Which Tablet Is Easiest to Hold?
Hands-down, the 7-inch Galaxy Tab gets the nod here. Yes, it's chunky (0.5 inch thick, with boxy sides); but at a weight of 0.8 pound, it's significantly lighter than the iPad 2 (1.3 pounds).That said, the 9.7-inch iPad 2 (at left) is the way to go if you want a tablet with a bigger screen. It's much easier to hold than its predecessor, thanks to its tapered sides, thinner design, and lighter weight (the original iPad tipped the scales at 1.5 pounds). The Motorola Xoom, at 1.6 pounds and with a thickness of 0.5 inch, is leaden by comparison.
Weight and thickness matter more than you might think--and not just because most people like to hold a book or magazine in one hand to read it. It's important to realize that when you use the tablet without a surface, you are essentially holding it one-handed, because you have to use your other hand to operate the tablet.
Which Tablet Has the Best Screen?
Here, the iPad 2 (at left) gets the win. Images on its display looked evenly and accurately saturated and balanced. I wish that text looked significantly sharper--I prefer precise text with no jaggies, the way it appears on an iPhone 4--but the iPad 2 still beats the competitors in its category.The rival tablets have different shortcomings. I liked the sharpness of the Galaxy Tab's 1024-by-600-pixel display, but not the tendency of its 7-inch LCD to produce oversaturated colors (the Tab is shown on top of the Xoom in the picture below). The Tab is a pleasure to look at otherwise, and it finishes a close second to the iPad overall, but don't expect a high level of color accuracy from it.
The Xoom has a 1024-by-800-pixel display, but its text rendering was inconsistent, with several fonts showing unexpected choppiness (I especially got this impression in the Web browser, and in the Google Books app). More worrisomely, colors appeared to be off (the image at left shows the Xoom's duller colors, as compared with the Tab's oversaturated colors). Since the Xoom is the only Android 3.0 tablet to appear so far, I can't say whether these failings are due to the way Honeycomb handles rendering or whether they reflect problems with the Xoom's display.Which Tablet Has the Best Keyboard?
I suspect that the best keyboard for a tablet has yet to be produced. I liked some of what I saw with theHP TouchPad, which includes multiple keyboard sizes and a number row built in to the main keyboard.
In the tussle between the iPad 2's keyboard and the Xoom's, however, I give the nod to iOS and the iPad 2. Its keyboard did a better job of keeping up with my touch-typist fingers, whereas the Xoom lagged whenever I input data at full speed. I liked the Xoom's larger button sizes and its inclusion of a Tab key, but the input lag drove me bonkers. The Galaxy Tab's keyboard is unremarkable by comparison: Like an Android keyboard on a giant phone, it's small and cramped in comparison to the bigger tablets' keyboards, and it lacks the speed to keep up with touch-typing.
Which Tablet Is Best for Data Transfers?
The Galaxy Tab (now) and the Xoom (soon) have the edge here. Because they are Android-based tablets, your PC will recognizes them as mass storage devices when they are connected via USB. As a result, you can drag and drop files onto your tablet without converting them to a different format and without using special software. True, the tablet will take a moment to recognize the new images in the library, for example; but this approach is preferable to Apple's locked-down universe, which requires you to use iTunes, the least satisfying, least capable, least flexible file management tool out there today. Both the Galaxy Tab and the Xoom have MicroSD card slots, though you must enable the Xoom's through a software upgrade. The resulting expansion potential is lacking in the iPad 1 and the iPad 2.
Which Tablet Provides the Best Notifications?
Of the models I looked at, notifications were best on Android 3.0 Honeycomb devices. The Honeycomb interface puts its notifications bar at the bottom right, where it unobtrusively informs you of new e-mail messages, new OS or software updates (for example, Pulse reader notifies you when new content is available), and completed downloads. New messages pop up there and then disappear. Tapping on the bar expands the notifications so that you can view them all. The same notifications bar shows time, connection status, and battery life; and you get more details plus one-tap access to settings when you tap to expand the bar.Apple's iPad feels archaic by comparison. It provides notifications via a pop-up window that interrupts and disrupts your other activities. If you don't touch your device and you receive multiple notifications at once, iOS will collect them into a single window for you to view when you return. But if you get one for AIM (for example), dismiss it, and then get another one for AIM, it will pop up over whatever your current activity is each time, requiring you to take action in order to return to your activity. On the other hand, you get no notifications of new e-mail messages: To get those you must go to your e-mail app.
The Galaxy Tab runs Android 2.2, which delivers notifications in the "classic" Android style--a pull-down bar at the top of the screen--but they're far less elegant and usable than the notifications in Android 3.0.
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