Apple Announces the iPad Air

The iPad Air was announced at Apple’s Keynote event on Oct. 22, 2013. The slick new full-sized tablet will be available later in November starting at $499 for the 16GB model, and $629 for the model of same capacity, with the addition of cellular data.

The iPad Air is the 5th generation iPad, and shows that through its leap in evolutionary hardware design. The Air has an iPad Mini inspired aesthetic featuring a thinner bezel, giving it an overall smaller body. The Air owns up to its name sporting a 7.5mm thin body, which is 20 percent thinner than the 5th gen iPad, and weighing even less at just one pound. It still features the same 9.7 inch 2048×1536, 264ppi retina display implemented in iPads since the 3rd gen. It also features a 5-megapixel iSight camera and an HD front-facing FaceTime camera.

The iPad Air is powered by Apple’s A7 chip, the same one found in the iPhone 5S, and the also newly announced iPad Mini with retina display. The chip brings a 64-bit architecture to tablets. The chip gets the job done and is twice as fast and twice as powerful as its predecessor, while still maintaining the traditional 10 hours of battery life. The M7 motion coprocessor is also featured in the device. Having 802.11n Wi-Fi, wireless speeds should be twice as fast, but it does lack 802.11ac.

iOS 7 will obviously be what the iPad Air runs on. With wrinkles users have with the new OS on their iPhones, hopefully most will be ironed out when translated to the tablet space.

Source: Apple