I have been looking at tablets for quite a while and was trying to decided between the Motorola Xoom and the iPad. It was quite a difficult choice between the two but I decided on the iPad for one simple reason, the quality of the device ( hardware and software ) is just so much better than the Xoom or any other android tablets. If I had gotten the android one I would have spent a lot of time hacking around with android to get it to work well, like I did with my phone when I had a HTC Hero. The iPad just works much like my Windows Phone 7 HTC HD7.
That said it’s not perfect, it doesn’t fit in with my microsoft dominated computer setup that I use, and it is just a stop gap solution to when Microsoft bring out there tablets next year.
It is a very good device, and very able to do a lot of. The things I wanted a tablet to do but there are a number of key features missing that I believe Microsoft will be including in there tablets from the way the development of Windows 8 is going. The first issue is the lack of user account or begin able to put the device into a “guest mode” so that i can lend my device to someone else without worrying that they can access all my email, social networking and work details. I believe Microsoft will have this feature in there tablet version of Windows 8. This feature would mean that a family or couple could share an iPad without having their different account settings clashing with each other. The second issue that I have noticed is that the keyboard always just has the capital letters on the keys, rather than switching between lowercase and uppercase letters when suitable during the writing process, or when the shift key is pressed, as a better indication of the change, because as i am writing this article on my iPad using both hands I cannot see the shift keys, and therefore can see if it is capitalised or not.
I will follow up this article once I have spent more time on the device, but so far it seems to be really good even if it isn’t perfect for my needs, it will be a far more pleasurable year to spend using it rather than the android equivalent.