Apple 9.7-inch iPad Pro review: Superseded by the 10.5-inch iPad Pro

Keyboard

Thanks to the docking port, you can connect an array of peripherals to the 9.7-inch Pro, and they’re all powered directly from the tablet. Apple has released a Smart Keyboard Cover for its new iPad, which is a smaller version of the one that was available for the original iPad Pro. It’s a little expensive at £129, but well worth it.

Like the original Pro’s keyboard, Apple has managed to create another flat keyboard with plenty of feedback (haptic and audible), which makes it a pleasure to type on. The smaller case obviously means the main keys are more compact than the original Pro’s keyboard, while some of the punctuation keys (~, Tab and \) are very tiny indeed. Fortunately, this doesn’t make much difference during day-to-day use.

In fact, I wrote this entire review on the iPad Pro using Pages. Yes, the larger iPad Pro’s keyboard is more comfortable to type on, but my typing style quickly adapted to the smaller keyboard. I recommend giving the keyboard a test in store to see what you think before you buy.

Having a keyboard also brings some other advantages, as it means you can use normal shortcuts such a CMD-TAB to switch between tasks, and CMD-C, CMD-V and CMD-X to copy, paste and cut text. If you’re not sure which shortcut keys are active at any time, you can just press and hold CMD to bring up a shortcut overlay – this is something that every app and operating system needs.

The one thing that the keyboard could do with is a button to bring up the onscreen keyboard. That might sound a bit superfluous, but if you use two fingers on the onscreen keyboard it turns into a giant touchpad, which makes moving the cursor a lot easier than using the arrow keys. Still, even without that, the 9.7-inch iPad Pro’s keyboard remains one of the best tablet keyboards I’ve ever used, which is pretty impressive given its light weight, as there’s barely any difference between this and the standard flip cover.

iOS 9.3

Apple ships the tablet with iOS 9.3. As with the original iOS 9 launch, there are some multitasking modes that make the iPad that bit better for work use. First is Slide Over, which lets you peek at a compatible app by sliding in from the right-hand edge of the screen. Better still, if you drag the Slide Over app a little bit further to the left, you get Split View, which lets you run two compatible apps side-by-side. In landscape mode, there’s enough room to do this comfortably, although the screen is a little more cramped than on the larger 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

Speakers and entertainment

Apple’s fitted its new tablet with four speakers (as it did with the original iPad Pro), with two at the top and two at the bottom. These have a wider frequency range than the old iPad and give you much better stereo separation. In fact, with these speakers, I could comfortably watch a film and didn’t feel the need to switch over to a set of headphones. It’s a big improvement on the old system and makes this tablet a better all-rounder.

Performance

As with the larger model, the 9.7-inch iPad Pro has Apple’s dual-core A9X processor, the fastest in the company’s line-up. Scoring 5,417 in the Peacekeeper, which is around the same as the original iPad Pro, the 9.7-inch iPad Pro is one of the quickest mobile devices for browsing. It’s got a lot of processor power, too, scoring a massive 5,221 in Geekbench 3’s multicore test. Needless to say, iOS 9.3 is perfectly designed for the tablet and runs exceptionally smoothly.

If you want to play games, that’s not going to be a problem: the iPad scored a massive 3,170 in the GFX Bench offscreen Manhattan 3.0 test, showing that this tablet can easily cope with the most graphically demanding mobile games available.

The only area that this model loses out to the bigger iPad Pro is the amount of RAM it has. The larger iPad Pro has 4GB, while this one only has 2GB. It’s only something you tend to notice while working on larger files or switching between apps, though, as the new iPad Pro isn’t quite as snappy as the larger model.

Battery life

Apple has fitted a 7,306mAh battery, which is slightly smaller than the 7,340mAh battery in the iPad Air 2. As a result, the new iPad lasted just over 30 minutes less in our video playback test with the screen set to our standard brightness level of 170cd/m2, running for a total of 8h 56m.

That’s not brilliant compared to other top-end Android tablets, as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S2 9.7 lasted 12h 09m under the same conditions, but it’s still enough for a full day’s use. The tablet doesn’t take long to charge via its Lightning port on the rear, either, as each one comes with a 2.1A USB charger in the box for fast charging.

Touch ID

Touch ID is included, so you can quickly unlock your tablet with a fingerprint. It integrates with Apple Pay, too, so you can authorise in-app payments quickly. There’s no NFC, so you can’t use Apple Pay in store, but given the size of the tablet, this really wouldn’t make sense.