the latest competition.
The new A8X processor provides a performance boost, so the iOS 8 operating system and immersive full-screen apps respond to taps and swipes faster. And while iPad apps in general are superior to the stretched phone apps you too often see on Android tablets, I wish I could see more apps on the screen at the same time, the way I can with a Surface or Galaxy Tab.
While the iPad Air 2’s processor makes it easier to switch between apps, you can still use only one app at a time, unlike the competition. DREW EVANS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
I constantly yearned for that functionality while responding to emails about potential meeting times, tapping the home button frenetically to switch to the calendar. I yearned for it as I wrote this column, jumping to the messaging app to update my editor on my progress. I even yearned for it when I wasn’t anywhere near my desk, surfing the Web and attempting to tweet an article.
I’d also really love a better way to type. While I’ve gotten faster on Apple’s latest software keyboard (predictive QuickType helps), I’m far more productive typing on real keys. Microsoft’s $80 Universal Mobile Keyboard is one of the best you can buy, but it won’t prop up the screen well enough—and doesn’t double as a cover.
The iPad Air 2 pushes forward in all the ways you’d expect Apple’s tablet to. The blend of screen, build and app quality make it the best full-size tablet you can buy.
But it doesn’t move ahead in one area where some of us have been waiting (desperately) for evolution: true multi-tasking, going beyond the one-app-at-a-time functionality. Perhaps that’s the big surprise that Apple will bring when it introduces a 12.9-inch iPad next year.
It would be nice to see the iPad get beyond the lean-back experience that’s been the focus since Steve Jobs first sat down on the couch.