Steve, what do you think the issue is, primarily? Is it a lack of brightness (even when cranked up to the max), or is it the glossy screen?
As I say, I found my iPad to be quite bright enough in flight. It's the angle that sometimes gets me, and i've wondered if it would make sense to get a matte-finish screen protector for it to cut the glare. Or maybe there's a glare-reducing non-matte finish protector... I haven't looked at what's out there.
On my Aera, i'm certain that there are two fundamental flaws... One is the overall lack of brightness, even when cranked to the max it's not even half as bright as my iPad. Two is the resistive touchscreen, which adds so many layers between the screen itself and the outside of the display (resistive layers, air gaps, durable matte-finish screen protector, etc) that what little brightness it had is quickly destroyed. Garmin could corner the handheld market if they put a capacitive touchscreen in the Aera and tripled the brightness.
Rob, sorry for the delay in replying to your post. I have not been on the forum for about a week now and have not followed this thread for a bit longer than that. To answer your question, although the brightness is the prominent shortcoming there are others as well. As for the brightness, it is a deal killer for sure. As I have posted previously I am hooked on the iPad for its functionality but not for its reliability. Mounting it and then relying on it to provide me the data I need without fail is not going to happen. I have experienced all sorts of "data loss" issues while flying with it in the cockpit. Glare and unreadable screens is a "data loss" issue when you absolutely need to have that data but cannot read it without contorting either your eye or the instrument.
Every time I read about the iPad screen brightness issue it reminds me of an experience I had years ago with a Microsoft Flight Sim X airplane program I downloaded from AOPA. Several years ago when AOPA was giving away a Cessna Cardinal for their yearly promotion, they had a Flight Sim download that allowed you to fly their Cardinal on the simulator. So I downloaded it. It actually was pretty nice except for one particular quirk that I never was able to fix. If I flew in severe clear conditions on the simulator and turned the airplane so that the sunlight was beaming in onto the instrument panel all of the instruments (
they were round dial old school instruments) would turn completely black and no information was displayed at all on them. At the time I was flying the simulator trying to get the feel of flying with instruments. Well, as long as the sun was beaming in on the panel there was no instrument flying going to occur for sure. I never was able to adjust any of the settings to change this behavior. I finally gave up on flying that airplane in the simulator.
I have experienced that behavior first hand with the iPad but that is not the only problems I have experienced. I have had the iPad lose the GPS signal multiple times, I have had the Foreflight app lock up and the only thing that would resolve it was a reboot of the iPad. I have had the 'pinching' functionality of the iPad send the data on the screen into a super close-up mode to the point where I had no reference to where I was on the moving map display because it had blown up the view to the scale of a few feet instead of a few miles because my hand was bumped around just as I was touching the screen.
So between the screen readability issues in sunlight, the 'too touchy' touch screen and the instability of the apps and/or operating system in a dynamic environment such as a bumpy cockpit I do not have confidence the iPad could ever serve in its current configuration as a primary flight tool. I have not even discussed the temperature range issues that can be a problem too.
My GRT HX displays cost a lot more than the iPad for sure, but, there is NO COMPARISON between the stability and reliability of the HX to the iPad. The same holds true for my Garmin 695 GPS. Both of those units when held in direct sunlight facing up to the sun can be easily viewed without squinting, tilting or any contorting what so ever. They are rock solid instruments. The iPad, not so much.
what do you think the issue is, primarily? Is it a lack of brightness (even when cranked up to the max), or is it the glossy screen?
To answer these questions specifically, it is both. I have used the anti-glare sheilds that are sold. I could see very little, if any, decrease in glare. What I did notice was a distortion of the clarity of the display. Why buy a device with an incredible high resolution display only to put a fuzzy thick sheet of plastic over the screen that will distort the view? After less than a week of trying this the plastic film came off. The glare is very bad but the fuzzy quality of looking through the plastic was worse. The brightness is also just as detrimental. I would bet everything I own that the Apple designers developed the current brightness level because they had to compromise that in order to achieve a longer battery life. I am sure they were much more concerned about the problems of being able to have that longer operation time than they were of users taking the device out into bright sunlight and using it. After all, really how often do geeks even look up from their computer screens, let alone step out into direct sunlight. Ok, just kidding. That was a joke. But seriously, they were designing a revolutionary product that really has changed the world. It was inevitable that some compromises had to be made.
