New iPad, Asus Transformer Prime, or Samsung Galaxy Note: Which Tablet To Buy?

I'm in the market for a tablet. Yeah, I know: I'm the tablet guy. But this one's for my wife and daughter, and I'm torn between the gorgeous new iPad, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, and the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1.

I recommend iPads to most of my readers. But there's a gap between generic recommendations and specific needs that these other tablets may be able to exploit. The question for them is, are there enough people in their niches to make their tablets successful?

My Killer AppsEveryone has their own killer apps. The most common killer apps for tablets are email and Web browsing. Pretty much all tablets do those things nowadays, so speed and stability play critical roles.

New tablet buyers often don't know what their killer apps will be. In that case, the tablet with the broadest array of third-party apps wins, just because it offers the most options. That's where the iPad reigns supreme.

But some of us have specific needs. My wife is a professional artist, and wants to experiment with digital painting. That's a pretty tiny niche.
Our family travels a lot, and we have a huge amount of video in various formats stored on a NAS at home; we'd like our daughter to be able to watch some of those files on the road. That's a somewhat larger niche.

We're Android phone owners, and it would be nice to leverage our existing Android Market purchases and use a familiar interface. That's a much larger group.
And finally, we're looking for a tablet stable enough not to make a six-year-old cry. I think that covers everybody.

The Android DilemmaHere's why I don't recommend 10-inch Android tablets to many people. (Seven-inch tablets are a different market in my mind, with different portability and price considerations.)
A reader rightly criticized me for saying that Android tablets "don't have apps." Of course they have apps. But the apps are often lower quality than iPad apps, and there are far fewer of them.

Apple showed why at the iPad event. Google's approach, which is to say that apps should be screen-size-independent and that it's okay to blow up phone apps to tablet size, is simply wrong. Developers need to take different design approaches on a 4-inch screen and on a 10-inch one. There is no shortcut, no way around this.

The result is that you have a lot of apps on Android tablets—Twitter and Facebook are the most prominent—that function but look ugly and take lousy advantage of the real estate. They aren't grainy like iPhone apps blown up to 2x on an iPad, but they're awkward to use and full of blank space.

We see this problem regularly in the PCMag Labs when we try to do Android tablet app stories. It's easy to create a list of 75 great iPad apps. Building a list of great Android tablet apps is harder. On our last attempt, our software team only found 12.

Which Tab For Me…And For You?My family recently took a two-week international trip, bringing the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime with us. It did a great job as a video playback device. It played all the games we're familiar with from our Android phones. Chrome Beta should be an excellent, speedy browser. However, the tablet is completely useless for painting with a stylus; the screen is too unresponsive.

Most worryingly, though, we kept on running into little bugs with the keyboard dock and my daughter's gameplay kept being interrupted by annoying firmware update messages. The update messages would jump into the middle of whatever she was doing, making my six-year-old sad. The attachable keyboard, meanwhile, would sometimes drop characters when writing emails in the built-in browser and couldn't type some capital letters at all in Chrome Beta.

Then there's the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. This will be the world's best painting tablet, thanks to its pressure-sensitive Wacom stylus support. It'll run familiar Android apps and play my daughter's video files. Sounds great. But Samsung warned that it may be expensive, it uses a slower processor than other recent top-of-the-line Android tablets, and it may not go on sale for months. We want a tablet soon, not months from now.
Finally, the new iPad has an amazingly gorgeous screen. It will work well with styli, although it isn't pressure sensitive like the Galaxy Note 10.1. It won't play my daughter's videos without a slow, painful re-encoding process through iTunes on a PC, which is a real bummer.

The iPad has far more and far better apps than the other tablets. We'd have to re-buy many of our Android favorites such as Cut the Rope, Where's My Water, World of Goo, and Quell, but that's only a few dollars. And we'd be opening up a world of thousands of tablet apps that aren't available for Android, which we've never played with before.

How Android Could Close the GapLook at the niches my family fits into, and there are some opportunities for Android-powered tablets in the world at large. Few people are painters. Relatively few have a terabyte WD NAS full of children's videos. But most people with smartphones have Android-powered phones and download Android apps. They're familiar with the world of Android.
Google and manufacturers have done a hideously poor job of leveraging that huge user base into tablets. Part of the problem is the disproportionate usage of free apps on Android; if you don't have money invested in a platform, it's easy to cast off.

But most of the issue is that nobody has convinced Android app developers to create tablet experiences. We can argue all day about whose fault that is. But I don't want, and I think few people want, a 4-inch-screen experience blown up to 10 inches the way we see with the Twitter app.

For me, that leaves a gulf between my specific killer apps and the general app situation. Samsung, for instance, can deliver a tablet that's perfect for one thing—drawing—but as long as the Android tablet ecosystem as a whole remains weak, it's hard to promote even the best Android tablet hardware.

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Apple's New iPad Will Pressure Android: Analyst - Mobile and Wireless - News & Reviews - eWeek.com

Apple's new iPad will pressure Google Android tablets. Although it dominates the tablet market, Apple faces a variety of competitors in the space.

Apple's new iPad could help solidify its position against other tablets in the marketplace, according to a new analyst report.

"We believe Apple will maintain its dominant market share of the fast-growing tablet market despite increased competition," T. Michael Walkley, an analyst with Canaccord Genuity, wrote in a March 8 research note. "We believe the new iPad has raised the bar relative to competing tablets with impressive hardware specifications, competitive pricing, and the leading software ecosystem."

Apple is apparently helped by Android manufacturers' increased focus on smartphones over tablets. "While Android tablets were a primary focus at last year's [Mobile World Congress]," he added, "most Android OEMs offered tablets but focused our MWC meetings on new smartphone offerings. With the iPad launch, we believe Apple has extended its leadership position in the fast-growing tablet market."

Apple's new iPad includes a high-resolution "Retina Display," a new A5X processor with quad-core graphics and a 5-megapixel rear camera capable of shooting 1080p video. It weighs slightly more than the iPad 2, at 1.4 pounds, and offers comparable battery life. Those in the United States will have the option of purchasing the new iPad with 4G LTE connectivity on either Verizon or AT&T.

The new iPad will keep the same prices as the previous model, starting at $499 for WiFi only versions and $629 for those with 4G capability. Prices top out at $699 for the WiFi-only, 64GB model and $829 for the 64GB model with WiFi and 4G.

Apple also dropped the price of the iPad 2, with the 16GB, WiFi-only version starting at $399. In doing so, it replicates the strategy it started with the iPhone, where the prices of the previous version fall with the introduction of a new unit. It could also help further spur iPad adoption.

Other analysts believe the new iPad's features will help it in the battle against Android.

"Given the 8" Kindle Fire ($199) and several lower-priced 10" Android Tablets," Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, wrote in a March 7 research note, "we see the price reduction of the iPad 2, and the lower entry-level price for the iPad family, as a strong defensive move from Apple." Nor does he see the iPad 2 price reduction as negatively impacting sales of the new iPad: "Rather, it expands Apple's addressable market in the rapidly growing tablet space."

From: http://ping.fm/EijCm

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Crave Giveaway: Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9!

Crave Giveaway: Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9! 

The new iPad debuted this week, but it's still pretty pricey. Here's your chance to win a free Samsung tablet worth $469.

(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)

First, a big congrats to Felix C. of Parkville, Md., for winning a Grace Digital Audio Mondo in last week's giveaway. Felix beat out more than 1,300 other entrants to snag the Wi-Fi music player. Now, here's your chance to get a shiny, new gadget for free.

This week's Crave giveaway prize is the 16GB, Wi-Fi version of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9. The Android Honeycomb tablet features an 8.9-inch touch screen with a 1,280x800-pixel resolution and comes with a 1GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, a front-facing 2-megapixel camera, and a rear-facing 3-megapixel camera.

It's pretty much a more compact version of the Galaxy Tab 10.1, but as CNET Senior Editor Donald Bell points out in his review, the smaller design in many ways eases the user experience.

Normally, the 16GB, Wi-Fi version of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 would cost you $469, but you have the chance to get one gratis. How? Well, there are a few rules, so please listen up.

• Register as a CNET user. Go to the top of this page and hit the Join CNET link to start the registration process. If you're already registered, there's no need to register again.
• Leave a comment below. You can leave whatever comment you want. If it's funny or insightful, it won't help you win, but we're trying to have fun here, so anything entertaining is appreciated.
• Leave only one comment. You may enter for this specific giveaway only once. If you enter more than one comment, you will be automatically disqualified.
• The winner will be chosen randomly. The winner will receive one (1) Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 (16GB, Wi-Fi) with a retail value of $469.
• If you are chosen, you will be notified via e-mail. The winner must respond within three days of the end of the contest. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen.
• Entries can be submitted until Monday, March 12, at 12 p.m. ET.

And here's the disclaimer that our legal department said we had to include (sorry for the caps, but rules are rules): 

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A PURCHASE WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. YOU HAVE NOT YET WON. MUST BE LEGAL RESIDENT OF ONE OF THE 50 UNITED STATES OR D.C., 18 YEARS OF AGE OR OLDER AT DATE OF ENTRY INTO SWEEPSTAKES. VOID IN PUERTO RICO, ALL U.S. TERRITORIES AND POSSESSIONS AND WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW. Sweepstakes ends at 12 p.m. ET on Monday, March 12, 2012. See official rules for details.

Good luck.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57392803-1/crave-giveaway-samsung-galaxy-tab-8.9-16gb-wi-fi/#ixzz1ocY50nyb

Please note that the author, while maintaining this website as a free-site, may accept ad-generated income to maintain the website. 

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