So after last two of my articles on whether you should buy a Tablet or not, you finally decide to buy one. Yes it’s a great decision; after all at least somebody should try the latest gadgets and provide reviews for the rest who can’t buy!
I thought when I helped you throughout deciding buying or not buying dilemma, I should help you in deciding what to buy as well.
So here’s my new article on, which way should you go buying a new Tablet. I am going to compare the new iPad with iPad 2 and three high end Android Tablets i.e. Asus Transformer Prime TF201, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Toshiba Excite X10 LE.
Let’s start
Display Quality :
Well I don’t have to say much about display here, the world already knows the current dominator. Yes, that’s the Apple’s new iPad with crisp clear and high definition quality display that they call it as Retina Display. After thorough tests with iPad’s retina display with almost 100s of images, all different in size, colours and quality. I can rank it undoubtedly the best display among all other tablets into consideration here. I don’t say it because it’s from Apple, it’s because after all the minute tests, I could see iPad delivered the best of colour saturation, skin colours were like life and couldn’t even find a single pixel after zooming the characters to their highest possible zoom level.
All android models we are talking about here features a 1280×800 pixel display but which is surely a great one but when compared to iPad it’s still 1 step behind.
Camera :
Camera is one aspect that should not be left behind, after all a multimedia device without a camera is not complete. Though Apple pumped up the camera to astonishing 5 MP camera, we still have better options available if we consider Android tablets. Asus Transformer sports a magnificent 8-MP rear sensor. Here I’ll have to declare a tie between Apple’s 5 MP iSight camera and Asus Transformer’s 8-MP camera. Both perform almost equally well in bright to intermediate light. But fail to impress under low light condition.
This might look a bit unfair to have a tie between them; this is the way I see. Though 8-MP camera performs really good, but the usability and ease of capturing photos was offered by iPad. You still have a lag with Transformer Prime, after taking a photo you need to wait a bit for Android to enhance it. Which isn’t the case with iPad, it takes the Photo in a flick on eye and does no artificial enhancements to original picture.
Hardware :
For the hardware part, I am relying on GLBenchmark 2.1.2. And believe me or not Apple’s new iPad with A5X chipset featuring a dual core Cortex A9 processor and a quad core graphics card support performed extremely well and crushed the competition very hard.
My personal opinion when we heard about new iPad’s specification was it won’t perform much higher then iPad2 because it was featuring a retina display and all the processor and gpu power will go waste in supporting the display itself. But I admit I was wrong.
Web surfing :
The standard everybody follows for web surfing test is sun spider and we followed the same. Where iPad both the iPads performed equally well on sun spider test with 1.8 seconds, thanks to Apple’s Nitro Javascript Engine, Toshiba performed a bit better with 2.1 seconds than other 2 Android tablets which had 2.2 seconds benchmark. Though these were not very decisive and almost all devices performed well in this category, but if we go by numbers, again iPad wins.
I understand that this came out to be a one sided comparison and Apple’s iPad dominated all its competitor in all aspects except Camera where it had to settle down with a tie. But Apple is the company for Richie’s and iPad is not “coffee” that every one can afford.
If you have the money then there’s a clear cut winner in front of you and you should choose iPad! But if you don’t want to spend that much or are actually motivated from my previous articles, you know that future is bright and a new gadget more useful then Tablets will be uncovered sometime in future. So just for the sake of trying out tablet, I’ll suggest you to go for Android based tablets.
Following are some of the reasons you can prefer to go with Android based tablet and save few grand by not buying iPad but still enjoying a tablet in your hand.
Cost :
Yes this is the one we are talking about since last two paragraphs. You can’t afford an iPad, go for Android tablets.
Choice of Size :
You don’t like big things? Apple gives the best reason to stay away from it. Apple’s iPad is almost 9 inch in size and the newer version has put on some extra pounds too. Whereas if you go with Android you have choice of 5 to 10 inches tablets which are much lighter when compared with iPad. But remember the bigger the better.
True Multitasking :
Yes Apple offers you multitasking, but it charges you heavy for it. Android tablets running anything above Android 3.0 is capable of providing you true multitasking and easy navigation. They also provide you previews of what’s going on in other applications which I suppose Apple should support as well.
No Syncing required :
The most annoying feature with an Apple product is the itunes syncing it requires for even transferring a small image to iPad. This is not the case with Android based tablets. You have limited but essential access to Android’s file system and you do not need an iTunes like Application for Android. Though this method obviously increases the security risk but everything has its cost.
Bluetooth Connectivity and File Sharing :
You have the royal and legacy feature available with Android that is sometimes useful. You can connect to any other device and share files with it if you are on Android, which otherwise is not possible with any iPad or any other Apple’s device.
USB connection kit :
You are at the liberty to connect most of the USB keyboards, external drives, mouse, data cards and other supported peripherals to an Android based tablet which actually is a very usable feature and is available with most of the low end devices as well. And this puts Apple to shame for not allowing such essential and innovative features.
Hope this extensive guide helps you in picking up a Tablet that suite you the best. Please share your thoughts on this article and provide me feedback if you think something can be improved.