Tablet Computers: It’s All About the Apps

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Someone whom you know likely has purchased, or wants to buy, a tablet computer, even if he/she can’t say precisely why.

Today’s tablet is almost literally a tabula rasa, or blank slate. Unlike a smartphone, a personal media player (PMP), a notebook computer or nearly any other gadget or electronics component that you can buy, today’s tablet has no single specific purpose. In many ways, one size does fit all.

And, of course, today’s tablet isn’t to be confused with older “convertible” tablets. Today’s tablets are multifunctional devices that have a single-slab construction, a 7-inch-to-10-inch touchscreen and a mobile-specific operating system. Convertible tablets are full-service notebook computers on which the screen, which can be operated with a finger or a stylus, can flip and fold flat, single-slab style.

Given that broad potential—the lack of expectation for you to use a tablet in a certain way—it’s little surprise that tablet sales are booming.

Also of little surprise is the fact that when you say “tablet” chances are that you’re talking about Apple’s iPad or iPad 2. Less than 2 years after Apple introduced its tablet in April 2010 and 25 million iPads and iPad 2s later, at least 12 competitors have jumped into the market. Some already have jumped out, and none has made headway against the iPad’s success. That means that you face clear choices when it comes to choosing a tablet.

THE BIG APPLE. According to investment bank UBS, Apple will sell 37.9 million iPads globally this year and 53 million tablets next year. UBS says Apple’s biggest competitor, Samsung, will sell just 5 million Galaxy Tabs this year and 7 million tablets in 2012. The bank predicts that no other company will sell even half as many tablets as Samsung.

What do those big-business numbers mean to you? Like in any gold rush, some businesses attempt shortcuts to make a quick strike and, when they fail, they disappear. In the tablet business, it’s become almost immediately clear what the long-term brands are likely to be and, more important, from whom you want to consider purchasing.

Like Windows and Mac in the desktop- and notebook-computer worlds, tablets quickly have settled into two warring, incompatible camps—Apple’s iPad, which runs Apple’s iOS mobile operating system, and devices that use Google’s Android operating system.

Apple iOS, of course, is the same operating system that’s used in the iPhone and the iPod Touch PMP. By the time that you read this, Apple will have made available its iOS 5 mobile operating system. Like iOS, Google’s Android originally was designed to run on smartphones and, like iOS, has been repurposed to run on tablets.

Unlike Apple, however, Google devised a special tablet Android operating system that’s called Honeycomb, which at press time had progressed to version 3.2. Honeycomb speeds up operations and enhances graphics for a tablet’s larger screen, compared with the versions that were designed for smartphones. But which Honeycomb-powered tablets will remain as the market shakes out is a question mark.

There’s no guarantee that current Android-based tablets will adopt Honeycomb. Further, if you want to upgrade your older Android operating system to any newer 2.x version or to the 3.x tablet-specific Honeycomb OS, you should know that that isn’t possible in most cases. If you can’t upgrade, of course, that means that your tablet will be unable to run more-advanced applications. Less sophisticated tablets that are loaded with earlier Android versions will continue to be made; those models don’t have powerful enough processors to run Honeycomb anyway.

BEING ANDROID. Compared with the iPad 2, some Android-based tablets have faster processors, which means that applications and videos open and run faster. They also have expandable memory, which means that you aren’t limited to the storage capacity that’s built in. And most include Adobe Flash compatibility, which is the format that’s used widely to play back Web-based videos.

But that latter point won’t be as weighty a deciding factor in the days ahead: Apple uses a Web-based video playback format that’s called HTML5. It’s a more generic format and requires no special compatibility, which means that any device’s operating system can play back HTML5 video. HTML5 is becoming widely embraced: Adobe, which created Flash, even has released its own HTML5 solutions for Web developers. Market-research firm ABI forecasts that by 2016, 2.1 billion devices, including tablets, will include HTML5-based browsers, compared with just 109 million devices in 2010.

For the foreseeable future, both formats will be used and you won’t notice a difference between how HTML5 and Flash operate. For now, Flash websites predominate, and it will take time because of technical and financial reasons for those websites to switch.

APPS APLENTY. Beyond the iOS and Android technology differences, it’s all about the apps. To us, choosing between iOS and Android operating systems is a matter of the apps.

There are two types of apps—those that are designed for smartphones that also run on tablets, and those that are specifically for tablets. Apps that are designed for smartphones have to be blown up on a tablet to cover the larger screen size. That means that some apps are fuzzy, like a photo that’s blown up too large. (We found that the differences are more noticeable on an iPad than on an Android-based tablet.) Also, such apps sometimes don’t operate as they were designed to operate on a tablet’s larger screen, regardless of which type of tablet/operating system that you use.

In the Apple world, more than 500,000 iOS apps exist, of which about 100,000 are “optimized” for the iPad, which means that they are designed expressly for iPad’s larger screen. About 250,000 Android apps exist, but fewer than 200 are optimized for Honeycomb. Consequently, that means that you have fewer ways to maximize the potential of your Android-based tablet.

Apps for Android-based tablets will continue to increase, but it seems unlikely that Android ever will approach iOS’s app diversity. That’s because developers have found that developing iOS apps is easier and more lucrative as more people buy iPads, and thus, iPad apps.

BEWARE BARGAINS. Which operating system that a tablet uses has little to do with how much that you’ll pay; a tablet’s price is based primarily on its hardware attributes.

State-of-the-art tablets from major manufacturers range in price from about $450 to $850. For these, the difference between otherwise identical models from one manufacturer to the next typically centers on how much memory is built into each model and whether it includes 3G or 4G cellular capability.

Apple has its own operating system and makes its own tablets. It thus maintains control over its ecosystem, that is, how a tablet interacts with devices and apps and how you get the content onto your tablet. But Google makes Android available to anyone, which means that any company can make its own tablet—and many do. As a result, there are many Android-based tablets at half of the price of top-of-the-line models.

However, as in all things, you get what you pay for.

The first thing that bare-bones tablets skimp on is memory. Even the least expensive versions from major manufacturers typically include at least 16GB of memory, which is plenty of room for, say, a few thousands songs, a few thousand photos, a few hundred apps and a dozen movies. A less sophisticated tablet, however, is likely to pack in only 2GB or 4GB. Bringing such a device up to 16GB or 32GB means buying an SD memory card—assuming that the tablet includes an SD memory-card slot—which will cost you an extra $25–$75.

These bare-bones tablets also use slower processors—below 1 gigahertz (GHz)—which means that everything takes longer to load than it would take on models from major manufacturers and sometimes twice as long. And LCD screens for bargain models typically have lower quality and lower resolution than those that are on mainstream models, which means that on-screen objects will look fuzzy, text could be difficult to read, and the touchscreen won’t be as smoothly or instantly responsive.

Because tablets are a new business and a handful of brands have the biggest slice of the market, it’s unlikely that many of the lesser players—and considering what happened to Hewlett-Packard, even a few well-known brands—will be in the tablet business for long. So any bare-bones tablet that you buy today could be an orphan in terms of service and support tomorrow.

FUTURE LOOK. One new tablet vendor might shake up the current market: Amazon. The online bookstore behemoth unveiled its tablet in September. The Kindle Fire ($199) is a hybrid model, like the Barnes & Noble Nook Color ($249), rather than a device that’s similar to the iPad or a full-size Android-based tablet. The Kindle Fire combines e-book-reader functions and tablet capabilities, including Web browsing, games, and movie and music playback. Like the Nook Color, it uses the Android operating system and has a 7-inch LCD touchscreen rather than an e-ink screen, which is the low-power electronic display that most e-book readers use. (Editor’s Note: Because the Kindle Fire isn’t scheduled to be released until November, it wasn’t evaluated for Best Buy consideration.)

However, tablet prices are unlikely to drop dramatically in the short term, but you can expect more technology for your money, such as faster, more-powerful processors, marginal improvements to the manufacturers’ stated 7–10 hours of battery life that tablets now supply, slightly higher screen resolution and higher resolution cameras.

Innovative designs are emerging, too. Already on the way is Sony’s Tablet P, which at press time was due this fall. (No price has been announced.) It’s a clamshell/foldable model that has dual screens that allow you to run different apps on each screen or one app across both. Also scheduled for release this fall was the Asus Eee Slider SL101 ($479 for its 16GB version). The top (screen) slides across and up to create a stand, revealing a slide-out keyboard.

And Apple’s iPad 3 is rumored to be available next spring. According to reports, the iPad 3 will have the higher resolution display that the iPhone has and a faster processor. It also might be positioned as a higher priced “professional” tablet model rather than as an update to the iPad 2.

But even models that arrive in the next year still won’t have the same capacity for heavy-duty gaming, serious programming or storage of many large files that a typical notebook computer does. Will they do enough to become the only computer in your life? The answer, of course, depends on your answer to the question of why you want a tablet.

Stewart Wolpin has reported on consumer electronics for 27 years and is a frequent contributor to Consumers Digest.