iPad 3 vs iPad 4

Back in October of 2012, Apple threw the tech world for a loop by announcing the iPad 4. This was at the event where everyone was expecting the iPad mini, and the Cupertino firm made good on those rumors, but no one expected a successor to the iPad 3 so soon.
Yes, the poor iPad 3 was less than a year old when its was pushed from the spotlight. To add further insult to injury, Apple refers to the iPad 4 as iPad with Retina display, even though the iPad 3 was the first tablet with the signature high-density display.
The iPad 3 is now gone from Apple shelves and assembly lines. It's only available as a refurbished product when buying directly from Apple. The iPad 2, however, is still sold new, and serves as Apple's budget tablet offering.
But enough about confusing marketing practices, what are the actual differences between the two iPads? Is it worth plunking down the extra cash for the iPad with Retina aka iPad 4? Or should you save a little money and grab a (gently) used iPad 3? Let us break it down so you can decide just how broke you're going to go.

iPad 3 vs iPad 4: Screen

Both the iPad 3 and the iPad 4 come with Apple's Retina display. They both have a pixel density of 264ppi (pixels per inch). Not too shabby, but it's actually outdone by the iPhone 5, which is 326ppi. We think if Apple can make a 4-inch screen than dense, then an iPad mini 2 with Retina should be a given.

iPad 3 vs iPad 4: Camera

Apple might not have upgraded the screen, but it did upgrade the front-facing camera. The iPad 3 came with a 0.3MP standard definition offering, whereas the iPad 4 makes full use of the Retina display for video chatting with a 1.2MP HD camera.

iPad 3 vs iPad 4: Processor

Gearing up from the iPad 2, the iPad 3 comes rocking a dual core A5X processor, with a quad core GPU. However, the iPad 4 packs Apple's latest A6X processor, which Apple says "doubles the performance of CPU tasks."

iPad 3 vs iPad 4: Battery

The iPad 4 comes with a battery that lasts up to 10 hours, but so does the iPad 3. Don't think that this is a bad thing though, we noted in our iPad 3 review that despite the high-resolution retina display, the battery life was "more than acceptable."

iPad 3 vs iPad 4: OS

Apple's latest operating system, iOS 6, was recently launched alongside the iPhone 5, so unsurprisingly it's also featured on the iPad 4. The iPad 3 launched with iOS 5.1 but is upgradable to iOS 6.

iPad 3 vs iPad 4: Connectivity

The big difference between the two iPad generations lies within their connectivity options. The most obvious of these is the new 8-pin Lightning dock, first announced on the iPhone 5.

Old and new, left to right

This is 80 percent smaller and more durable than Apple's original 30-pin offering.
The other major difference is that the iPad 4 (Wi-Fi + Cellular version) comes LTE enabled. The iPad 3 did come enabled with 4G, however, it couldn't be used in the U.K. But, with the introduction of the iPad 4 Brits can also enjoy super fast mobile internet when they're out and about.

iPad 3 vs iPad 4: Price

With the announcement of the iPad 4, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the iPad 3 would be made cheaper. Apple has different ideas, with the plan seeming to be to phase out the 3rd gen iPad.
The iPad 4 debuted at the same price of the iPad 3, with the Wi-Fi only tablets coming in at £399($499, AU$539) £479($599, AU$649) and £559($699, AU$759) for 16GB, 32GB and 64GB respectively. The Wi-Fi + Cellular versions cost a bit more, at £499($629, AU$679), £579($729, AU$789) and £659($829, AU$899) for the three storage options.
As mentioned, the iPad 3 is no longer in production, but Apple and other retailers are still clearing out an inventory of refurbished models. Savings compared to a new iPad 4 is about 15-18 percent.
For the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB Wi-Fi models, you'll spend £249($US379, AU$419) £309($469, AU$509), and £369($549, AU$539). For the Wi-Fi + Cellular versions it'll cost you £415.00($509, AU $499) £469 ($599, AU$589) £539.00($679, $669).
Since there won't be anymore, stock on the iPad 3 is limited. Honestly though, given the small price difference, you're better off buying the newer, more future price device, unless you're looking for a collector's item.

Paint that generates electricity

The paint on your wall could soon power your home by generating electricity from sunlight. Interestingly, it could even change colour on request if you find it tiring to stare at the same shade.

British scientists have found that combining the wonder material 'graphene' with other stunning one-atom thick materials could create the next generation of solar cells and optoelectronic devices. The breakthrough, published in the journal Science on Friday, could lead to electric energy that runs entire buildings by sunlight absorbed by its exposed walls.

The energy can also be used at will to change the transparency and reflectivity of fixtures and windows depending on environmental conditions, such as temperature and brightness. The isolation of grapheme led to the discovery of new family of one-atom-thick materials.

Bye Bye hair dyes!!

Using hair dyes may soon be a thing of the past. Scientists have for the first time reversed premature greying of hair. British and German scientists have created a new compound that reverses oxidative stress, thus curing loss of hair or skin colour.

The researchers found that people who are going grey develop massive oxidative stress via accumulation of hydrogen peroxide in the hair follicles, which causes hair to bleach itself from the inside out.

The research now shows that this massive accumulation of hydrogen peroxide can be cured with a treatment developed by the researchers described as a topical UVBactivated compound called PC-KUS (a modified pseudocatalase).

The study also shows that the same treatment works for the skin condition vitiligo-a disease that causes skin depigmentation to almost 65 million people globally. Treatment options for vitiligo are presently limited.

Current options include phototherapy, which needs to be administered for three days every week for three years to achieve even partial pigmentation-that too in only 30% of the patients.

"To treat vitiligo, we analyzed an international group of 2,411 patients with vitiligo," said Karin Schallreuter, author of the study from the Institute for Pigmentary Disorders . Of that group, 57 or 2.4% were diagnosed with strictly segmental vitiligo (SSV), and 76 or 3.2% were diagnosed with mixed vitiligo.

Scientists found for the first time that patients who have SSV within a certain nerval distribution involving skin and eyelashes show the same oxidative stress as observed in the much more frequent general vitiligo.

Predicting Robot being developed

Indian-origin researchers have developed a new 'smart' robot that can predict human actions with surprising accuracy. The robot can refill your coffee cup and hold the door open for you, in addition to performing several other tasks.
The robot developed at the The Personal Robotics Lab at Cornell University, has learned to foresee human action and adjust accordingly.
The robot was programmed to refill a person's cup when it was nearly empty. But when the robot sees the human reaching for the cup, it can anticipate the human action on its own and avoid making a mistake.
From a database of 120 3D videos of people performing common household activities, the robot has been trained to identify human activities by tracking the movements of the body.
Observing a new scene with its 3D camera, the robot identifies the activities it sees, considers what uses are possible with the objects in the scene and how those uses fit with the activities.

Best smartphone ever

In the year 2013, few things are as hyped as a new premium smartphone. There were adverts for the Sony Xperia Z all over the national press, technology journalists (ourselves included) are falling over themselves to pick up on any rumours about the Samsung Galaxy S4 and even staid, businesslike BlackBerry hired Alicia Keys to be its Creative Director. By contrast, HTC has been relatively quiet about the new HTC One.

There was a launch press conference in London but, acrobats aside, there were few gimmicks. Make no mistake, though; this is the big one. HTC has fallen far behind Apple and Samsung in sales, and it hopes this is the top-end phone to revive its fortunes.
First impressions, thankfully, are great. The One is a gorgeous phone, and we think it wipes the floor with the Sony Xperia Z. The combination of metal rear, bevelled metal edges and edge-to-edge screen are class itself, and make the Xperia Z feel square and tacky, despite its glass rear. The HTC One's curved back also makes it comfortable to hold - a minor downside is that it's tricky to type when it’s lying flat on a desk.

The metal-backed HTC One is a thing of beauty, and even out-classes the Sony Xperia Z's glass chassis
We were also seriously impressed with the screen. It's a 4.7in model with a Full HD 1,920x1,080 resolution, leading to a huge pixel density figure of 468ppi. When compared side-by-side with the Xperia Z's display, we preferred the HTC One's screen, thanks to its superb contrast. It has incredibly deep blacks (for an LCD at least), and our test photos showed rich, vibrant colours and plenty of shadow detail.
The Xperia Z had the advantage when it came to looking at web pages, however; its slightly larger 5in display meant text was ever-so-slightly larger and easier to read when web pages were fully zoomed out, helped by brilliant white backgrounds, compared to the very slight grey tinge on the HTC One.

Last year it was 720p, now Full HD 1080p screens are becoming the norm on top-end smartphones
The HTC One wins out when it comes to web browsing performance. It has a quad-core 1.7GHz processor, and completed our Sunspider JavaScript benchmark in a super-fast 1,123ms. This is far faster than the 1,890ms we saw from the Xperia Z, but we think much of this is down to the speed of the Xperia Z's browser. For comparison, we ran the same test using the fast Dolphin browser, and the HTC One remained ahead of the Xperia Z with a score of 1,120ms compared to 1,357ms.
This difference was borne out in our subjective web browsing tests. Both phones rendered graphics heavy web pages at a similar speed, but when zoomed in and panning around a web page, the Xperia Z would stutter when coming across a large image – a problem we didn’t have with the HTC One.
Luckily, HTC has provided a huge 2,300mAh battery to power the fast processor and bright screen. The handset managed 8h 32m in our continuous video playback test, which is a strong result and bodes well for all-day battery life.

SENSE 5.0

An Android smartphone can be beautifully designed and have an amazing screen and top-notch chipset, but none of this will make any difference if the software is rubbish. HTC sails closer to the wind than most on this front, as it heavily customises Android with its latest Sense interface.
Sense has always divided opinion, but this time HTC has really pushed the boat out. Running on top of Android 4.1.2 is Sense 5.0, and with it comes the end of the traditional Android homescreen, with its mix of widgets and icons.
Instead, you get what HTC calls BlinkFeed. This consists of a rolling grid of tiles, containing information aggregated from various news websites and your social media feeds. You can add all the major social media services, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr, but the choice of news websites is quite narrow; you get the Guardian, the Independent and Reuters for news, and CNET and TechCrunch for technology. For those used to getting their content from a wide variety of sources the BlinkFeed selection will seem very narrow.

BlinkFeed replaces the standard Android homescreen, and shows you news feeds and social networks in chronological order
It looks like the BlinkFeed needs to be specifically supported by the corresponding news outlet or website, so it remains to be seen whether overstretched publishers will be keen to support yet another platform. We found BlinkFeed more useful for keeping an eye on our Twitter and Facebook feeds, though, and often used Twitter links to find news stories anyway.
BlinkFeed is a clever idea which is in tune with how many people actually use their smartphones; to keep an eye on what's happening in the world and among people they know. Of course, if you prefer to use your Android smartphone to check your calendar widget at a glance on your homescreen before opening your email, you will most likely hate it.

The app tray is a smooth-scrolling lovely bit of design
The standard Android homescreen isn't completely dead and gone, though. Swiping right from the BlinkFeed takes you to a standard Android homescreen with space for the usual apps and widgets, and you can add up to three more screens if you need more room.
Most importantly, you can set a standard Android home screen as your default screen (the one that appears when you unlock the handset). BlinkFeed is still there, sitting to the left of the default screen, while your other home screens are off to the right.
Meanwhile, pressing the icon in the middle of the shortcut bar at the bottom of the screen takes you to the app tray, which is rather lovingly designed; we like the way it scrolls smoothly through pages of icons rather than continuously, as this makes it easier to keep track of where you are.

MUSO CORNER

HTC has made a big deal about music playback ever since it first stuck a Beats by Dr. Dre logo on one of its phones, and the One is no exception. It has what HTC calls BoomSound – a pair of stereo speakers at the top and bottom of the phone - or left and right when watching video in landscape orientation.
Amazingly, these speakers sound reasonably good. It's the best sound quality we've ever heard from a phone, but the bar is set pretty low. The speakers are loud and produce audio with some definition, but the sound is certainly harsh with a definite high-end emphasis, but that's to be expected from speakers this size. We're also not convinced that putting loud speakers in a phone is a great idea, as most bus journeys we take are hellish enough as it is.
The One also has built-in twin microphones, which HTC says are designed for recording gigs. We didn't have any upcoming gigs during our time with the phone, so we decided to simulate one instead. We played back a Crowded House gig from YouTube on our PC with our speakers turned up high, and recorded the result on the HTC One.

ULTRAPIXELS ARE THE NEW MEGAPIXELS

As if replacing the Android homescreen wasn't radical enough, HTC has also gone against popular convention with the One's camera. Instead of racing to fit as many megapixels as possible on a tiny sensor, which is normally a recipe for huge amounts of noise, HTC has made a sensor using what it calls Ultrapixels. These are larger-than-average pixels, which means that instead of having 12 or more megapixels on a small sensor, the HTC One only has four megapixels.
This should mean that there's less interference as light hitting one of the sensor's pixels scatters onto those around it, which is a key contributor to noise in digital images. HTC also claims the camera lets in 300% more light than a standard smartphone model; we're not sure how the company came to that figure, but the 1/3in sensor, F2.0 lens and optical image stabilisation all bode well.

Shake-free indoor shots with little noise indoors from the HTC One - click to enlarge

The Xperia Z can't manage the same level of detail, but colours are marginally more accurate
We were impressed with the HTC One's indoor shots. We saw camera-shake free images under poor indoor lighting, with little visible noise or noise reduction. However, we did find colours rather muted. The Sony Xperia Z's camera captured shots with more vibrant colours, but they didn't have the same level of detail as those from the HTC One.
The phone also picked up a large amount of detail in very dark conditions - far more than the Xperia Z could manage. There was one problem; a light source in our test scene caused artefacts elsewhere in the image, which is a problem we've also seen on the iPhone 5. We suspect this is due to internal reflections in the camera's lens.


Under very low light, the HTC One (top) picks up an impressive amount of detail compared to the Sony Xperia Z (bottom). However, artefacts are visible to the right of the monkey's ear
When we went outside, the One's camera was again impressive in some ways and less so in others. The camera captured plenty of detail in the medium distance, and shots were much sharper than on the Sony Xperia Z. However, once again we found the One's colours to be rather muted, and shots from the Xperia Z were both more vibrant and with more true-to-life colours.

The HTC One (left) produces sharper photos, but the Sony Xperia Z (right) has more accurate colours
However, when taking shots outdoors we noticed the limitations of the HTC One's low megapixel count. Photos were fine at short and medium distances, but detail tails off significantly in the distance, leading to smudgy details and pixilation.

Pixilation is evident in the HTC One's shots (left) when you zoom in, showing the limitations of its 4-megapixel sensor
Like all smartphone cameras, then, the HTC One's model is a compromise. If you mainly use your phone for taking indoor shots of friends and family, you'll definitely appreciate the impressive low-light performance. It's also fine for outdoor snaps, but if you like your smartphone to be a replacement for a compact camera for holiday snaps, you're better off with choosing one with a higher-resolution sensor such as the Sony Xperia Z, or even maybe the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S4.

VERDICT

HTC has pulled off a blinder with the HTC One. It’s a gorgeous phone with a beautiful screen, and we think it's a more desirable handset than the Sony Xperia Z.
Given you can move BlinkFeed out of view, the HTC should appeal to everyone. It will be especially tempting to those who crave the low-light capabilities of its camera. Its metal chassis is also a big selling point - and one, based on past models, that is unlikely to appear on the Samsung Galaxy S4.
Most will be tempted to see that handset before making a choice, but with the HTC One, HTC has a huge contender for handset of the year. It's an amazing phone and deservedly wins our Ultimate award.