Picture perfect

The original iPad didn’t have cameras. The iPad 2 added a low-resolution, front-facing camera for video chat and a rear camera with just enough resolution to shoot 720p video. That rear camera was, to put it bluntly, not very good. It was the weakest feature of the iPad 2, in fact.

The good news is, with the third-generation iPad, Apple has finally righted this wrong. Apple’s dusted off an old brand name (just as it did when the old iBook laptop became the new iBooks app) and applied it as a label to that camera: iSight. iSight, apparently, means “camera good enough to shoot photos and videos with.” And it is. It’s a five-megapixel camera, not quite on a par with the one in the iPhone 4S, but still quite good.

When I compared images from the new iPad’s iSight camera against test images taken by other mobile devices, I found that the new iPad’s camera fared quite well. It offered roughly the same image quality as the iPhone 4S and the Asus Transformer Prime, and clearly outdistanced both the Samsung Galaxy 10.1 and the iPad 2. It seems safe to say that the new iPad has the best camera of any tablet device, and among the best of any mobile device. Most notably, the quality of the 1080p video I shot with the new iPad was very good, even in low light.

The iPad’s sheer size doesn’t make it an ideal camera, but if you do need to shoot something and your iPad is at hand, the third-generation iPad’s camera is of a high enough quality that you won’t regret your choice.

Takes dictation, but not orders

I actually find Siri useful in many cases where speaking a brief command is more efficient than swiping to unlock, swiping to find the right app, and then tapping through an interface in order to get what I want. I use Siri to set alarms and timers all the time. I don’t see why that wouldn’t be relevant on the iPad. (Of course, those features use the iPhone’s Clock app, which Apple also omits from the iPad! And one of Siri’s other marquee features, getting a weather forecast, uses the Weather app—another iPad no-show. Sigh.)

That said, dictation is still a great feature and I’m happy to have it on the iPad. Yes, there have been apps available that allow you to dictate, but now you can dictate from the standard software keyboard just by tapping the new microphone icon, and that’s a big deal. Once you get the hang of dictation, which requires you to speak all your punctuation comma you’ll discover that it can be a great way to input text without typing period

LTE and cellular options

Ever since the original iPad debuted, Apple has offered two different models with different networking features. The base-priced models support only Wi-Fi, but for $130 more you can get a model with support for both Wi-Fi and cellular networking. The cellular features don’t require any sort of contract; instead, you can buy access right on the device, a month at a time, and activate and deactivate whenever you want.

With the iPhone 4S, Apple was able to bring the two dominant cellular technologies in the U.S., GSM and CDMA, together in a single piece of hardware. The 4S hardware is the same whether you buy it from Verizon or Sprint or AT&T. Unfortunately, 4G LTE circuitry is still in its infancy, and Verizon and AT&T use different LTE systems. So the third-generation iPad takes us right back where we were with the previous iPad models: there are two different versions, one that works with AT&T’s flavor of LTE, and one that works with Verizon’s.

The good news is, both models fall back to 3G networks with ease. A Verizon model will work with Verizon’s CDMA network in the U.S., and will work with GSM networks overseas. The AT&T model will work with AT&T’s GSM network in the U.S. and other GSM networks abroad. Like all previous iPads, these devices are unlocked, so if you want to buy a local SIM card when you’re traveling internationally, it should just work.

The new iPad’s cellular radios also support connecting to faster GSM networks. In the U.S. the most common example of this is AT&T’s own HSPA+ network, which AT&T confusingly calls 4G. This has a very odd effect: I began my bus commute home one evening with the iPad displaying LTE, but as we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge the indicator shifted to 4G. That was the sign that we had left AT&T’s LTE network and were now on its HSPA+ network, which AT&T calls 4G even though it’s really just faster 3G. So confusing.

Overseas, LTE apparently isn’t widely used, but carriers have invested in speeding up 3G. In addition to HSPA+, some countries have networks that use the DC-HSDPA (dual-carrier HSDPA) format. The radios in the iPad support all of these speedy formats. (Apple told me that the cellular iPad model sold internationally will essentially be the AT&T model that's sold in the U.S.)

My experience with AT&T’s LTE network in San Francisco was impressive. While riding through the city, I was able to get speeds that were roughly as fast as my office Wi-Fi. When I turned off LTE (there's an "Enable LTE" option in the Cellular Data section of Settings), the iPad fell back to AT&T’s “4G” HSPA+ network, and speeds dropped precipitously. However, as with everything cellular, location is everything. When I used the iPad at my home in suburban Mill Valley, which doesn’t yet have AT&T LTE coverage, the HSPA+ download speed was more than twice what I had experienced in downtown San Francisco—but still half the speed I saw on the LTE network.

At long last, the iPhone’s Personal Hotspot feature has come to the iPad. This is great news, because it means your iPad can act as a Wi-Fi router and provide an Internet connection to any device that uses Wi-Fi by relaying data from its cellular connection. Unfortunately, it appears that only Verizon is supporting this feature at first, with AT&T lagging behind. The third-generation iPad I used was of the AT&T variety, so I wasn’t able to test this feature. But it promises to be pretty cool, since if you’ve got one of these iPads you don’t need to invest in a separate piece of Wi-Fi routing hardware.

AT&T has a track record as an unenthusiastic supporter of tethering features. It took the company a full year to activate tethering on the iPhone. As a result, I’d recommend the Verizon model if Personal Hotspot is a must-have feature. And I’m impressed with Verizon’s approach to Personal Hotspot on the iPad: It doesn’t cost any more. You pay for the amount of data you want your iPad to consume, and if you want to share that data pool with other devices, Verizon’s fine with that.