Apple ipad Pro 10.5in

The tablet to beat the laptop?

Apple’s second ipad Pro (see our review, Issue 474) brought the size back down to 9.7in. Now it’s crept up to 10.5in, but in a case almost exactly the same size, thanks to narrower bezels. With even more pixels, the screen is still incredibly sharp, and it can now show the wider DCI-P3 colour range in apps that support it. Others display correctly in SRGB mode, and we found this covered 96 per cent of the SRGB range. As before, the screen goes very bright, with Apple’s True Tone technology cleverly taking ambient light into account, although you can turn this off.

Unexpectedly, Apple has also upgraded another aspect of the screen: the refresh rate. It now updates 120 times a second, and not only does that mean graphics move and text scrolls without any blurring, but the optional Pencil stylus (pictured below left) also feels noticeably more responsive. It currently comes with IOS 10, but IOS 11 (a free update due in the autumn) adds flexibility to using multiple apps, making the ipad Pro feel more like a ‘proper’ PC.

Inside, the processor has also been upgraded. The 10X chip ranks much higher in both general and multi-core benchmark tests, making more advanced games possible and enabling apps for tasks such as 4K video editing to offer even more functionality. In fact, so efficient is Apple’s software that the ipad Pro can often ‘feel’ quicker than a Windows PC that has technically more powerful hardware.

Let’s not get too excited, though: there’s still a lot that an ipad can’t do (see our box below). And it’s not cheap. The previous model’s price tag of £499 has jumped – partly due to the exchange rate – to £619. The Smart Keyboard is £159 on top, and the Pencil £99. The standard 64GB of storage can’t be expanded with a microsd card, and the next option up is 256GB for an extra £90, while mobiledata capability adds £130.

The ipad Pro’s obvious rival is Microsoft’s Surface Pro (see www.snipca. com/24806), which has just been updated (we’ll test the new version soon). It starts at £799, which is a lot more than the 10.5in ipad Pro, but this includes a 12.3in screen and 128GB of storage for just £30 more than Apple’s 12.9in model. On the other hand, if a tablet is what you want, consider the 9.7in ipad, which starts at £339. It doesn’t support the Pencil, but you can still use styluses from other makers, some of them pressuresensitive, although software support is less reliable.