Of course, we at Mac|Life know full well that the iPad is in a class by itself, but after two years and three revisions, we figured at least one of its competitors would have stepped up to challenge its throne by now. So after reading the umpteenth report of market domination by Apple's mighty tablet, we got to thinking: What it is that the iPad's biggest competitors can't seem to get right?
Granted, there aren't too many criticisms about the new iPad; but then again, there aren't many complaints about the iPhone, either, and Apple's been fighting off formidable Android challengers for years. Among the dozens of failed attempts, there are five major things that each would-be iPad killer has gotten critically wrong (and that's with giving them all a pass on the retina screen).
iOS Photos now integrates seamlessly with iCloud.
Even before the iPad got fitted for front and rear cameras, its Photos app was incomparable. One of the iPad's best selling points--and a natural fit for its brilliant screen--Apple set the bar enormously high for photo viewing with the iPad. Amazon's Kindle Fire--which is pretty much undone in this department by its lack of camera, anyway--has a clunky photo app and an even clunkier way of uploading photos.
Sony's P Tablet design has nothing on the iPad's ubiquitous form.
This one's fairly obvious, but Apple has put its competitors in a tough spot: The good designs are deemed copycats and the bad one are, well, just bad. Sony's once-anticipated P tablet is a perfect example; not wanting to fall into category A, its developers clearly thought well outside the box but ended up creating a cumbersome, overly bezeled mess that landed smack dab in the middle of category B. Apple has always been ahead of the curve with its designs, but for its class, the iPad is nearly impossible to top.
Everything's available on the App Store.
Right out of the box, the iPad's apps--namely Mail, Safari and iBooks--are head and shoulders above their competitors. (The BlackBerry PlayBook didn't even have an native email app until it was on shelves for nearly a year.) Add in the App Store and its brilliant developers, and you've got an unbeatable combination. Take HP's TouchPad--by the end of its short run, about 10,000 apps populated its App Catalog (and who knows how many of of those were actually worth downloading). The last time we checked, the iPad section of the App Store was on its way to a quarter-million.
iOS is the winner and it takes it all.
Apple had three years to perfect its iPhone OS before it made its way into the iPad, and the iOS team used every bit of the knowledge they had learned. Android, on the other hand, is still playing catch-up. The original Samsung Galaxy Tab was saddled with a re-proportioned version of Froyo (and later a still-not-ready-for-prime time Gingerbread), but even the tablet-specific Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich (running on the Tab 2) aren't quite up to par (and that's to say nothing of Samsung's TouchWiz skin). Nothing sullies a tablet experience like a poor, laggy OS, and Android (albeit the best among iPad's competitors) isn't there yet.
ARM's got nothing on the A5X chip.
It's not that the iPad is underpowered, it's just that Apple doesn't put a premium on processor speed and memory like its competitors. Samsung, Asus and Motorola may boast multi-core CPUs and loads of RAM, but none of that matters without a proper top-to-bottom tablet experience. Too many consumers are sucked in by promises of speed, only to find out that the horsepower doesn't matter if the steering wheel locks up.
Geoduck
June 01, 2012 at 5:36am
The Sony P Tablet may have gotten it wrong but I've always liked the idea of a folding tablet. Imagine two 7" iPads hinged together. When closed they are smaller than a 10" iPad and the screens are protected from damage. When open you get more working space than the 10" iPad. Use one side for the processor and all the circuitry and the other for the battery and you might have more battery life than the current iPad.
It's an idea that someone, possibly Apple, will get right one of these days and it'll be huge.
Redhead95
May 31, 2012 at 3:16pm
Isn't saying "ARM's got nothing on the A5X chip" a little like saying that ice cream's got nothing on gelato?
I realize that Apple doesn't need such high speed processors for the iPad, and that the iPad beats the graphics pants off the tegra, but last time I checked, Apple paid to license the ARM design, and build their own chip based off the ARM design.
