Apple iPad Pro review: Slate of the art

Gallery

Apple's gallery is called Photos and includes the now familiar Search option. The smart suggestions implemented within the new Spotlight and Safari browser work here too. You can search by place, date, people, nearby location, etc.

Just like before, images are organized by date and location, for those that have been geo-tagged. This view is called Moments. You can go a step back, to Collections view where you can better view your sorted photos into groups with labels and much smaller thumbs. Finally, there is the Year view. It squeezes your collection into tight grids for each year.

Photos

The Recently Deleted album is available on the iPad Pro as well. It stores your recently erased photos for 30 days before deleting them for good. Each photo shows the days remaining until deletion. It works like a recycle bin and, of course, you can restore the files you want.

Shared photos are available - the tab has all your Photo streams. Photo Stream, which acts like a social sub-network, works really well and is very simple to set up. You choose what pictures to share and which people to share with. Your buddies on the receiving end will be able to like them and post comments. You can invite users you want to share your Photo Streams with via email or get invited. If you are using the new Family Sharing options you can easily configure Photo Streams shared between your homegroup.

If your iCloud Drive is active you can gain access to your cloud gallery and browse it on the iPad Pro without the need of storing it locally. If you have opted to store everything in your iCloud Drive, you can save precious space and still have access to your images and videos. You'll need a working internet connection, of course, and the iCloud Drive free quota is only 5GB.

Viewing a photo

There's a simple, yet powerful integrated image editor. It supports standard features such as crop, rotate and filters, but it also offers advanced settings allowing full control over light (exposure, highlights, shadows, brightness, contrast, black point), color (saturation, contrast, cast), black & white (intensity, neutrals, tone, grain). In case you aren't into meddling with your photos, you can use the new intelligent Auto Enhance feature, which will do things automatically for you.

Editing an image

Music

The music player hasn't changed its white, flat looks but has gained new functionality. You can create playlists, delete songs right from within the player and reorder tabs whichever way you like. Album view is available too - you access it by flipping the device landscape. It lists all the covers to the albums you have in your library. Tapping on an album thumb lists all the tracks in it.

Music player

The Now Playing screen hasn't changed in functionality neither is the settings. Nine major releases into the iOS' existence, it still fails to offer configurable equalizers, so you're left with the "only" 23 presets.

EQ Presets • Now playing

Videos

The videos app allows you to upload only supported formats via iTunes or purchase videos from the iTunes store. This is an extremely disappointing showing by a platform that is supposed to excel at multimedia consumption.

The lack of extra functionality is bad enough, but having to use just an extremely limited number of media formats or resorting to converting files, which is both slow and inconvenient is a real deal-breaker.

A new feature lets you watch videos in an overlay window above the rest of the interface. You play the video from the Videos app, press the home button and it continues playing in a picture-in-picture fashion. You can resize the window with a pinch gesture and it tends to stick to one of the corners of the display, of course respecting other interface elements (in this case the dock).

Video player

A quartet of loudspeakers

Apple has really gone to great lengths designing the loudspeaker setup of the iPad Pro. A total of four drivers are installed, with spacious enclosures on the inside, aiming to achieve a depth of sound unrivaled by the usual tinny speakers. Machined into the frame, the resonance chambers are said to deliver "three times the acoustic output of iPad Air", Apple claims.

That's not all. Depending on how you're holding the iPad Pro, the software will automatically adjust the sound output, so the higher frequencies come out of the top pair of speakers.

In our standardized loudspeaker test, which doesn't take into account such fancy setups, the iPad Pro scored a Good rating. Measured numbers aside, the output is truly powerful, with no distortion at maximum volume and really deep bass, for a tablet of course.

Excellent audio quality

The Apple iPad Pro did splendidly in our audio quality test. When docked to an active external amplifier, it produced stellar audio, scoring greatly in every part of the test. Its volume levels were impressively high too for an all-round flawless performance.

The stereo crosstalk degradation when you plug in a pair of headphones is moderate and since none of the other readings are affected, the iPad Pro is shaping up as a device every audiophile will appreciate.

Check out the table and see for yourself.