TECHNOLOGY

New Apple iPad tablet weighs only a pound, sports slimmer profile

The new iPad Air, left, will be competing with its little brother, the iPad Mini. Apple recently unveiled the thinner, lighter iPad Air. The iPad Air weighs just 1 pound, making it less likely that your hand will cramp up while holding it for hours. It will face competition from a variety of other tablets.

The iPad Air is noticeably lighter than its predecessors.

If you are the least bit interested in the new tablet computer from Apple Inc., you probably already know that. The company’s engineers shaved just short of a third off the weight of the earlier version; the 9.7-inch Air weighs only a pound.

What you may not know is this: Those 6.4 ounces make all the difference when, as you recline while reading or watching a movie, you conk out and the iPad falls forward to bonk you on the nose. The Air won’t hurt you the way the old iPad did.

The weight reduction and a 20 percent slimmer profile provide other benefits too. My messenger bag strap didn’t dig into my shoulder as deeply when my iPad was in it. My hand didn’t cramp up while grasping the iPad Air for an hour while watching movies or playing games.

But is Nose Bonking Reduction enough to justify buying a new iPad if you already own one of the 170 million iPads that have been sold? And if you have never bought a tablet computer, is this the one that persuades you to fling your laptop aside?

When the iPad Air went on sale on Friday around the globe, it faced its toughest competition yet — from Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1, Microsoft’s Surface 2, and Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX. Google has a new Nexus in the wings.

The iPad Air will also compete against its little brother, the iPad Mini. Later this month Apple will begin selling a new version of that tablet, which comes with a high-resolution 7.9-inch Retina screen and the same faster processor found in both the Air and the new line of iPhones.

So how does the Air stack up? Compared with the Mini, the question really boils down to size. If all you want to do on a tablet is read books or watch movies, the smaller screen is excellent, and you can save $100 (the cheapest model of the Air costs $500. The new Mini costs $400). But I use the iPad for work, reading documents and occasionally even editing or writing on it. I also use it as a second screen on my desk for research on the Web. The extra real estate provided by a larger screen matters at the office.

If you decide you need the bigger screen, you will find a lot of benefit in the iPad Air. In addition to being light and slim, it loads apps and Web pages quickly — faster than the old iPad, because Apple tailored software to mesh with the custom A7 processor and vice versa.

It easily runs for 10 hours on a charge, just as Apple promises — despite the battery’s smaller size and the increased demands put on it. In my test of pretty heavy use, it downloaded and played three hourlong episodes of Game of Thrones and a few hours of music. I scrolled through Twitter and Flipboard, played games, and perused the Web. That’s almost a typical day for me and my iPad. It will get you through a normal day and then some with no worries.

The iPad Air also sports two antennas to pull in Wi-Fi signals faster than the old one did. Called MIMO for multiple-input and multiple-output, these antennas make a noticeable difference when your fast Wi-Fi signal is weakest, like in a back bedroom or the basement. (You’ll have to have a recent MIMO compatible router to see the magic, though.)

But do you need to plunk down $500 or more for an Air if you already have an earlier version of the iPad? Notice I used the word “need.” Even though I love shiny new objects, I really can’t tell you to replace your old iPad; the improvements on the new one are incremental, not revolutionary.

If you’ve never had a tablet, though, the answer is different. A tablet, especially this iPad, is a delight to use and will bring you hours of enjoyment.

Apple sells the devices in two colors — black and white. The company, though, calls them Space Gray and Silver because that’s the color on the back of the tablet. (What can I say? It’s a quirky company.) It also sells covers in six colors for $40 and cases, also in six colors, for $80. You can assume stores will soon be stuffed full of covers and cases of various materials and designs from many vendors to fit the new specs of this version.

Apple sells the iPad Air in four levels of memory or, as it is better to think about it, storage. The basic Wi-Fi only model costs $500 for 16 gigabytes and steps up $100 for each level: 32 GB, 64 GB and 128 GB. It’s another $130 if you want a device that also works over a cell-phone network.

So which model do you want? One bit of advice hasn’t changed from the PC era: Buy as much storage as you can afford.

You can certainly save money by getting the Wi-Fi-only model. Public Wi-Fi is nearly ubiquitous these days. Also, the amount of storage matters less in general because you can store so much in the cloud, in Apple’s iCloud, or services like Dropbox or Google Drive.

You can also free space on an iPad or iPhone by killing off apps; Apple remembers what you own and lets you download it again free at any time. So you can juggle apps if you skimp on storage; it’s just not very convenient.

Still, you may need more storage than you think. Apps keep getting bigger. Apple’s operating system also continues to grow. Plan for that.

Compared with the other tablets on the market, Apple still holds the edge. It might be a tougher call if the competition were significantly cheaper. But the Surface 2 at $450 and the Galaxy Note at $550 aren’t bargains. And they are heavier and lack the wide variety of apps.

Apple upped the ante a bit by giving away six apps to buyers of the iPad Air: iMovie and iPhoto, to manage and edit videos and photos; Pages, to handle documents; Numbers, for spread sheets; Keynote, for presentations, and GarageBand, for creating music. Those are some of the most popular apps in the App Store and worth $45.