Apple iPad 2 Tablet eBook Reader Review

Music & Audio Controls

If you've used an iPod before, you're familiar with the iPad 2's music software. When you're playing a song, all the playback controls are at the bottom of the screen, and there's a progress bar along the top you can scrub left and right to skip within the song. You can also set a repeat or shuffle from this screen. Clicking the top right icon will take you to the song's album and lets you rate the song on a five-point scale.

The iPad 2 does features an equalizer, but it's limited to presets. For most users, this list of 22 presets will be comprehensive: acoustic, bass booster, bass reducer, classical, dance, deep, electronic, flat, hip hop, jazz, Latin, loudness, lounge, piano, pop, R & B, Rock, small speakers, spoken word, treble booster, treble reducer, and vocal booster. If you want more controls over your frequency bands, however, you're out of luck.

Music & Audio Management

You can navigate through the various lists and song groupings by flicking you finger up and down to scroll vertically. Between the quick scrolling and the ability to quickly skip between letters via the alphabet trailing down the right side of the screen, it's easy to find what you're looking for. You can sort your music by playlist, artist, album, compilation, song, genre, or composer. Apple had the foresight to keep audio books and podcasts in their own categories, so you can easily keep them out of your music playlists.

You can also create and edit playlists on the iPad 2. To create a playlist, you just hunt through your albums and songs and choose which ones to include. You can also edit existing playlists by opening them and clicking the "edit" button.

Music & Audio Battery Life

If you're using your iPad 2 as a giant, novelty iPod, you'll find it has a ridiculously long battery life: the iPad 2 had over 94% of its battery life after 24 hours playing an MP3 file. We estimate audio could play continuously for over sixteen days without recharging the battery. Of course, this is the battery life with audio playback only: doing anything else will cause the battery life to fall significantly faster.