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With the imminent announcement of the iPad 3, I have began to consider purchasing a tablet.  A lot of the guys at work have iPads and they rave about them.  They have been asking us to port across the Echo system so that parts of it are available on the iPad.  In fact, the app is delivered via a browser anyway, so all this really equates to is making the currently internal site accessible from the outside world.  However,  an iPad app would still be a pretty cool thing to work on, and with MonoTouch it means we wouldn’t have to go out and learn the somewhat awkward Apple Objective C.

At present I write all my blog posts during my commute to London using WordPress’s fantastic Blackberry client. But a tablet would probably help a lot, certainly with my spelling.

So in keeping with the true teccy way of doing things,  I didn’t just go and impulse buy an iPad,  I thought, hang on when is the next iPad due for release.  MacRumors.com happily informed me that Apple has booked the Guggenheim Museum on March 7 and so that looks like the likely announcement date for iPad 3. That gave me some time to take a good look around at what was available in the Android world.

It appears that the Android world of tablets is a bit of a swamp.  There are thousands of the things out there and there are new ones popping up all the time.  If you have any sense you steer clear of the lesser known makes and look at the offerings from the big boys :

  • Samsung
  • Asus
  • Acer
  • Motorola
  • Sony
  • Toshiba
  • LG
  • HTC
  • anyone else who knows me

In amongst these you’ll quite quickly find that the best offerings come from Samsung and Asus with the Sony and the Motorola devices coming in next.  The real issue with some of the devices I physically looked at was build quality.  Comparing them with an iPad, a lot of the cheaper devices (Acer etc), feel very plasticy, and poorly designed and assembled. The top 4 at least feel like they had some half decent materials used in their construction.

The reason that the Samsung and Acer devices come in highly is really down to their processing power, their screen performances and their battery life.

Android as an OS looks good on a Tablet.  IT runs smoothly and seems to offer up a more interactive interface when compared to the screen full of  icons that is the iPad home page.  This is mostly achieved through the use of Widgets that can live on the homepage and show things such as news feeds, or the latest weather forecasts etc.  However, upon a bit of digging around on the internet I discovered that if you start using a lot of Widgets on an Android device, you will start to see your battery life plummet, as to show these interactive mini-screens takes processing power and that in turn takes battery power.

The applications that are available for Android are also a bit of a problem for me.  It is well documented that Apple exercise strict control over what applications are allowed to be added to the AppStore.  Code needs to be submitted and approved before it will be allowed onto the general public’s devices.  This is fairly strict control. At the other end of the scale is the Android App Market.  This is essentially a free for all.  Write it, and put it up there.  No-one is stopping you.  This means that it is fairly straight forward to find virus ridden software for your Android device if you are happy to install anything and everything.  Also (so I believe) the coding environment for Android devices is not as sandboxed as it is for the Apple world,  meaning that you can get access to more parts of the underlying system (address books, email etc.) than you can with the Apple dev environment.  In reality I don’t find this a massive worry. I’ve used Android phones before now, and you are always notified when installing a piece of software what services on your phone that it wishes to access and if you are not happy with what it wants to do, you can just cancel the installation.  So long as you have half a mind on what you are doing it is pretty unlikely that you will install something nasty.

The main problem I have with Android Tablets really is a symptom of the way the OS is utilised.  Yes, any company can build an Android device, and as we have seen this has led to a plethora of choices for us the consumer.  For example, just go to the Samsung website and click the links through to their Tablets range.  There you’ll find about 6 different Samsung tablets available, and I’m not talking about variants (16GB or 32GB, WLAN or 3G etc.), no,  there is the 10.1″, the 8.1″ the 7.0, the 7.7, the Note and the plain old Galaxy Tab.  When I first came to this I thought “crikey, what the hell do you want me to buy?”. And that is just one supplier.  All in all, phones included there is probably in excess of 1000 devices currently on sale that use the Android OS.  This is the problem.  All of these devices have different hardware, screen sizes, processors, graphics capabilities, memory footprints, USB, Keyboards, Touch-pens etc.  There is no fixed format.

If you are a software developer for Apple’s devices using iOS 5 you need to test your app on 4 (maybe 6 at most) devices. The available platforms are clearly defined, and set in stone.  It’s easy to ensure that your code works.  Try and do the same for the Android world, you will quickly discover that you don’t stand a chance.  You are going to target the main players only, and as we’ve seen even if you focus solely on Samsung, you’ve got a lot of devices to play with.

To bring it all to a close,  I got to the point where I liked what I had seen of the Asus EE(e) Transformer (Optimus) prime, but couldn’t actually find one anywhere to play with for real.  A few poor reviews of it on Amazon left me feeling a little scared of investing any money in it, although my brother says he has the original Transformer and really likes it.  However, it’s not got 3G capability, and I commute to London everyday, 3G is essential.  The other big hitter is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 .  I went and looked at this, and it’s actually a sturdy piece of kit, it feels good in the hand and has a great, bright screen on it.  The downsides to it are that it isn’t running Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich (what the hell do they keep giving their OS’s such ridiculous names for?) and the price.  When they told me that the price was in-line with the iPad’s I said “If the Galaxy Tab is the same price as an iPad, surely I would just buy an iPad.”.

And that final line of the above paragraph really tells you all you need to know.  ”If the Galaxy Tab is the same price as an iPad, surely I would just buy an iPad.”. You see in my mind I don’t think the Android devices should cost as much as the iPad, why? well I suppose because I just don’t perceive them as being as good.

So after all my digging around, and trekking around, and saying “I think Apple are going to really have to do something amazing with the iPad 3 to justify the price point” I don’t think they actually are.  The truth is the iPad is a pretty good piece of kit, nicely designed, and with a lot of very good apps available for it.  Yes it is expensive, and yes it is part of Apple’s cool machine, but it does perform very well and everything else seems to be “A bit like a Golf” as the Volkswagen adverts say.