Media capabilities

Apple wins hands-down for media availability compared to other tablets.

You can rent or buy just about any TV show or Hollywood movie, find albums from just about any indie artist on the planet, and set the iPad 2 to automatically download audio and video podcasts without any trouble.

In fact, this is the one stronghold that Apple has over other tablets, because they have licensing arrangements for so much content. You can't even rent a movie on the Xoom, at least not until Blockbuster releases their app in the US.

Yet, the iPad 2 does not really improve on media viewing itself. The screen resolution ast 1024 x 768 just can't match the quality of the Xoom.

That means, for the high-def videos we tested, including the movie Miracle at St. Anna and several home movies shot using a Canon 1D that can record 1080p video, the iPad 2 still leaves room for improvement.

Coupled with the inadequate built-in camera, the video capabilities on the iPad 2 are still not up to par – although the iTunes Store ecosystem certainly is.

In a side-by-side comparison with the Xoom, our test movies in particular looked more colorful, played smoother, and looked sharper on the Xoom than the iPad 2. Brightness level between the two tablets was about the same, however.

The news is not all bad, though. Apple has included several new features with the iOS 4.3 release which the iPad 2 uses to full effect.

Home Sharing is one of the new features. Essentially, it means you can stream music, movies, and TV shows from your computer over Wi-Fi. The catch of course is that you still need to obtain the content – you can't stream media directly from the Internet unless you use a third-party app like Netflix.

In our tests, several episodes of Modern Family streamed smoothly from a MacBook Pro.

One of the most impressive features on the original iPad involved streaming content form the device to an HD television. You had to use an Apple TV as an intermediary device, and this is still true, but the iOS 4.3 adds the ability to stream videos you have recorded yourself to the Apple TV from the camera roll.

You can now also play iTunes preview clips. A new Apple Digital AV Adapter lets you connect directly to an HDTV using an HDMI cable and mirror whatever is on your iPad 2.

Video compatibility is hit or miss. We had great success with "Apple sanctioned" video formats like H.264 MPEG-4, and found that, predictably, formats like Windows Media did not work.

The popular open-source HD format MKV did not work in iTunes or when we tried e-mailing a 3MB test file to the iPad 2.

You'll need a third part app like VLC to run those files for the time being.

Curiously, we had trouble loading video files into the new iMovie app. Apple seems to restrict this app to use videos you have recorded using the iPad 2 or at least recorded with an iOS device.

However, we did find a workaround: we couldn't load QuickTime files through iTunes but when we e-mailed them to the iPad 2, we could then save the clips locally and they appeared in the iMovie video bin.