New life for old iPads, from Bang & Olufsen BeoPlay A3 churns out awesome audio quality, but docking and undocking a drag

New life for old iPads, from Bang & Olufsen

BeoPlay A3 churns out awesome audio quality, but docking and undocking a drag

Here are three things you can do with an old iPad: pass it along to a family member, sell it on eBay or convert it into a great-sounding portable entertainment system -- by spending more than it may have originally cost. Bang & Olufsen portrays its $549 BeoPlay A3 as an easy solution for those times when you want bigger, better sound from your iPad than the tiny, tinny speaker Apple builds in. As far as “easy” goes, the A3 is pretty much a failure: It’s a royal pain to dock and undock your tablet. But the company’s marketers may not quite understand their own product. Its real killer app turns out to be as a permanent home for that unused iPad, turning it into a wireless mini entertainment-and-information centre you can take with you from room to room. The BeoPlay is compatible with all three generations of iPads, and you can, theoretically, pop your tablet out to take with you if you’re going somewhere. In practice, however, it isn’t something you’ll want to do often. Sitting Snugly The A3 comes with two rubber sleeves that fit around the iPad and are designed to allow it to sit snugly in the dock, its screen flush with the speaker enclosure. I had the easiest time with the sleeve designed for the original, 2010 iPad, which allowed it to slide fairly smoothly into the unit and hook up with the retractable dock connector. But I had trouble using the sleeve designed for the iPad 2 and the current, third-generation iPad, both of which are slightly thinner than the original tablet. With the iPad 2, I had to line up the connector just so to get the tablet to snap properly into place. And the current iPad, which is fractionally thicker than its immediate predecessor, was a real struggle. Several times, I thought I had it properly aligned, only to turn it on and discover the iPad sounded even worse than usual because the A3 audio connection hadn’t been made and the housing was covering the tablet’s built-in speaker. Redesign Bang & Olufsen says it is aware of the problems and has redesigned the sleeve to work better with the newer models. Still, it’s tiresome to put it on every time you want to dock your iPad. And when you undock the tablet to take it with you somewhere, you’re faced with the problem of what to do with the sleeve once you remove it. At about this point, I was tempted to consign the BeoPlay to the pile of the overpriced and underthought. But a funny thing happened. Once I finally got it working right, I started warming to it. For one thing, there’s the audio quality, which is terrific. The A3 features a two-inch woofer for a nice rich bass, but what’s really interesting are the half-inch tweeters, particularly how they’re deployed. There are three of them, but only two are in use at any time.