The New iPad: Second Look [UPDATED]
Just a few more observations after a few more days with my shiny new toy.
The heat issue is a non-issue. Not only have I not noticed it, but Wired conducted its own tests and concluded:
So that’s the new iPad — it spiked at a temperature that’s warm but not unseemly. And its heat generation isn’t even all that notable when compared against the pack. Now check out the heat generated by other tablets after 30 minutes of Dead Space action (degrees in Fahrenheit, from warmest to coolest):
Not only was the new iPad merely tepid in terms of heat generation, it was also one of the cooler-running tablets in our test. But let’s take Consumer Reports’ 116 degree reading at face value. It may cause sweaty hands, but is it any danger to consumers?
Consumer Reports abandoned its former mission in favor of sensationalism a while back. Keep that in mind whenever you read that they’ve found some horrible flaw in the hot product of the moment. I should add that those hotter tablets are all running slower graphics chips and much-lower density screens. What will happen to those Android tabs when they try adding Retina Displays?
The charging issue is another non-issue:
“That circuitry is designed so you can keep your device plugged in as long as you would like,” Tchao said. “It’s a great feature that’s always been in iOS.”
It appears to have gone largely unnoticed until this latest generation iPad, when DisplayMate analyst Ray Soneira noted that his testing showed the iPad not fully charged when it displayed 100 percent.
No matter where in that cycle a battery is, Tchao said, owners of the new iPad can expect the 10 hours of battery life that Apple has promised.
The decision not to keep changing the battery status was designed so as not to distract or confuse users.
Still, it’s best to unplug any device before it reaches 100% charge. Even a trickle charge, like the one just described, is probably harder on your battery than you want to be.
So now that we’ve dismissed Batterygate and Heatgate, how is the thing to use?
Very nice, and in a couple unexpected ways.
I never much used my Original iPad for reading books. The screen just wasn’t comfortable enough for long periods of focused attention. When I wanted to read books, I reached for my Kindle. But without making a conscious decision, sometime last week I made the new iPad into my primary e-reader. The screen renders text so comfortably, that the Kindle is what I use outdoors, where LCDs become impossible to see. Amazon’s WhisperSync still works just fine, no matter which device I have in my hand.
And I confess I’ve fallen in love with LTE. Here in southern Colorado, the speed on my Verizon unit is almost indistinguishable from a household WiFi network. It’s that fast. I’m paying $50 a month for the 5GB plan, and I’ll let you know how hard I push against that data limit. After nine days, I’m safely at 10MB sent and 111MB received — but I haven’t had to do any traveling. Hell, I’ve barely gone anywhere without WiFi. Come BlogCon next month, that could change and in a big way.
My only complaint so far is, the case I want isn’t available yet. So I’m stuck either carrying it around unprotected, or putting it into what looks and feels like an ill-fitting suit. And since that’s the worst thing I have to say about the new iPad, it’s a sure thing I’ll be getting two or three years of great use out of it.
ONE MORE THING: Forgot to mention this last detail before clicking the Publish button, but the nice thing about blogging is, you can always tack on updates.
Apparently, one of the ways Apple gets the iPad’s battery life up to ten hours, is with aggressive use of the Auto-Brightness feature. In bright light, the iPad kicks up the screen’s brightness to compensate. In dark rooms, it dials it down. Both directions use your personal brightness setting as a kind of center point.
For my tastes, however, Auto-Brightness dials it down too low for watching HD video. I curled up in bed last night with my earbuds and The Borgias, and wondered what in the hell had happened to all those glorious Vatican sets and fancy costumes. So I dialed the brightness up a tad and all was well again. When it was time to stop watching TV and go back to reading Atlas Shrugged for the nth time, I turned the brightness back down. Actually, I turned it way, way down — because that’s much easier on the eyes when reading in the dark.
You may turn Auto-Brightness off, if you choose. But I don’t recommend it. I tried that today just to see how much good it really does, and I can tell you: It does a lot of good. My battery is ticking down noticeably faster, and that’s under light processor and WiFi-only loads.
In any case, Apple has made the manual brightness control easy enough to reach. Double-tap your home button to get to the multi-tasking dock, then flick to the right. You’ll find right it alongside the music and screen lock controls.
New issue headline:
“APPLE IPAD: NOT HOT ENOUGH”
Minor point of clarification: lithium ion batteries do not trickle charge. Like the article you linked to points out, lithium ion is a very different animal from the chemical reaction-based batteries everyone is used to. The iOS charging scheme appears to alternately discharge and charge between two states-of-charge defined to be above the (arbitrary) 100% threshold. Lithium ion batteries are VERY good at this kind of frequent, low-discharge cycling. That’s part of why they’re so well suited to hybrid/electric vehicles (the Chevy Volt notwithstanding…) and to shipping container-sized electrical grid stabilization systems. The latter are designed to be parked outside power plants and provide instantaneous load-leveling over unbelievable (that’s code for I-can’t-find-the-exact-spec) numbers of cycles.
Tom, thanks for the great information.
The last article I read on the proper care and charging of Li-Ion batteries was on Ars Technica a while back. The thinking behind it was, the high and low ends of the battery charge required the most “work” out of the battery. Therefore, it argued, they way to get the most life was to stop charging before reaching 100%, and to start charging north of 20%, when practical.
If what you say is true, I’ll be glad to leave my iDevices on the charger all night. but just to be on the safe side, I’ll keep doing it by the Ars advice — when practical.
ARS was right about the upper and lower ends causing more “wear.” On some cheap devices, their advice probably makes sense. But if Apple did their job correctly, they took that into account when they sized the battery. Good design would dictate unused headroom at the high end (i.e. 100% on the device is less than 100% state of charge), and that level of attention to detail seems consistent with Apple’s M.O. That’s how electric car batteries are sized, too. In order to get them to survive 10 years, they make them a whole lot bigger than you realize and only use a small portion of them (in the middle, like you said). You could get a lot more mileage out of one if you didn’t mind buying a new battery every 2 years.
Either way, it’s a moot point. Your devices should only charge if the batteries drop below the threshold Apple set, and they shouldn’t do that unless they’re burning power on something. If the device is off, the battery should fill up and stop.
I’ve had the same experience wrt reading. I started reading more Kindle books with the iPad 2, even though it was still difficult for longer stretches, but am now almost exclusively reading (what I can) on the 3. I did a side-by-side comparison of the Kindle app, and the difference in font rendering is startling. If anything, the fonts are slightly thinner on the 3. But they’re so much crisper, it’s amazing.
Any book I find online or in the bookstore, I first go to the Amazon app and look for the Kindle version. A) It’s immediate; B) It’s cheaper; C) It’s a wee bit more compact.
I’m becoming more and more irritated when it doesn’t exist in that format. 
My technical books aren’t available (usually) that way, but I have high expectations for iBooks 2.
I saw a mock-up (probably on AppleInsider) of a possible new magnetic cover/case for the 3 from Apple. It is supposed to have a back, as well. I’m something of a fumble-fingers, and have the marks on my 2 to prove it. I’d really like to get that kind of case for the 3. It just seems like the perfect combination of protection and style. I’ve looked at other vendors, but nobody seems to get it.
It looks like a fine device, and I might consider getting one if they had lost the walled garden and added a micro SD slot and a USB port (I said the same thing about the previous 2 ipads). But as it is I will wait and see what the Windows 8 tablets are like.