During its last night live media event in Cupertino, Apple has finally unveiled the earlier rumored, and quite impressive, iPad Air successor, the iPad Air 2, as well as the rather underwhelming update for the iPad mini 2, the iPad mini 3.

Apple has started its iPad announcement with a rather interesting number of 225 million iPads sold since the first one is launched in 2010. While this might be a rather long period of four years, the number of sold iPad devices are rather impressive and these have become a synonym for a tablet, at least to those that are not familiar with the industry.




Announced as the world's thinnest tablet, the new Apple iPad Air 2 has been slightly redesigned but still looks exactly like you would expect it, or simply, as an iPad. Despite a decent boost in performance, Apple still managed to slim down the iPad Air 2 down to 6.1mm, which makes it 18 percent thinner than the predecessor.




While the display remained the same, with 9.7-inch size and 2048x1536 resolution, which adds up to 264 ppi, Apple has updated the display with zero-gap, by fusing three layers into one. This resulted, according to Apple, in more vivid colors and greater contrast. The display has been also coated with an anti-reflective coating which allowed Apple to brag and describe it as the least reflective display of any tablet in the world.




While display might have remained pretty much the same, at least in size and resolution, the new Apple iPad Air 2 got a decent performance boost compared to the predecessor. It is based on a new 64-bit A8X SoC which, according to Apple, has 2.5x faster graphics and 40 percent faster GPU, compared to the iPad Air, of course, The new SoC, paired up with, yet to be detailed battery, allow the iPad Air to run for 10-hours. The new A8X SoC is also paired up with M8 co-processor which is mostly used for sensor data.




As expected, the new iPad Air 2 also got the Touch ID sensor, which is a must for the Apple Pay, while the rest of the updates and specification include a new 802.11ac dual-channel MIMO WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 and 4G LTE connectivity.

Apple also updated both the front and the rear cameras on the new iPad Air 2. The front camera has been updated to a FaceTime HD camera with f/2.2 aperture, got a new sensor as well as an improved face detection and an ability to shoot burst mode selfies and HDR photos and videos while the the rear camera is now an 8-megapixel f/2.4 iSight camera capable of recording 1080p video with 120fps slow motion recording.




While the iPad Air 2 got some decent performance, feature and specification improvement, the iPad mini 3 updates are rather underwhelming. While we certainly expected Apple to at least give it some sort of an update, it appears that customer ratings of iPad mini 2 were quite good as Apple decided to keep everything as it is, add Touch ID for Apple Pay, a new color choice and same model versions as the new iPad Air 2, just to keep it leveled with the rest of the offer.




Thus said, it is obvious that Apple iPad mini 3 is based on the same 7.9-inch 2048x1536 resolution screen with 326 ppi of pixel density as the predecessor as well as the same Apple A7 SoC seen in the Apple mini 2. It also comes with the same 5-megapixel iSight camera so basically you get Touch ID and new gold color model to pair it up with your iPhone.




According to Apple's own listing, the iPad Air 2 pre-orders will start tomorrow, October 17th, while it should ship out and be available in some regions as of October 24th. The silver, grey and gold iPad Air 2 will start at US $499 for the 16GB WiFi-only version and go as high as US $699 for the 128GB WiFi-only version. As noted, the iPad Air 2 will be available with 4G LTE as well and these models will carry a US $130 premium over WiFi models.

The iPad mini 3 pre-orders also start tomorrow with price set at US $399 for the 16GB version, US $499 for the 64GB one and US $599 for the 128GB version, all WiFi-only models. The 32GB model is completely gone, just like in the iPad Air 2 case, while LTE versions of iPad mini 3 will also have a US $130 premium.



Source: Apple.com.