iPad 8th Generation Full Review - 10.2 - Apple's Entry Level iPad By Lon.TV

Hey everybody, it's Lon, saber we're taking a look today at the brand new iPad. This is the eighth generation iPad with the 10.2-inch screen. This is the entry level model for the Apple iPad line and if you've got kids at home or just looking for an iPad that won't break the bank, this is likely the one to consider it's got the older design, but it performs pretty nicely for the price point we're going to be taking a closer look at what this new one brings here in just a second, but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that I paid for this with my own funds. All the opinions you're about to hear are my own. Nobody is paying for this review, nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you're about to see before it was uploaded. So, let's get into it now and see what this iPad is all about.

Now, the price point on this is about 329, although you can often find it for less. These iPads go on sale all the time. So if you are patient, you can likely get one for a lower price than what is currently listed. Now this one is the high-end model. It has 32 gigabytes of storage and only works on Wi-Fi networks.

They have another version with 128, gigabytes of storage and there's a whole other group of these that have 4g LTE modems built in, so you can use them on a cellular network performance wise all four perform the same, but if you are looking to just get the basics here, the Wi-Fi version, which is what I have should work just fine and as you'll see it's a pretty nicely performing device for a high-end tablet. Now, let's take a look at the hardware, this one has a 10.2 inch display and physically. It looks a lot like older iPads. Do itbe not all that thick, but it's starting to look a little dated compared to some of apple's newer, more expensive iPads. So you have these very big bezels up here on the top and the bottom, but you do have a fingerprint reader here at the bottom.

That does unlock very quickly. So if you are massed up during the day, you don't have to worry about face recognition, not working. You can just rest your finger on that little sensor there and get in the other thing that I like about these lower cost iPads is that they still have a headphone jack, which many do not have these days. So you can continue to use your favorite, earbuds and microphones in that port. There.

Your power button is over here you have your volume rocker there on the bottom. You have speakers, it's not stereo just coming out of the bottom here, and you have a lightning connector, which is, of course apple's proprietary connector. That's been on iPads and iPhones for many years now, and that's pretty much it. There is not much to the story here. The display looks pretty nice, although there is a decent size, air gap here between where the screen is and where the glass is on the unit.

So newer iPads have the screen kind of glued right up to the glass, and it looks really, really nice and modern. This one again is a little less modern in its appearance, and there will be a bit of an air gap between the glass and the display on it. Now, while the hardware is starting to look a little dated, the display is still really nice on these low-end iPads. It runs at 500 nits, in fact we're often turning the brightness down because they blow out our cameras here in the studio, and they run at a high resolution 2160 by 1620. This is the same resolution as the prior generation was running at that's 264 points per inch, and that means that your text and your photos look very, very sharp and are very easy to read and look at I've always been very happy with these apple retina displays, and this one, of course, is no exception.

They really do put a nice display in for the price point. It doesn't support some true tone, color or the HDR, that the higher end iPads support. It runs at 60, hertz versus higher frame rates that we're starting to see out of other devices, but overall for its place in the market. Furthermore, it is very competitive and a very attractive display. Now you might be wondering what the difference is between this 8th generation iPad and the 7th generation, one that just came out like a year ago.

They actually feel and look the same. They've got the same, display the same cameras and everything else, but this one has a new processor, at least for this level of iPad. It has the a12 bionic chip, which is a nice performance improvement, at least on paper over what was in the prior iPads that came in at around this price point now you do have a front-facing camera here. This is the same as it had before. So this is a 1.2 megapixel camera here in the front, more than adequate for FaceTime calls and zoom and everything else that you might do with it. So if you have kids learning from home, it should be just fine on the back.

You've got the same 8 megapixel camera that was on the iPad before these will do 1080p video out of the back at 30 frames per second, you can do 720p, slow motion, video out of that camera as well and on the front camera you can record 720p video at 30 frames per second camera quality is not spectacular, but again good enough and adequate for the price point now the battery life on this is the same as the prior edition apple says: you'll get about 10 hours, and I would agree with that assessment. If you keep the screen brightness down and not play a lot of games on it, if you're sticking to movie watching and some web browsing, you could probably get close to that mark. My experience, typically with This is about eight to nine hours, doing a little more than the basics and having the screen brightness turned up a little more, but generally, I found the iPads to really do well on battery life, and they're, often very close to what apple says you'll get in their marketing, which is sometimes unusual for this industry. The weight on this new one is 1.08 pounds or 490 grams. The one that has the cellular modem built in is a little heavier, but marginally so, and it's also slightly heavier than last year's model which came in at around 483 grams, but it really isn't much to walk around with if you start adding cases and other accessories.

Obviously those things will add some weight, but on its own it is a very lightweight device that isn't too strenuous to carry around with you all right. Let's take a look now and see how the new iPad performs we'll begin with some basic stuff like web browsing, we'll go to NASA. gov here and just see how quickly everything can render in and as you can see, everything is pretty zippy here now, I'm connected to my ac wireless network in my house over Wi-Fi. Your mileage, of course, will vary depending on the speed of your internet connection, but it does feel very responsive here, as I'm browsing around different things, and you can also see just how fast everything is, as I'm pinching and zooming, and doing all the other things you might do with an iPad while you're browsing the web. So that is good.

This does not, though, support the new Wi-Fi 6 standard, but I think for most folks the ac support will work out. Just fine video playback is also very nice on here. This is a 60 hertz display, so you're not going to get the 120 hertz that you might see on some newer devices, but it's able to play 1080p 60 video here from YouTube. Just fine, and we were also able to watch videos on Netflix and some other video services without issue either. Now it's nice about these low end iPads is that they do things that some of the more advanced models do.

One of those things is split screen mode. So, for example, as we're watching a video here, I can grab safari and dock it here on the side of the screen and be able to browse the web. While I am watching YouTube videos and not all apps support, this split screen mode, but many do in fact most do at this point. So you can do this kind of work on your iPad that you didn't pay all that much money for uh. The nice thing about the 7th and 8th generation models versus the older models that came before it is that this does have a 10.2-inch screen versus 9.7, and that does give you a little more real estate to do this kind of stuff. Now, like the prior two generations of the entry level iPad, this new one supports the Apple Pencil, but it only supports the first generation pencil, not the second generation one.

The good news, though, is that the first generation Apple Pencil costs less, and it charges just by plugging itself into the bottom of the iPad into its lightning connector. This little cap here comes off, and you can get it charged. I have long believed that the Apple Pencil is the best digital pen on the market. It really works nicely. It rarely picks up my wrist by accident, so the second, the pen gets close to this thing.

Furthermore, it just ignores my wrist input and I can start drawing somebody in my live chat here wanted me to draw a horse which I can do real, quick, I'm not a very good artist. So there you go, but it's a very natural feeling. Pen, the latency on the virtual ink here is very, very minimal. It just feels great, and I've been very, very pleased with this, both for drawing, but mostly for note, taking which I tend to do the most on my iPad now. One thing that you can also get is an Apple Pencil alternative and there are a lot of them out there that don't cost all that much.

We looked at the Adonis note recently, which is a very low cost pencil. It doesn't have all the features of this one, but it can get the job done for note-taking. But if you want to do a lot of drawing the Apple Pencil is probably going to be the way to go, and why that is because there are two different sensors on the pencil that are of note. The first is a pressure sensor. So if I just lightly draw my line here, I get a light line, but if I push down harder, I get a darker one, and then I can also tilt the pencil here to get a thicker line, and it's able to detect exactly how tilted my pen is as I'm drawing and those are some of the things that are unique to the Apple Pencil that you won't find on all the alternatives.

But again, if you're just doing note-taking, I think you might be able to get by with one of the alternative pens, and we've reviewed a bunch of those pens in a prior video. Now, like the other, more expensive iPads, this one supports scribble, which is a new feature of iPadOS 14. That allows you to use your handwriting for input. So, for example, as I'm writing things out here in notes, I can say hello. This is a test, and it will convert my handwriting into text.

It doesn't always get it correctly, every time, but it gets it most of the time. It's pretty accurate, a little more accurate than my newton was back in the day, and you can also scribble things out here just by squiggling on them, like the old newton used to do. Furthermore, it also can do shape detection here in notes. So if I select the pen icon and draw a circle and hold it right here, it'll make me a perfect circle. So if you have a problem, drawing straight lines and straight squares and stuff, you can just have the scribble feature.

Do that for you now scribble works in a lot of different places on the iPad and pretty much any time. You see a text input field. You can now write in there. So, for example, here on Google, I can just write in NASA right on the little search window there, and it will start bringing up search results. For me, that's pretty cool, but I can also write in right here at the top on the address bar.

So if I write in here space shuttle, it will recognize the text and do a Google search for me as well, and this is pretty handy because if you are using the pen in one application and don't want to have to put it down to start typing- and you don't want to tap on an on-screen keyboard now you can just write anywhere, and it will recognize that, and it's really great to see this working on the entry level version as well as it does on their higher end products. Now, as you saw, I am not an artist, but you can run a lot of advanced creative applications on here. I'm going to load up one real, quick, just to show you that it works. That is procreated, and I've been messing up all their custom artwork here that they include with it. But this is a really advanced multi-layer illustration application.

My daughter's been doing a lot with this, and I'm just amazed by what she can do, and it works fine. I mean, I think, if you start going into a lot of heavy-duty artwork where you're layering in a lot of different things, and you're, really taxing the hardware you're going to probably hit the limit here when you get a little too advanced with your creativity, but if you're just doing basics here, like just drawing on screen and maybe having five or six layers or something on procreate. I think this iPad might be a good starting point, especially if you're on a budget. You can buy this iPad and this pencil for significantly less than what an iPad Pro will cost you, where the iPad Pro has an advantage, though, is in its overall processing power the amount of memory it has. It's going to be a lot faster, as you start getting more complex with your artwork and photography and video, and that's still where I'll point, people who are very serious about doing their creative work, because these are perfect starting points, but certainly not going to be something for professionals to use.

But you will be surprised by how well the creative applications work on here. Even things like procreate that can be pretty advanced now. Another feature added recently to the iPad is trackpad support. You could also use a traditional mouse if you want. They have adapters to go from the lightning connector here to USB.

If you wanted to use a wired mouse, or you can go with Bluetooth like I'm doing here and as you can see, we get a mouse pointer moving around, I can click on things. Just like a laptop. I could go up to the search bar here and type stuff in with the keyboard. It pretty much works like a laptop would, although some trackpads work better than others. So this one on this Logitech k830 will allow me to do two fingers scrolling and left and right-clicking, but it doesn't do some of the more advanced gestures that iOS supports and for that you'll need either an apple official, trackpad or something that apple has blessed.

Officially like this Logitech combo trackpad case that we looked at a few months ago, this one works with this generation iPad and the 7th gen. It's a really nice keyboard. Actually, it's got a decent trackpad that supports all the different gestures, and it makes your iPad really feel like a laptop, and I think it's a really nice addition to the iPadOS that you can get this trackpad functionality and that Logitech keyboard also is backlit too, which might be handy for folks that are looking for that kind of functionality there. But still it's really nice to see this trackpad implemented so well. Another thing that works on the iPad now are Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controllers.

Unfortunately, we've found that many of the third party Xbox and PlayStation controllers, don't work, but the official ones do and for games that support game controllers. You can now use the controllers that you're very familiar with on your iPad. It's certainly better to use one of these than it is to use touch controls, and it was nice to see apple loosening up a little as to which game controllers that can work on their hardware and for games that support it. It really makes it a fun platform for gaming. Now, as far as the game library is concerned, you're going to see that just about every game, that's available on the iPad will run on this iPad.

The reason is, is that most developers are targeting where the most customers are and far more people can afford to buy a low end iPad versus the high-end ones, and, as a result, the game library is pretty rich on these devices and on the 3dmark slingshot benchmark test, we got a score of 4281 and although that is a higher score than the prior edition of this iPad, it's not as high as I thought it would be, especially when we start digging into that test and look at the individual components of it. So the two graphics tests there came in lower on this iPad versus last year's model. That surprised me and the reason why this one scored better is that the CPU components of that test were significantly better on this new one versus the old one. So what does that mean? Well, I think, for most consumers, not much of anything because you're not going to notice all that much of a difference on this iPad versus the other one, but some apps might feel a little faster here and others will not, depending on which side of that apple, a12, bionic processor. It's using things that are more graphically intensive, might feel about the same things that rely more on the CPU will feel quicker.

The bottom line is, is that if you have the prior generation iPad and are happy with it, I don't think there's a compelling reason to upgrade to this one. But I was disappointed to see that, although this does share a processor with the iPhone 10s, it doesn't perform as well as that phone does, and this is likely, because Apple is tuning the processor down, to keep this iPad from competing with their higher end offerings, which of course, deliver higher margins to the company. But still it performs quite well for its price point, and you would be hard-pressed to find a device from any other manufacturer that performs as well as this one does for the price. So, although this is not as much of an upgrade as I hoped, it would be, it's still a very solid offering and if you're in the market for an iPad and don't have a lot of money to spend this one is definitely something I think you'll be happy with that's going to do it for now until next time. This is Lon Simon.

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Source : Lon.TV