IPad Air 2

I've had my iPad Air 2 for a couple of weeks now, unsurprisingly it is a great device.

The screen is beautiful, it's so good to have a retina screen on my iPad again (I had the original retina iPad before I got the iPad Mini). It's really fast, no surprise there, though there aren't any games that will really push the GPU yet so that will be fun to see what developers can get out of it. While the screen and CPU/GPU is great, the biggest upgrade in my book is the RAM (which Apple, of course, doesn't even bother mentioning). Exiting a game to find that all your Safari tabs are still loaded is awesome, then you browse a bit and read a few comics before you go back to the game and see that is still loaded, fantastic!

All that said, as I suspected I do miss the size of the Mini, but not for the reasons I expected to. While the Mini was half the weight of the third generation iPad the Air is only about a 100g heavier than the Mini, you can feel it but just barely. It's light enough to lie in bed and hold it with one hand. So, what's the problem you might ask?

Let's put it like this, what's the benefit of the larger screen? Sure, bigger screen when you watch a movie or play a game but besides that it doesn't give you anything the Mini won't. You don't fit more icons, not more of a webpage. When the Mini came out people were worried the UI would be too small, I'd argue in many cases the UI is too big on the Air.