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Performance of ipad 2 with IOS 8.3 ?
- Thread starter shankar2
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The problem with questions like this, is the variability of what people experience and their tolerance for nit-picky things. Having said that, I think 8.3 on my ipad 2 is better than 7.1.3.
Big disclaimer here! YMMV.
8.3 is the best right now but if you are on ios 7 you should not update. On the other hand, more and more apps require ios 8.
I was wondering the same thing about my iPad 3. I'd like to update but was hoping they'd fix some of the laggy stuff.
I agree with that. Already iOS 8.2 worked very well on my iPad2, but iOS 8.3 is even better and smoother. I waited until iOS 8.2 before switching from iOS7 and I'm glad I did!
If it does not run smoothly, reset your iPad settings, do a clean install and restore apps and settings from your backup (iCloud or iTunes).
I agree with that. Already iOS 8.2 worked very well on my iPad2, but iOS 8.3 is even better and smoother. I waited until iOS 8.2 before switching from iOS7 and I'm glad I did!
If it does not run smoothly, reset your iPad settings, do a clean install and restore apps and settings from your backup (iCloud or iTunes).
Lag is mostly eliminated, and in general the phone feels snappier. Safari is faster as well.
Ok, so I just upgraded my iPad 2 up to iOS 8.3 from 6.1. I have not used it much, but first impressions are that there is not a terrible lagginess everywhere like I was fearing might happen. Indeed, some things seem a bit faster, in particular, web browsing. But I have swapped browsers from Chrome to Mercury, which has built-in ad blocking, so that may be a factor.
There does seem to be a bit of lagginess with typing, at least in the few instances when I was typing text into the browser. But overall, my conclusion at this point is that the machine is certainly usable, and there is no horrendous lagginess like I feared might be the case.
Irrespective of performance, there is one, huge aesthetic disappointment, however--the gargantuan, gray, semi-transparent dock. It is pretty hideous in my opinion! It takes up about 1/5 of the vertical real estate on the screen when in landscape mode hiding the beautiful background wallpaper. Why??? If I had been on iOS 7.x previously, I would have had the visual shock at that point, but since I was jumping from 6.1, I only now found this unpleasant surprise. I'm sure some folks appreciate it, but yikes, there's also a whole bunch that also dislike it. Too bad it cannot be disabled or changed in a stock configuration.
There does seem to be a bit of lagginess with typing, at least in the few instances when I was typing text into the browser. But overall, my conclusion at this point is that the machine is certainly usable, and there is no horrendous lagginess like I feared might be the case.
Irrespective of performance, there is one, huge aesthetic disappointment, however--the gargantuan, gray, semi-transparent dock. It is pretty hideous in my opinion! It takes up about 1/5 of the vertical real estate on the screen when in landscape mode hiding the beautiful background wallpaper. Why??? If I had been on iOS 7.x previously, I would have had the visual shock at that point, but since I was jumping from 6.1, I only now found this unpleasant surprise. I'm sure some folks appreciate it, but yikes, there's also a whole bunch that also dislike it. Too bad it cannot be disabled or changed in a stock configuration.
Yeah, the dock is awful. I'm used to it now as I've been through all the versions of iOS7 and 8, but I'm surprised that the big grey dock is still here at 8.3
Are you referring to "control center"? The dock with the 4 default icons is translucent but when you pull up from the bottom what you're seeing is the control center panel. That unfortunately is always grey on the iPad 2/3. The real head scratcher is that it's enabled on the original iPad Mini which has the same internals as the iPad 2 and it also has Siri while the iPad 2 lacks that feature as well.
Hi Rodster, I'm talking about the dock at the bottom of any normal home screen where the default Messages, Mail, Safari, and Music icons reside.
I said "gray" originally as I was using a dark background. And the dock provides a translucent blur of the actual background image (sort of like frosted glass) so if you have an orange background, for example, you get a big bar of orange blur instead of gray.
It is really most obvious in landscape orientation when the dock covers up a full 1/5 to 1/6 of the screen bottom. In portrait orientation, it is less obvious as it occupies a relatively smaller percentage.
In iOS 6, this "dock" only came about halfway up the height of the four default icons, and it had a 3-D perspective so the icons appeared to be sitting on a table. It was much more visually subtle. It's much bigger and less subtle in iOS7/8.
I did try the Settings-->General-->Accessibility-->Increase Contrast option, and that results in a completely opaque, gray-colored dock. Ideally, I would like it to be transparent, or a la style of iOS 6. It would be great if Apple simply added and option for this, but that is probably not in the cards.
I said "gray" originally as I was using a dark background. And the dock provides a translucent blur of the actual background image (sort of like frosted glass) so if you have an orange background, for example, you get a big bar of orange blur instead of gray.
It is really most obvious in landscape orientation when the dock covers up a full 1/5 to 1/6 of the screen bottom. In portrait orientation, it is less obvious as it occupies a relatively smaller percentage.
In iOS 6, this "dock" only came about halfway up the height of the four default icons, and it had a 3-D perspective so the icons appeared to be sitting on a table. It was much more visually subtle. It's much bigger and less subtle in iOS7/8.
I did try the Settings-->General-->Accessibility-->Increase Contrast option, and that results in a completely opaque, gray-colored dock. Ideally, I would like it to be transparent, or a la style of iOS 6. It would be great if Apple simply added and option for this, but that is probably not in the cards.
Yup we're referring to the same thing. If you swipe up from the bottom of the dock you'll pull up the "control center panel". That panel is always a solid grey on the iPad 2/3, unless you Jailbreak it.
No he's talking about the normal dock.
I've never seen messages and Safari live inside of control center? Unless your jailbroken?
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I believe the iPad 2 has that grey dock because the iPad GPU cannot support more of the fancy little "features" that iOS 7/8 have such as parallax. The other is the translucent dock that other newer Devices support.
Rodster, I am talking about the true dock where the default Messages, Mail, Safari, and Music icons reside. Anyway, I did not mean to hijack this thread about the aesthetics of iOS 8.3, it was just a big surprise for me since I had been stuck on iOS 6.1 up to that point.
Back to performance of 8.3 on the iPad 2--I've used it several more hours by this point, and I haven't run across any glaring speed differences with 6.1 besides a bit of hesitation on the keyboard once in a while. But the big positive difference is that things are now up-to-date as there were quite a few apps that were no longer being updated for iOS 6.x. So for me at least this has been a worthwhile upgrade.
Back to performance of 8.3 on the iPad 2--I've used it several more hours by this point, and I haven't run across any glaring speed differences with 6.1 besides a bit of hesitation on the keyboard once in a while. But the big positive difference is that things are now up-to-date as there were quite a few apps that were no longer being updated for iOS 6.x. So for me at least this has been a worthwhile upgrade.
I just updated my ipad2 on 7.1.2 to 8.3 and am liking the results so far. I expected a performance hit but have been pleasantly surprised. Things are moving smoothly and no real hiccup. Honestly this has probably cost Apple an iPad sale since I can live with this performance till the iPad Air 3 comes out. I've also noticed a slight improvement in the way some apps perform. Very pleased.
cost apple a sale? comments like this may tempt them to roll out crappy updates lol
What I don't understand is why the original iPad Mini has the translucent and blur effects throughout the UI, including Siri? The iPad 2 and original Mini share nearly identical specs.
The reason for Siri is that the iPad Mini 1 has the noise cancelling microphone system that was introduced with the 4S - This seems to be the justification anyway for the lack of SIRI.
The iPad 2 originally had blur effects under iOS 7 beta, but the iPad 3 could not handle it, so Apple disabled it on the iPad 3, and it wouldn't look good if the 3 could not handle something the 2 could. I think under iOS 7 the iPad 2 would have run well with translucency, but not in iOS 8!!
The only thing is, blur effects are working perfectly fine with an iPad 3 (jailbreaked)...
I believe while they might now, with the iOS 7 beta for iPad running behind and such a short development time, they didn't have the rescources in 2013 to get it working.
If I remember it right there were some performance issues with the iPad 3 in the first few betas, but the overall performance was not too bad? At least I'm using the blur effect via jailbreak tweak with my iPad 3 since the final version came out (now I'm still on 7.1.3) and as I said it works just fine. At least they could have implemented a switch to turn it on/off. The tweak to reactivate the blur effect is actually more or less the only reason I jailbreaked my iPad.
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Thanks for confirming what I suspected. Apple removed the effect because they wanted to. After all at that time they were selling the iPad 4 so that would have knocked down the sales of that. It's the same thing with the iPad 2.