Seriously, look for a refurb iPad if gaming is key. The selection’s amazing.
(And I say this as owner an iPad 3, a 10" Android ICS tablet, and a Surface RT.)
Android’s a superior OS if you like to hack around and customize your system. From a user interface standpoint, IMHO the standard Android UI is horrible, but obviously that’s subjective.
But the selection of games and apps on iOS is unmatched.*
( *Except for Office apps, where the Surface RT wins by having real MS office instead of half-baked tablet apps.)
Yes, if you run bad versions of Android on bad hardware, it won’t be awesome. But guess what: If you run a Nexus 10, which is hardware that’s better than iPad Retina, with stock 4.2.2, it’s really super-great. It’s fast, smooth, elegant, powerful, etc.
Old information that is no longer relevant has assumed the status of urban legend, at this point. I’m telling you, Android on tablets is fine. I’ve listed off for you a bunch of games that all work fine on tablets. You can’t, or won’t, name a single one that doesn’t, just citing stuff that “everyone knows.”
The state of Android tablets has moved very, very fast. The first tablet that was even vaguely worth buying, the Transformer Prime, came out about a year ago, and didn’t even launch with ICS. The state of the tablet app system then was bad, because who used tablets? But since then, and after the Nexus 7, and the Nexus 10 (the first Android tablet to have better specs than an Apple one, and the best large display on any device) and Jellybean and Jellybean 4.2, it’s a very different world.
If your experience with Android tablets is based on a hacked-up pre-Tegra 3 Touchpad running an alpha version of Cyanogen, you might consider that current devices running stable versions of Android are going to be considerably better in every possible dimension.
Any difference at all in apps for pdf reading - specifically game pdfs - between say a nexus 10 and in ipad 4? I’m guessing they both have more than enough grunt. I tried on my mum’s ereader and it was painful and slow reading things like the Knights of Honour pdf.
Thanks for all the great info/debates, this has actually been quite useful.
So a question I asked earlier, if I plan to only store apps on the device weather it is a Nexus 10 or Ipad, will I really regret getting a 16GB vs. 32GB version? I understand bigger is always better here, but saving $100 would be nice if I won’t regret it down the road.
I think we can all agree that hardware wise, there’s really not much difference these days especially when it comes to resolution. When it comes to apps, iOS certainly wins out in the games department and Android apps, while certainly not “crap” more often than not tend not to to be optimized for the larger tablets (meaning that while they work perfectly fine, they don’t take advantage of the extra space).
I was doing some surfing and found that the latest talk (rumors) is that the new iPads are expected to come out this March which isn’t very far away at all. I don’t expect any price drops which would mean that a 32GB iPad would probably be $600. I’m not sure whether I’m willing to pay that price just so I can play Battle of the Bulge.
One of the great things about iOS is that there is no “region locking” when it comes to hardware or internet connection. When I go to the Google Play store on my phone or tablet, I’m faced with the Japanese Google Play store with all their god damned stupid tentacle porn games. Usually I can get the apps I want but sometimes I can’t-for some reason Flickr doesn’t have their Flickr app on the Android store in Japan. Sometimes I can get around this by going to the PC store and using a PVN but sometimes that doesn’t even work and I get a “this app is not available for your device” message, which means there must be some kind of hardware region locking going on as well. Whereas with iOS all I do is log into my Canadian iTunes account and I can do whatever I want no matter whether it’s on a device I’ve bought in Japan or using a Japanese ip address connection.
On the other hand my tablet and phone both have expandable memory and both allow me to drag and drop movies and television shows and comics straight from their folders on my PC to folders on my memory card. If I do get an iPad I am dreading having to install and use iTunes again and having to sync my tablet.
A perfect tablet would be a combination of the Android and iPad but unfortunately that just isn’t going to happen.
It depends on your use case. If you just want to play games, 16GB is fine. You won’t be able to hold more than seven or eight big games at a time, but that should be plenty, and you can always redownload.
Get more than 16GB if you plan on traveling with the device and plan to use it to watch movies. Each movie is easily well over a gigabyte, even in SD. HD movies can be 4 or 5GB.
But if you plan to keep it on your coffee table or use it in bed where you always have wifi available, 16GB is plenty.
My 16GB tablet has 4GB of space available on it. It’s got 3.5GB of apps, 3GB of ebooks and comics, 1GB for a second user, and 1.5GB of videos. My music is all in Google Music, so doesn’t take up any space.
16GB isn’t a ton, but it’s not an unusable amount, either.
If you’re really concerned about price, you can pick up a refurbished Galaxy Tab 2 from Best Buy for $260. It’s updated to Jelly Bean and you can pick up a 32GB memory card for $20. So for $280 you can have a Jelly Bean capable tablet with 48GB memory. That’s certainly a lot less than $600. Are iOS exclusive games worth $320?
The cheapest ipad is $329, not $499. The ipad mini will play every iOS game. Even though it has a low-DPI screen, it’s probably the best choice for most people as the form factor is so superior. It’s less suited as a laptop replacement, but it’ll work in a pinch.
Which is fine in a general discussion, but the OP we’re primarily trying to advise (I assume that no one here is actually trying to win a Platform War argument) has stated–twice now–that he is interested in a 10" tablet.
iPad = best games, best real world 3D performance, broadest selection of games
I think most of us can agree on that.
Lets just assume for a moment everything else is more or less equal. If gaming is a very high priority for you then well it’s pretty easy to decide then. So ask yourself if the price premium is worth the better gaming experience.
IMO MOST definitely yes but then again I put gaming as a VERY high priority.
Some other differences:
ios has amazon vod, android does not unless you get a kindle fire
ios has air video hands down the best real time transcoding video streaming system, android has ummm plex (crap in comparison)
iOS iSub works great with subsonic streaming over network shares, for some reason the android client doesn’t support this. it only works with the subsonic server accessing local content.
iOS has limited emulation support (though I do have iDOS and 2 versions of Mame), android can side load all sorts of crazy crap though some things require rooting (like say adding xbox 360 controller support) and well there goes your clean stable OS.
iOS has downcast, android has doggcatcher (close but not quite as nice IMO)
iOS has better dropbox integration. It’s easy enough to say download a mobi file in the dropbox app then open with the kindle app. You can do this all directly inside the iOS dropbox app. Android: download file, export, save to sd card, open in file browser.
Expandable memory on android devices that do have them are a bit misleading. Sure they are great for storing media but as far as running apps off of them it seems to be hit and miss depending on your device so do your research if this is important. Some apps won’t even let you move it to the sd card. I have the 64GB iPad 3 and 64GB iPhone 5 and I’ve filled both up with apps and had to go back and clear some off. So yeah the more internal memory you can afford the better if you are a power user or just like having lots of games installed.
Depending on what you expect out of your mobile device, the deeper I dig, the more things I find about android that are close but just not quite as good as iOS.
Android uses DLNA, which is the standard thing that works with everything. And it works as both a DLNA client (streaming from some other server) and as a DLNA server (streaming from the tablet to your Xbox/PS3/TV), even while you’re doing other things on the tablet.
iOS has better dropbox integration. It’s easy enough to say download a mobi file in the dropbox app then open with the kindle app. You can do this all directly inside the iOS dropbox app. Android: download file, export, save to sd card, open in file browser.
That’s a weird way to use it. The Moon+ Reader application has Dropbox integration built-in, so that you can load up your reading app, and browse your Dropbox directory right from there. Or you can use FolderSync to do a (one way or two way) sync between a local directory and Dropbox, so that your reader’s “bookshelf” is always up-to-date with what you have on Dropbox.
Having to manually go into the Dropbox app to get books is an artifact of iOS’s lack of proper inter-app integration. But even at that, you’re still wrong: If I go into Dropbox, and browse to an ePub and tap it, it immediately brings up all my apps that can open an ePub and lets me choose between them to open it immediately, just like you say for iOS. There’s no downloading, exporting, file browsing.
