Galaxy Tab 10.1 vs iPad 2, which one should you choose?

We’re here again, offering up a versus post of two undeniably fantastic products in the hope that we can shed some light on which one is going to be best for you. Now, both of these products are sublime and are technically speaking the flagship products in one market, so how do they fare against each other? And more importantly, which one are you going to find most valuable to yourself in every day usage? Well that’s what we are here to find out. Read on to see what’s what.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

When Samsung unveiled their Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 it was straight after the iPad 2 was unveiled. Now, in terms of business and headline grabbing, this was an incredibly smart move from Samsung because as I am sure you are already fully aware the Galaxy Tab 10.1 trumps the iPad 2 in thinness, measuring in at a staggeringly thin 8.6 mm. This thinness allows you as the user to store and place the Galaxy Tab 10.1 anywhere with ease, and it also makes for an incredibly bag friendly device for the daily commute.

Display wise the Galaxy Tab 10.1 ships with a (you guessed it) 10.1″ display of the WXGA variety, throwing out a resolution of 1280 x 800 which is higher than that of the iPad 2′s, which ships with a 1024 x 762 resolution display (The 10.1′s is better). Software wise the Galaxy Tab 10.1 ships with Android 3.0 Honeycomb, which in the world of Android can be classed as the latest version and it itself is fully optimized and was in fact designed to be used on tablet’s. Moving on to power and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 comes with a 1GHz dual-core processor capable of handling anything with ease.

Whilst the software on the Galaxy Tab (Honeycomb with TouchWiz UX) is the latest of the Android pack, the only downfall to this device as a lot of technology websites have pointed out is the apps. There honestly aren’t that many good usable high-quality Honeycomb apps available right now on the Android marketplace, meaning that you’ll be stuck with the web (which is no bad thing) for some tasks.

iPad 2

The iPad 2 is Apple’s latest update to their tablet line up. Replacing the original iPad (which was a market leader, and powned all other tablet’s in 2010) the iPad 2 has two fundamental upgrades over its predecessor; graphics and power. For the people who don’t already know the answer to this question could you have a guess as to how much more powerful in graphics terms the iPad 2 is compared to the original iPad? 3x? 4x? 5x? Nope, it is 9x more powerful. What this means is that you can multi-task, use all your enhanced iOS 5 features and play system heavy games without any lag at all, although to be fair you can do all of that on the Galazy Tab 10.1 too.

Design wise the iPad 2 measures in at 8.8 mm (0.2mm fatter than the Galaxy Tab) and features a 10″ 1024 x 762 resolution display, which as noted above isn’t as high quality as Samsung’s offering. The iPad 2 ships with Apple’s very own A5 dual-core 1GHz processor making it just as powerful as the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Overall in terms of design it is easy to award the Galaxy Tab 10.1 victory over the iPad 2 due to being thinner and also having a batter screen, but…

Whereas the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is let down due to apps, the iPad 2 is not. In fact, the iPad 2′s app range destroys that of Honeycomb’s (Honeycomb’s is getting better) with thanks to a huge number of developers supporting Apple’s iOS platform.

Downsides

It pains me to say this but overall and even though the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a superior product in terms of hardware, the iPad 2 is a better buy for most consumers simply because Samsung has priced its tablet higher than the iPad 2 and even the ASUS EEEPad Transformer (see news coverage here). For a lot of people though I would say that a better screen and thinner design could be a key reason to paying a higher premium for Samsung’s offering over Apple’s, but people who do this will have to live with the fact that the number of apps available to them (and this will be for a while) is going to be limited when compared to Apple’s.

Overall I recommend both devices to those wanting a hot product, but I’d imagine 80% of you are going to go with the iPad 2. Whatever choice you do make, you’ll still get the nod of appreciation from myself when you whip it out on the train.