First review of Apple's new iPad Air from Rodney Chester

REVIEW: Pick up the lighter, faster, thinner iPad Air and the feeling is the reassurance of meeting a familiar face rather than the excitement of an encounter with someone new.

Pick up the lighter, faster, thinner iPad Air and the feeling is the reassurance of meeting a familiar face rather than the excitement of an encounter with someone new.

The stats don't lie. This is a few mm thinner than any iPad you've held before and the bevel around the screen is smaller.

It's also faster and more powerful and there will no doubt be apps to come that take advantage of the new M7 processor in there that handles motion, gyroscope and acceleration data.

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But unless you had an older model in your other hand, you could fail to appreciate the real difference.

It is easier to hold in one hand than, say, your old iPad 2, although if there is a subculture of people out there suffering because their iPad is too heavy for convenient one-hand holding then they are keep a low profile.

One thing you do notice at first about the iPad Air is what is missing.

After the launch of the iPhone 5S, there were rumours circulating that this new iPad would have the fingerprint scanner built into the home button. It does not.

And despite the the iPhone 5S splashing out with the colour of gold and the iPhone 5C using colour as its main feature, you can forget about any dreams you had of your next iPad being a splash of something rainbow like.

The iPad Air comes in silver with white and space grey with black.

As the tablet market matures, one of the key differences between Apple and Android tablets is not the features of the device but the features of the software that runs on it.

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When you ask an Apple person to wow you with the new tablet (which is exactly what I did in the hands-on session), they don't necessarily ask you to weigh it but show what it can do with the updated apps such as the new iMove and iPhoto.

iPhoto now has powerful editing features that really brings it up to speed with some of the most popular photo editing apps in the tablet market.

The changes in iMovie include the ability to embed a small window of HD video onto a larger window of HD video. The result can look great, although like the slow-mo feature of the iPhone 5S it's a feature that is best used in small doses.

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Sure, you can download the same software on your old iPad models. You'll be able to do the same things but just not as quick, given the A7 chip inside the iPad Air.

The iPad Air feels like an old friend, albeit an old friend who has lost a bit of weight around the middle. It's when you go to use it that you realise this old friend is doing things faster than ever before.