Sascha joined me in the studio last night for a full-on 3.5hr marathon testing and discussion session with 10 different tablets. The iPad2, Asus Eee Pad Transformer, Acer Iconia Tab A500, HTC Flyer, Blackberry Playbook and Samsung Galaxy Tab were the focus of our efforts and we recorded three parts of the live session for you to view below.
The Blackberry Playbook impressed with its smooth UI, video handling and gestures. The Flyer beat the other 7 inch tablets in a browsing test (and is as fast as any Tegra2 + Honeycomb browser I’ve tested.) The Galaxy Tab was crowned the value-for-money king and in the 10 inch category, we couldn’t really find a winner. The iPad2, of course, just sits in a special space all on its own and isn’t truly challenged by the 10 inch Android devices although as Honeycomb and Honeycomb-optimised apps start for mature, that could change., especiall when we look to lightweight hardware like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Anyway, here are the videos. We hope you enjoy them. All products are owned by Sascha or myself.
Don’t forget the detailed HTC Flyer Live Review tonight, May 18th, at 2100 CEST (Berlin) on Carrypad.com/live. Follow @chippy for more on that.
The first video is an overview of all the tablets Two 10″ Devices were tested in detail in Part 2 Three 7″ devices were tested in detail in Part 3
We’ve been strangely quiet on Carrypad over the last two weeks. First of all there was CeBIT where we focused heavily on netbooks and pro-mobile products over at UMPCPortal and then the iPad2 hit the streets. We had some discussions internally about whether to buy one for our review but it was clear to us that there would be a hundred or more reviews out in the first week so we’ve held back and enjoyed the show.
Availability of the iPad2 turned out to be tighter than expected. Surprise surprise! Online orders were only permitted on launch day and the lead-time for delivery has been stretching out beyond two weeks. Early adopters hate having to wait; Bloggers, journalists, software developers and competitors can’t wait so with supplies of entry level models limited in the stores, it was no surprise that buyers queued and some people, possibly one-in-ten, have spent more than they had planned.
I was invited to join iPad experts Nick Robinson (@ratkat) and Kevin Wright (@kevwright) for a chat about the iPad2 on their Tech Talk UK podcast (formerly the iPad Chat Show) a few days ago and although I was still reeling from the ‘Jobs Attitude,’ I enjoyed it and come out of the podcast thinking I really should get an iPad 2 for further testing (and music, movie making etc. etc.) We discuss it in the light of early Xoom and Honeycomb reviews, talk about apps and the the ‘post-PC’ era.
You can listen and subscribe to the podcast over at the TTUK site.
