On Friday I picked up a space-grey 128GB cellular iPad Air 2 from the Apple Store in Covent Garden. It wasn’t an impulse buy, I had been planning this ever since the iPhone 6 Plus appeared and I decided to sell of my iPad mini. Over the past couple of years I have been carrying around an iPhone 5S and a mini. Now, with the larger iPhone screen, I am happy to have just one device for mobile use. The bigger iPhone is great for reading news, composing emails and general day-long productivity tasks.
The new Air 2 will mostly stay at home as a convenient web browser, writing tool and as a superb platform for my increasing stock of free (almost) Readly magazines. While attacking magazines on the iPad mini is perfectly feasible, even without zooming, there is no doubt that the extra screen size of the Air 2 is much to be preferred. Magazines such as Amateur Photographer and Macworld are now almost full size and, thanks to the crisp retina screen of the tablet, are lifelike and fully comparable with the printed page.
The iPad itself is unfeasibly thin and light. I haven’t handled a full-size iPad for a couple of years and I am so impressed by the look and feel of the latest iteration. I am enthusiastic about it and, while it will mainly stay at home, I can see that, together with a keyboard, it could replace my MacBook Air for short trips.