Thinner, lighter and more powerful iPad plus iPad mini with Retina display
Apple has today announced iPad Air, the latest generation of its tablet range, featuring a 9.7 inch Retina display in a new, significantly thinner and lighter design compared to its previous iterations.
Precision engineered to weigh just one pound, iPad Air is 20% thinner and 28% lighter than the fourth generation iPad, and with a 43% narrower bezel the borders of iPad Air are dramatically thinner, making content even more immersive.
Apple also announced iPad mini with Retina display, bringing all the pixels from the 9.7 inch iPad to its 7.9 inch screen, delivering razor sharp text and detail in the same amazingly thin and light design.
The new iPads feature the powerful and power-efficient Apple designed A7 chip with 64-bit desktop-class architecture, ultrafast wireless with faster built in Wi-Fi and expanded LTE cellular connectivity, plus the newly designed iOS 7 featuring hundreds of new features.
'iPad created an entirely new mobile computing experience, and the new iPad Air is another big leap ahead. It is so thin, light and powerful, once you hold one in your hand you will understand what a tremendous advancement this is,' said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing.
iPad Air's Retina display makes web pages, text, images and video look sharp and realistic, and the new power efficient A7 chip allows the battery to be even smaller, helping reduce the overall volume by 24% from the previous generation while doubling its performance and maintaining its up to 10 hour battery life.
The new iPad mini with Retina display packs all the 3.1 million pixels (2048-by-1536 resolution) of iPad Air into its 7.9 inch Multi-Touch display, for a pixel density of 326 pixels per inch. The 7.9 inch Retina display of iPad mini is 35% larger than screens on 7 inch tablets, and is the only small tablet to deliver the full iPad experience, now with razor sharp Retina quality. Images are crisp, text is crystal clear, movies play at full 1080p HD-resolution and the 475,000 apps designed specifically for iPad work automatically.
The A7 chip in iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display offers 64-bit desktop-class architecture, advanced graphics and improved image signal processing from previous generations. With up to twice the CPU and graphics performance on iPad Air, and up to four times the CPU and eight times the graphics performance on iPad mini with Retina display, almost everything you do is faster and better than ever, from launching apps and editing photos to playing graphic-intensive games, all while delivering all-day battery life.
Also, the A7 chip's 64-bit architecture and support for OpenGL ES version 3.0 unlocks game console-like visual effects. The new iPads also feature the M7 motion coprocessor that gathers data from the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass to offload work from the A7 for improved power efficiency.
Both new iPads feature two antennas to support Multiple-In-Multiple-Out (MIMO) technology, bringing twice the Wi-Fi performance to iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display at a fast data rate up to 300 Mbps. Cellular models also come with expanded LTE coverage to accommodate even more LTE networks worldwide, while continuing to deliver comprehensive support for other fast cellular technology around the world (DC-HSDPA, HSPA+), all in a single model.
iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display now have a next generation FaceTime HD camera with improved backside illumination sensors featuring larger pixels for better low-light performance. The iSight camera with 5MP sensor and advanced optics, combined with iOS 7 and the image signal processing of A7, further improves still image and video capture on iPad bringing faster auto-focus, up to three times video zoom, five times still zoom, better dynamic range and automatic image and video stabilisation.
Smart Chimps thinks: Now these launches sound much more interesting than the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c. Apple has concentrated on quality, by reducing the hardware and increasing the pixels, making two products that have genuine appeal to end users who are always interested in more in a smaller, tighter package. These products sound like they will appeal to both existing iPad users and potential tablet owners who have not yet taken the leap.
