So far all comparison reviews I've seen looking at the iPad mini and Nexus 7 focus on the hardware. That's all well and good but rather misses the point.
Comparing hardware specs tells you nothing about the software and this is where, for me, the Nexus 7 is let down and the iPad mini shines.
I have used a Nexus 7 for a couple of months and really rather liked it. Excellent for casual web browsing and basic email. However there are significant shortcomings for anyone wanting to do some work with one.
Attempting to work with some not terribly large documents in quick office or google drive proved impossible. Each key press was followed by a long delay, when I could get the keyboard to appear at all.
Google's own Drive app would lock up and display a 'not responding' message when opening a 12 page tabled document. When it did eventually open, scrolling was jerky and unpredictable. Then, if you reoriented the tablet you were taken back to the top.
These same apps and documents on the iPad just work as you would expect.
I found it very hard to do email on the nexus as I use folders and google doesn't really do folders and the calendar app doesn't sync more than one calendar over activesync.
Again these just work perfectly on the apple.
I did find solutions to most of these issues but they were messy and required extra sync connectors. The real deal breaker was the failure to do documents properly. I genuinely couldn't find a single office app for android that worked right. The best was kingsoft office, but their WebDAV support is broken and google drive documents were not always uploaded after editing.
Media was disappointing too. Where the iPad has an implementation of BBC iPlayer that's smooth, high quality and allows downloads, android doesn't support the rights controls necessary to appease the media companies so the result is an adobe runtime based mess that's slow, low quality and crashes.
Where the iPad has GarageBand, nano studio, propellorhead's figure, Alchemy... Android has very few music apps of quality and nothing like twistedwave audio editor.
Things are not perfect with the iPad. The mini is essentially the ipad2 miniaturised. Same CPU, same screen resolution and that screen is ok but it isn't great. Though the nexus7 screen seemed a bit lacking in colour to me, the iPad's lower resolution is a disappointment. The locked down nature of iOS can be frustrating too. I don't like being told what I can and can't do by Apple.
Bottom line though is it doesn't matter how good the nexus screens are, how fast the OS runs and even how cheap they are... It's about the whole package, and that means the apps. Apple's App Store just has more high quality software on offer.
Google hasn't managed to foster the same creativity and quality in their play store. More than that though, while I don't expect Google to make other people's software work I do expect their own to work and it doesn't, not very well. I'm baffled as to why Google Drive is fine on iOS but poor on Android. The same goes for Quickoffice, which Google now own.
It could be iOS is just better with better APIs and easier to code for. It could be Google don't care about the details, whereas the Apple of recent years has been obsessively driven by the details. Perhaps Apple's head start is all it took. All I really know is Android disappoints.
The differences between Android and iOS are smaller than they were when I first encountered both on the iPhone 3G and the G1, back then Android felt like a developer release, but Android still lags behind.
I wanted my Nexus7 to do the job for me and I really tried to make it work but in the end I ran out of patience and took the easy way. After all I want this device to make my life easier.
So the nexus7 has gone and made way for the iPad mini I'm now using. It cost more and the screen is lower res and it probably makes me an Apple fanboy in some eyes, but it works and the apps work and that's what matters.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
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