The new iPad of March 2017 is heavier and thicker than the iPad Air 2 it replaced. Physically, it’s a step backward. I didn’t notice anything particularly brighter about the screen, either.
I was more interested in how it would perform compared to the iPad Mini 4. The Mini 4 has an A8 CPU and the new iPad has a more powerful A9 CPU.
The only difference that made was how quickly a downloaded Google Books PDF opened in iBooks.
Otherwise, page rendering speed seemed to be identical.
Something else was identical too. But it was no surprise.
The inability of iBooks to go without crashing on a Google Books PDF.
I leisurely went page-by-page this time, not trying to stress the machine or software. And still wound up with this:
That black page is like a bookmark — iBooks giving up or iOS not clearing the RAM or whatever.
Because this is what age 28 should look like, and does later on:
I got up to this page before iBooks went poof:
If iBooks (and remember, all I can test is iBooks, not a dedicated PDF app) worked properly — and probably won’t until iOS 11 is released as final, because this is also an iOS problem — it’d be a no-brainer to get the iPad Mini 4.
But as things stand right now, reading Google Books is crippled on both iOS and Android.
On Android, SmartQ Reader needs an update because it’s not able to access the Android filesystem anymore with 6.x. This makes it impossible to properly organize the PDFs within the app.
What a mess!
Previously here:
Video: Embarrassing Apple Some More
Video: iPad Pro Extreme PDF Test
Video: PDF Fun With iPad Mini 4 Splitscreen
Video: iPad Mini 4 Extreme PDF Test (Plus Tablet Thoughts)
Samsung Galaxy Tab S3: Google Books PDF Test
Asus ZenPad S3 10: Google Books PDF Test
Mike Cane's Atomic Supermen 