New iPad, Asus Transformer Prime, or Samsung Galaxy Note: Which Tablet To Buy?

I'm in the market for a tablet. Yeah, I know: I'm the tablet guy. But this one's for my wife and daughter, and I'm torn between the gorgeous new iPad, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, and the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1.

I recommend iPads to most of my readers. But there's a gap between generic recommendations and specific needs that these other tablets may be able to exploit. The question for them is, are there enough people in their niches to make their tablets successful?

My Killer AppsEveryone has their own killer apps. The most common killer apps for tablets are email and Web browsing. Pretty much all tablets do those things nowadays, so speed and stability play critical roles.

New tablet buyers often don't know what their killer apps will be. In that case, the tablet with the broadest array of third-party apps wins, just because it offers the most options. That's where the iPad reigns supreme.

But some of us have specific needs. My wife is a professional artist, and wants to experiment with digital painting. That's a pretty tiny niche.
Our family travels a lot, and we have a huge amount of video in various formats stored on a NAS at home; we'd like our daughter to be able to watch some of those files on the road. That's a somewhat larger niche.

We're Android phone owners, and it would be nice to leverage our existing Android Market purchases and use a familiar interface. That's a much larger group.
And finally, we're looking for a tablet stable enough not to make a six-year-old cry. I think that covers everybody.

The Android DilemmaHere's why I don't recommend 10-inch Android tablets to many people. (Seven-inch tablets are a different market in my mind, with different portability and price considerations.)
A reader rightly criticized me for saying that Android tablets "don't have apps." Of course they have apps. But the apps are often lower quality than iPad apps, and there are far fewer of them.

Apple showed why at the iPad event. Google's approach, which is to say that apps should be screen-size-independent and that it's okay to blow up phone apps to tablet size, is simply wrong. Developers need to take different design approaches on a 4-inch screen and on a 10-inch one. There is no shortcut, no way around this.

The result is that you have a lot of apps on Android tablets—Twitter and Facebook are the most prominent—that function but look ugly and take lousy advantage of the real estate. They aren't grainy like iPhone apps blown up to 2x on an iPad, but they're awkward to use and full of blank space.

We see this problem regularly in the PCMag Labs when we try to do Android tablet app stories. It's easy to create a list of 75 great iPad apps. Building a list of great Android tablet apps is harder. On our last attempt, our software team only found 12.

Which Tab For Me…And For You?My family recently took a two-week international trip, bringing the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime with us. It did a great job as a video playback device. It played all the games we're familiar with from our Android phones. Chrome Beta should be an excellent, speedy browser. However, the tablet is completely useless for painting with a stylus; the screen is too unresponsive.

Most worryingly, though, we kept on running into little bugs with the keyboard dock and my daughter's gameplay kept being interrupted by annoying firmware update messages. The update messages would jump into the middle of whatever she was doing, making my six-year-old sad. The attachable keyboard, meanwhile, would sometimes drop characters when writing emails in the built-in browser and couldn't type some capital letters at all in Chrome Beta.

Then there's the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. This will be the world's best painting tablet, thanks to its pressure-sensitive Wacom stylus support. It'll run familiar Android apps and play my daughter's video files. Sounds great. But Samsung warned that it may be expensive, it uses a slower processor than other recent top-of-the-line Android tablets, and it may not go on sale for months. We want a tablet soon, not months from now.
Finally, the new iPad has an amazingly gorgeous screen. It will work well with styli, although it isn't pressure sensitive like the Galaxy Note 10.1. It won't play my daughter's videos without a slow, painful re-encoding process through iTunes on a PC, which is a real bummer.

The iPad has far more and far better apps than the other tablets. We'd have to re-buy many of our Android favorites such as Cut the Rope, Where's My Water, World of Goo, and Quell, but that's only a few dollars. And we'd be opening up a world of thousands of tablet apps that aren't available for Android, which we've never played with before.

How Android Could Close the GapLook at the niches my family fits into, and there are some opportunities for Android-powered tablets in the world at large. Few people are painters. Relatively few have a terabyte WD NAS full of children's videos. But most people with smartphones have Android-powered phones and download Android apps. They're familiar with the world of Android.
Google and manufacturers have done a hideously poor job of leveraging that huge user base into tablets. Part of the problem is the disproportionate usage of free apps on Android; if you don't have money invested in a platform, it's easy to cast off.

But most of the issue is that nobody has convinced Android app developers to create tablet experiences. We can argue all day about whose fault that is. But I don't want, and I think few people want, a 4-inch-screen experience blown up to 10 inches the way we see with the Twitter app.

For me, that leaves a gulf between my specific killer apps and the general app situation. Samsung, for instance, can deliver a tablet that's perfect for one thing—drawing—but as long as the Android tablet ecosystem as a whole remains weak, it's hard to promote even the best Android tablet hardware.