This has been expected, Apple has finally announced its next generation iPad Air and iPad mini in today’s keynote event, the newiPad Air 2 brings significant improvements to the original iPad Air, featuring an all new A8X processor specifically designed for theiPad Air 2 that offers desktop architecture and 64-bit performance while being able to multitask even better, Apple has given theiPad Air 2 a great slimming job by making it extremely thin at 6.1mm from 7.5mm on the original iPad Air, weight has also been reduced to 437g from 469g as well.
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The iPad Air 2’s design isn’t much different from its predecessor, however this time the iPad Air 2 comes with three colors – Space Grey, Gold and Silver, similar to the iPhone’s color selection and its great to keep that consistency. The iPad Air 2 now also comes with Touch ID however NFC is missing so you won’t be able to perform Apple Pay transactions with it and that makes a lot of sense, since you won’t be holding a huge tablet to tap on the credit card machine. The display is the same 9.7-inch Retina display (2048 x 1536 resolution) that we’ve come to know of and it will deliver the same 10 hour battery life.
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Camera optics of the iPad Air 2 has also been upgraded to a higher resolution 8 Megapixel f/2.4 sensor, it will take panaorma, burst shots, HDR pictures, slow-mo, time-lapse videos, very comprehensive for a tablet and Apple is very sure that users will love using the iPad Air 2’s huge display as a viewfinder for taking beautiful pictures and videos.
On the other hand, the iPad Mini 3 gets a minor update from the iPad Mini with Retina Display by merely including Touch ID and offering the same color options to choose from, otherwise things such as the 7.9-inch Retina display, Apple A7 processor and 5 Megapixel iSight camera remains in place on the smaller version of the iPad.
Apple has started its online preorders for both the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3 in 29 countries while retail stores will start to carry stocks next week, both iPads come in storage options of 16GB, 64GB and 128GB. The iPad Air 2 retails from $499 for the WiFi variant and $599 for the WiFi + Cellular variant, the iPad mini 3 starts from $399 for the WiFi variant and $529 for the WiFi + Cellular variant. Apple will subsequently launch the iPads globally in the coming months.
Image Credit: Engadget
