3G iPad Video – A Disappointment Or Not?
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The much anticipated release of the 3G iPad has now come and gone. There’s no doubt many tech analysts (like us), as well as regular consumers, spent significant amounts of time over the weekend testing and reviewing Apple’s newest device.
From the beginning, the iPad has been touted as a wonderful video device. The App Store contains numerous video apps and the iPad+WiFi has allow users to take full advantage of its video capabilities, provided the user was located within a WiFi HotSpot. Since the introduction of the WiFi version the beginning of April, we have used our iPads to consume a lot of video. We’ve all enjoyed streaming video from YouTube, ABC, Newsy, Netflix and more with little to no issues. With the introduction of the iPad 3G+WiFi, you might be wondering – how it matches up? We did some video evaluations of our own and got mixed results.
We first decided to view YouTube videos using both a 3G+WiFi and a WiFi only model. With our two iPads sitting side-by-side on a table, we started videos and found the quality to be noticeably different. The YouTube video quality streaming over a 3G connection was poor and difficult to watch, while its WiFi only counterpart streaming the same YouTube video, was noticeably better. Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac had similar results and went as far as saying “Video over 3G on the iPad totally and utterly sucks.”
At that point, we started to wonder if all video apps had the same video degradation problem when streaming over 3G. We decided to test a few others and find out. Like YouTube, the video quality for our next app, Netflix, was also poor. When we streamed video over 3G, the quality was noticeably worse than over WiFi, which was quite clear. Moving on to another popular video app, the current ABC Player completely restricts users to WiFi use only. In that case, the video quality wasn’t poor but not even available. (That, however, will change shortly as ABC has already submitted a revised version to the App Store for approval.) The final app in our 3G video test was Newsy, which surprisingly appeared to be nearly identical to the WiFi streamed video.
So is video on the iPad 3G+WiFi better or worse than the WiFi only model? Simply put, it depends. Clearly the iPad is capable of delivering high quality video using a good cellular connection. We enjoyed good video while watching Newsy and Clayton Morris’ from FoxNews.com reported a similar experience and said his 3G iPad video “wasn’t Wi-Fi streaming quality, but it looked just fine.” The difference appears to be in the circumstances related to the delivery of the video. Poor cellular connections and the way in which developers choose to, or are required to, deliver video in their app seem to be more likely culprits for bad video.
What’s your experience been with video on your iPad 3G? Let’s hear it! Please leave us comments below.
