Video conferencing has become all the rage these days with the work from home trend taking over as lockdowns and social distancing protocols have been enforced around the world because of the coronavirus pandemic. As people use video conferencing applications like Zoom, Google Meets, Skype, FaceTime, Blue Jeans and Microsoft Teams – the best gadget/device for doing video calls isn’t your phone and it is not even your laptop or PC. It is actually Apple’s iPad Pro which may sound weird but there are things that Apple has done with the device which makes this the best tool for video conferencing.
What makes the iPad Pro special is the superior hardware. Most people have always thought that the iPad is underpowered as tablet compared to laptops or PCs and has inferior cameras than your iPhone — but the iPad Pro is different.
Most laptops and PCs have crummy cameras on the front as the mission is always to have the smallest camera possible as the display assembly is so thin. At the same time, while smartphones have superb selfie cameras for video calls, the display itself is not sufficient for having more than one person on a call and there is no way to prop the phone for calls that last a long duration.
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The iPad Pro strikes the perfect balance in terms of hardware — especially if you’re using the 12.9-inch iPad which has a screen that’s of the same size as a 13-inch MacBook Pro or Air. This screen is big enough. It also adds a lovely 7-megapixel front-facing camera which is basically the same as the iPhone X. Now by 2020 standards, the iPhone X front camera isn’t cutting edge, but it is miles ahead of the cameras that are there on most notebooks and also third-party web cameras.
Besides the cameras, iPad Pro has also great speakers and microphones. The iPad Pro has better speakers than most notebooks. In fact, the quad-speaker system is so good that it knocks the pants out of even the MacBook Pro. It is just a fantastic sounding speaker system which makes it great for even video calls. Apple’s microphones are legendary for recording crisp audio on the iPhone – the same applies to the iPad Pro. It is superb for video calls and mind you, I’m talking about the 2018 model. Apple has improved this with the 2020 iPad Pro with new studio microphones so much so many YouTubers have recorded the audio of their videos using the same microphones.
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The one thing that’s odd about the iPad Pro is the positioning of the camera – it is off-axis on the left side in tandem with the Face ID scanner. It takes some getting used to but it is a minor compromise in the larger scheme of things.
There are other advantages to the iPad Pro. For instance, if you are using an iMac or MacBook you can even use the new macOS Catalina feature sidecar to improve your video conferencing. And on top of this – iPad OS is home to all the top video conferencing apps like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Blue Jeans and also FaceTime which is only available on Apple’s platforms of iOS, iPad OS and macOS. On top of this, in the case of some apps, you can even run them from within the Safari web browser as now it supports desktop-class web apps which wasn’t the case before.
The thing about the iPad Pro is that it is light, powerful, compact and at the same time packs in superb cameras and microphones which make for an incredible plug and play video conferencing tool.
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