Introduction:
With the plethora of tablets on the market today, the two tablets that have made the biggest splash this summer are the iPad 2 and the Samsung Galaxy 10.1 [powered by Android 3.1]. Though they are not the only tablets that are 3G/4G enabled, they have the most and the best features. By the end of this comparison, it will clear as to why the only two that matter are the Galaxy and the iPad.
Design:
The Samsung Galaxy [though not by much] has been crowned the thinnest tablet on the market. Although the Galaxy and the iPad look the same, by literally a hairline, the Galaxy wins. But this comes at the price of not having the slick, sleek, and sexy design of the iPad – instead having a plastickier feel.
As far as screen resolution goes, again both are very similar. The Galaxy brags a larger 10.1 inch PLS-LCD screen with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels – whereas the iPad has a slightly smaller 9.7 inch IPS display at 1024 x 768 pixels.
Both tablets have the same ports/buttons along the sides – both have a 3.5mm headphone jack, a proprietary data/charging port, a power [lock] button, and a volume rocker. The iPad has a slight advantage in that the buttons seem to be a little flushed, which makes them easier to locate in the dark [tablets are very useful when you can’t fall asleep, trust me].
One major difference in their designs is the speaker(s). The iPad has one single speaker on the back corner, whereas the Galaxy flaunts two speakers – one on each side- allowing for a simulated 5.1 surround sound experience.
On a side note, neither tablet allows user accessibility to the battery.
And now, for everyone’s favorite part – the camera! The Samsung Galaxy has a beautiful 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera with accompanying LED flash – the iPad’s camera is under 1 megapixel and no flash. When it comes to the 720p video recording, again the camera on the Galaxy comes out on top. Though the iPad shows a little more fluidity in its camera motion, the overall quality just does not match up to the beauty of the Galaxy.
Interface and Functionality and Performance:
Since already we are finding cell phones coming to the market equipped with dual-core processors, no reason to be surprised that both, the iPad and the Galaxy, are fitted with 1 GHz dual-core processors – Galaxy with 1 GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 CPU and the iPad with its own Apple A5.
As a small, but important note, it is definitely important to mention that the email interface on the Galaxy is far superior to that of the iPad – that could be because Google [developer of Android] carries with itself a market specialty in email [Gmail], whereas Apple does not really have a large following in an email system.
The two tablets offer very different types of Operating Systems – The Apple iOS vs. the Android Honeycomb 3.1. The biggest and most important difference is user friendliness. Honeycomb offers much more of a PC like feel – including the ability to freely multi-task, personalize essentially everything, and notifications [from both emails and applications]. In contrast to Honeycombs fairly complex nature, iPad’s iOS is very basic and incredibly simple to learn and use. The iPad runs everything from downloaded apps, has a very vague sense of notifications, and does not allow for multi-tasking quite like Honeycomb. The friendliness of an OS should (but many times is not) the biggest factor that should go into a decision on technology. The iPad’s simple nature is great for those that are “technologically challenged”, whereas those of us that spend most of our day playing with computers – the Galaxy wins.
App Market:
Since iPhone came first, the market is quite a bit larger than the growing Android market. But both offer the major apps that people want and many little things are just fun to play with.
Conclusion*:
In pretty much every aspect other than complete simplicity, the iPad falls to the Galaxy and its powerful Android Honeycomb 3.1 – for technical people. Simplicity and ease of use, go iPad 2; pure power and ability to do more, go Galaxy. Oh and I forgot to mention that the Galaxy is enabled with 4G LTE on Verizon, but the iPad only has 3G…
And with a two year contract with Verizon, the much better Samsung Galaxy 10.1 is $100 LESS than the iPad.
*I am the proud owner of a Motorola DROID 2 and a Samsung Galaxy 10.1, therefore it is my duty to steer the public towards Android and away from the ever so simplistic and market driven Apple.
