Tablet Wars

I walked out of the Google I/O developers conference in May with a pre-release version of Samsung‘s challenger to the iPad — the Galaxy Tab 10.1.  Rather than put it up for sale on eBay like many attendees, I decided to take it on the road with me.  I’ve been traveling the last two months with both the Galaxy and an iPad 2, including a real pressure test — two weeks in the UK without a laptop. Before Apple blocks Galaxy sales in any more countries, here are my hands-on impressions.

Both tablets are nice pieces of hardware.  A Google search will provide no end of detailed comparisons of the hardware specs.   But in the real world, it’s a push.  The screen sizes are a bit different (the Galaxy has a bit more of an HD aspect ratio while the iPad’s dimensions are more like a sheet of paper), the Samsung is a few ounces lighter than the iPad, and the buttons are in different places.  There’s no real difference — they feel the same, both screens are beautiful, and their response times are great.

As you would expect, the iPad has a better selection of apps; the tablet version of Android (code named “Honeycomb”) just launched while the iPad has been out for over a year.  However, for apps that I use, the difference isn’t as significant as the raw iPad-vs.-Honeycomb numbers suggest.  Most of the apps that I use regularly — Evernote, Kindle, USAToday, Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, Concur expense reporting, Angry Birds — are all available for Android.

Evernote and USAToday are the only Android tablet-specific ones (and are nicely done), but the others work fine.  The holes seem to be slowly filling in, but the coverage is uneven.  WebEx just released an Android app that runs on phones and tablets.  The Financial Times app looks great on the Samsung, but the apps from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist only run on the phone versions of Android (2.2 and 2.3, or “Froyo” and “Gingerbread” in Google’s dessert-themed code names) and won’t install on Honeycomb. Understandable for a 2½-month-old product, but still a problem for real-world users.

Comparing Apple’s iOS vs. Google’s Android and each system’s built-in applications (e.g., browser, e-mail) seems to be less of a “better-worse” judgement and more a debate between two design philosophies.  The Apple experience is a locked-down one — there’s only one place to get apps, the screen layout not very customizable, there’s no independent access to the file system, and it’s tethered to iTunes (though this is expected to go away with the next release of iOS). This isn’t necessarily bad — it’s a much more secure approach, most people never change the default settings on their technology and there’s a lot to be said for not letting users screw things up beyond recovery. It’s Apple’s point of view. It’s a valid one, but it does have some impact.

While in the UK with just the iPad and Galaxy Tab, I wanted to replace my Facebook profile picture with one taken that afternoon in the Glengoyne Distillery. My daughter had taken the picture with my iPhone. Plunking around the Facebook iPhone app, I couldn’t find a way to change my profile. So I e-mailed the photo from my iPhone to my Gmail account.  Logging onto the Facebook site from the iPad Safari browser, I couldn’t save the picture from the Mail app to a place where the browser could access it. Opening up Gmail on the Samsung tablet, I could save the picture to the folder of my choice and then upload the picture from that folder to the Facebook site through the Android browser. Perhaps less safe, but I got done what I wanted.

It’s a little thing, but it illustrates why I found relying solely with the Android system — being without my MacBook Air– easier than the iPad. The Android design philosophy is to give the users much greater control over their experience.  Which means I can spelunk around the file system, tweak the technical operations, create truly horrid screen designs, and view Flash-based web sites to my heart’s content.

I like Android’s widgets — the ability to look at the screen and see new e-mails, Tweets, the temperature without having to open an app. But for enterprise users, the iPad does a much better job of sync’ing mail, contacts, and calendars with the corporate-standard Microsoft Exchange infrastructure. It’s interesting that my daughter who’s starting high school this year tends to pick up the Samsung tablet more than the iPad. It probably has to do with the fact that she has an Android phone, but she seems to prefer the Google experience.

The iPad 2 is definitely a more polished experience.  It feels 1-2 releases ahead of the Android tablet — which it is.  The Samsung tablet, though, keeps right up with Apple in hardware and fit-and-finish, and Android gives the advanced user the ability to customize it to his/her specific needs.  Final recommendation — at the same price, I recommend casual/non-technical users to buy the iPad 2; there are no sharp edges on which they could cut a finger. But if you like to pop the hood on your technology, you won’t go wrong with the Samsung.