Safari - Is the iPad 2 much faster than the iPad 1 ?

[Flotzie]

Morning All,
The only feature of the iPad 2 that would make me upgrade from iPad 1 is the reputably better web surfing experience.

I do find the it annoying when browser window has to reload when working with two or three open windows. Also the time it can sometimes take for images to load. It's not a big problem, and iPad 1 is still a marvelous device. But faster/more powerful would be better.

So how much better is iPad 2 ?

 

[Tim SPRACKLEN]

The iPad2 has twice the system memory (RAM) of the iPad1 - 512MB versus 256MB. The limited RAM of the iPad1 is the reason why Safari has to reload webpages that it's previously visited so often; if they're complex or lengthy pages then it simply doesn't have sufficient RAM to store the multiple 'tabbed' pages. You'll find several threads on iPadForum where there are YouTube videos of demonstrations of how this affects the iPad2 and Safari. In these tests, two iPads - a '1' and a '2' - were tested side-by-side on identical webpages and, whereas the iPad1 had to frequently reload pages, the iPad2 never did.

The time to reload the pages, however, is typically a function of the data rate that you have when connected to the Internet - i.e. how many Mbps your broadband link is. It's not normally Safari that's limiting the time taken to reload a page.

Tim