What tablet?

Compared to the TF700, the Nexus 10 has better battery life (you seem to be taking your battery life numbers from Engadget; I'd ignore them, as Engadget just doesn't have the technical chops of Anandtech, and their tests are probably poorly-designed compared to Anandtech's), is much faster (which matters; the TF700 is the slowest Android device I've ever used, by a mile), is better poised for the future with twice the RAM, has a significantly sharper (albeit dimmer) display, and is a Nexus device so gets the latest OS versions instantly (though Asus modifies Android lightly, and is very good about rolling out new versions relatively quickly).

If you're looking for a tablet that you're going to use outside a lot (where the super-bright display of the TF700 carries the day), or that you want to use as a quasi-netbook (where the keyboard dock is a crucial accessory), then the TF700 is better for your purposes than the N10. But for just about anything else, I'd have a very, very hard time recommending the TF700 over the N10.

Engadget is indeed one of the sites I came across that mentioned the Nexus 10 having mediocre battery life but even the article you link to at Anandtech admits the Nexus 10's battery life is merely 'not bad'. But that wouldn't be a deal breaker, anyway. The Nexus 10 doesn't have any particular strikes against it, apart from not actually shipping anywhere yet, but the keyboard dock for the Infinity gives it an edge for me. There may be something in the future for the N10 along the same line but it seems unlikely if you look at Samsung's other tablets.

On the other hand, maybe a separate Bluetooth keyboard would work well enough.

In any case, curse you for mucking up my thought process. I have now revised my mulling to:

Asus Transformer Pad Infinity 700 Nexus 10*
vs
Apple iPad with retina display (with optional turtleneck)


* I reserve the right to add the 700 back in to the mix at some arbitrary point in the near future

If it helps, I actually have the same TF700/N10 indecision. I have the TF700, but figure I could upgrade to the N10 for more or less free after selling off the TF700 + dock. And so on the one hand, I'm very excited by the higher-res screen (the TF700 screen is very nice, but 300 dpi screens are nicer) and the faster speed, plus 4.2, plus the plastic of the N10 seems like it'd be more comfortable in the hand than the attractive-but-slippery metal of the TF700.

But on the OTHER hand, given that I also have a Nexus 7, it turns out that in practice now, 90% of the time that I pick up the TF700 at all, it's when I want to use it as a laptop (as I'm doing right now), and a Bluetooth keyboard just isn't the same thing at all. So is it really an upgrade if it makes the tablet better for 10% of my uses, but kills the main raison d'etre for it?

So for me, I am pretty sure that I'm going to just stick to the TF700, unless/until Samsung/Google releases a keyboard dock for the N10. But if you don't have a 7" tablet that you use for most of your tableting needs, then the pure tablet aspects of the N10 are probably more important.

Nexus 10 was reviewed pretty well here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/23/review_samsung_google_nexus_10_android_tablet/

I do agree with your ruling out the 7" tablets, if you are happy to spend the extra to get a 10" - 10" is still my primary tablet and the 7" is not going to supplant it.

I've no views on the Nexus 10 or TF700, having not touched either.

If you want to duplicate the "tablet / laptop" crossover feel of the TF700 though, I've one of these folios for the Ipad:

http://www.geckogear.com/p/4235980/gecko-keyboard-folio-for-ipad-2-ipad-3-ipad-4.html

I use it when travelling for work and it does change the iPad into feeling like a little 10" laptop when used.

On the issue of "restrictiveness" of iOS, so far, I can't say I have found the android Nexus 7 significantly liberating, expect in one small aspect - ability to run emulators. (Dos, C64). No idea if that floats your boat. That said, there may be some "power user" features I discover over time that change that impression.

Finally, if you do go for an iPad, get one of the magnetic covers, they are really good.

Conversely, nearly everything I do with my tablet is something that I couldn't do with iOS. Using it as my book reader relies on the ability of multiple apps to access the same files in the filesystem and share data that way (FolderSync to grab my library off Dropbox, and then Moon+ Reader to be able to read it from the locally-synced location); using it to grab video files and then stream them via DLNA to my 360 requires that integration plus the ability to run a server process in the background; and even regular web browsing, where I often want to post about links on G+ depends on the "intent" thing for sharing.

I realize that most people aren't doing what I'm doing, but for me, iOS would just be way less useful.

For book reading, I just use Amazon's kindle reader. It remembers the most advanced reading location across devices.

Using the iPad as a server to stream media is not something I have ever contemplated and no doubt would be somewhere between extremely hard and impossible. (probably impossible)

So yeah, the position on iOS vs Android on restrictions is inherently a personal situation and there are some good arguments for android.

In terms of being liberating, I love how I can just plug my phone into my computer and drag and drop my files anywhere I want. That's a big one for me. Not being forced to use itunes is a HUGE plus.
Last time on my tablet I was able to install some kind of proxy app from Google play which allowed me to access different sites as if I was from that country. Didn't need to root or anything. That was pretty cool.

I haven't plugged my latest iPad into my computer, ever. Everything relevant is in the cloud, for me. For those few files that aren't actually in iCloud proper, there's the Dropbox app. Which lets you do exactly what you're talking about vis-a-vis dragging files onto your phone, but eliminates the "plug your phone in" step (or even the "have your phone in the same building with you at the time you move the files around")

Are there any good arguments for iOS in this regard? As far as I can tell on the topic of restrictions the only possible opinions are "I like Android because it lets me do the things I can't do in iOS" and "I don't care about being able to do the things I can't do in iOS."

Nope. Android wins that one hands down.

Of course iOS' more restrictive stance isn't without it's benefits in other regards (like 0 malware apps vs. a lot). So if freedom to do weird stuff like mkozlows is something you care about, then iOS is not for you (and yes, there's also some not so weird things like customization, widgets and whatnot that you get on Android but not on iOS). But at least there's a reason why Apple chose another way and something gained from that. So you have to weigh that.

Yes, and it's not malware (malware concerns on Android are overblown, and there's much, much less of it than antivirus vendors would have you believe). It's simplicity. So, for instance, a thing I just did earlier today: Connected up to a network share, grabbed some SNES ROMs and placed them into a particular directory, realized they didn't have the right extension to be read by the emulator, launched a Unix shell with the Terminal IDE app, renamed them, and then opened up the emulator, which can now see the ROMs. (Which my girlfriend is currently playing via HDMI out on the TV, using a PS3 controller.)

It's highly cool that I can do all that, but... my mom couldn't. Android's MO is to make easy things easy and hard things possible; iOS's mission is to make easy things easy, full stop. This has the advantage of making iOS easier in a sense for technophobes -- not because anything is easier to do on iOS, because that's not true; all the things iOS can do are just as easy to do on Android. But because there's never any situation at all in which you need to think about the complicated things.

And it seems silly to say that "no, you can't do that" is ever better than "you can do that by [insert tech talk here]," but there's something reassuring in knowing that you can get everything out of a device even if you're not technically savvy.

I don't see why, because all of the things you can do in iOS are just as available to users who are not technically savvy on Android (as you yourself say). So you've got one device that can do (say) a hundred things very simply and another device that can do the same hundred things just as simply plus another fifty things that are more complicated... so what's the advantage of the first device? The worst realistic scenario for a user of the second device who isn't up to figuring out how to do the complicated stuff is that they only do the simple stuff, and they still have access to the full feature set of the first device. That argument would make sense if things that are simple to do on iOS were hard to do on Android, but they really aren't.

Also, it isn't all launching Unix shells and pulling files from network shares; you could have just as easily transferred those roms via USB cable and renamed them via a file manager app. Neither of those is really taxing for even a computer user with pretty rudimentary (but not nonexistent) knowledge, so it isn't quite right to talk about that flexibility in terms of extreme edge cases. Plus, there are things that are made simpler by that flexibility; being able to transfer files to and from your phone the same as any other removable storage device is far simpler and far less error-prone than having to do it through a bloated and buggy application, for example.

iOS devices are for playing games from the app store and listening to podcasts and music from iTunes. They do that supremely well because they are essentially proprietary entertainment devices, like game consoles. If you want to do anything that resembles the operation of a real computer you should choose something else.

I think what mkozlows is saying is that there's a safety net element to iOS; if you're a luddite you can use iOS without worrying about fucking things up because iOS prevents you from doing anything too mental. You don't necessarily have that safety net with Android because it gives you a lot more latitude to do potentially harmful stuff. Possibly - I have to admit that I haven't spent much time using 4.x versions of Android.

I am not a great advocate for iOS, obviously, but so the advantage of the situation where everything is easy or impossible is that if someone says "I really like playing SNES games on my iPad," you can be sure that it's easy to do. If someone says the same thing about their Android, it might end up being a situation where you have to root your device, figure out intricacies of the filesystem, or install non-Play apps (it isn't, it is, and it isn't, respectively -- but you don't necessarily know that upfront, because all those are things that a tech-savvy Android user might do).

Also iOS still does quite a few things better and the things it does best are usually not just 'as easy' but easier.

The reason iOS devices sell so much and review so well isn't just marketing. You might disagree with the above, but you'd be in the minority - so just because one device theoretically does more, there's enough of a difference between how they do things, that there's plenty of reason to pick either, depending on what matters to you. Turning it into some weird binary choice like Extarbags or painting it as simple as Cnahr does, is just silly.

Just to be clear, I wasn't intending to sum up the entire iOS vs. Android thing with my above posts, just addressing the flexibility point only.

mkozlows - Gonna have to just agree to disagree, I think. I still don't see that as much of an advantage in practical terms but it's honestly a small enough point that I'm disinclined to argue it to death (or worse, continue to make you defend iOS over it).

Well the only reason I plug in my tablet is generally for transferring movies and TV shows. I wouldn't want to do that with dropbox nor stream my media over the cloud.

As a user of both platforms (owned iPad & iOS phones and now have been heavily using Nexus 7 for almost a month (to the point of a complete battery drain each day), and prior to that, the original Kindle Fire), I compare the platforms thusly:

Android on Nexus 7 is sweet and has come along to a mostly polished product, though I am writing of the "pure" Android Google experience, not the cannibalized variant that sits atop Kindle Fire and most all the cellphone makers that goober up the presentation (and internal works). At a recent conference I attended, a room chortled when I remarked how surprised I discovered my liking, given my near total habitation in the iOS space the past years.

What's better about Android:

* The Google product sphere is a much better experience -- gmail, plain Google search, Google+, Google Reader, etc.… all look and work better on the Nexus 7 (which shouldn't be a surprise). Though the calendar is still a mess compared to the iOS one.
* I dig the Chrome browser over the iOS Safari -- it seems snappier to me, and while the browsing experience is not as polished (font rendering), it is made up in how it performs.
* Ability to side-load or simply put your own apps on it (which you can do in iOS too -- it just requires you either (a) jailbreak or (b) become a licensed iOS developer for $99 a year)

What's better about iOS:

* Most games are absent from the Android platform, at least the high-caliber kind.
* Most of the apps are complete rubbish, and worse, from a tablet perspective, most are tailored for a smaller phone perspective -- and many "official" brand-name apps (Tumblr, Amazon) will not even run on the Nexus 7.
* The eReaders on the platform blow odious chunks compared to the offerings on iOS. Spent days experimenting (in the Android thread have chronicled some of these travails) with dozens of epub readers before discovering a couple that are adequate. I reckon epub formatting is hard as most of them are plagued by inordinately slow page turns, hideous UX and/or inability to properly format tables or blockquote/cited text/code blocks… The Kindle app is in a worse state than the iOS Kindle app was at launch time over 2 years ago, missing most of that platform's app features…
* Battery life - iPad could go days without charging… …at the same rate of usage Nexus 7 must be charged up every day…

Good thing Android lets you choose from any number of different interfaces, then.

Sure, if you believe in bullshit extremes and completely ignore the huge range of actual use cases in between buying stuff from Apple and "operation of a real computer," whatever the hell that means.

There's no question that Apple's made a path of least resistance between iTunes, the app store, the Apple TV, and iOS devices. And I get all my music through iTunes Match and signed up for it without a second thought, since it's hassle free, so their lock-in plan definitely worked there.

But if "playing games and listening to podcasts" is all you can do with the devices, then I must've been using mine wrong all these years. Just this past week, traveling with my iPad, I:
-- finished a book I'd bought from Amazon using the Kindle app
-- wrote a blog post on a plane flight using iWriter
-- read changes to a Word doc for work using Pages
-- read a bunch of web articles using Flipboard and Pocket
-- watched an episode of Castle using Hulu Plus
-- made a post about that episode on this forum, using Chrome
-- watched a couple episodes of a different series that I won't name (okay I admit it, it was "She-Ra" because I was curious if it was as bad as I remembered) using Netflix
-- drew a quick sketch with Sketchbook Pro
-- started an extremely simple prototype for a game using Codea
-- used GarageBand to do a quick musical sample for a game, to send to a real musician to tell me if it's feasible
-- transferred a PDF and a couple of Rifftrax shorts from my laptop to the iPad with GoodReader
-- downloaded a Rifftrax video on demand from within GoodReader, watched most of it on the plane, then streamed it to the Apple TV using AirPlay to watch the rest once I got home.

There's enough creation vs. consumption to dispel the "entertainment device" bit, and enough non-Apple-ecosystem stuff to dispel the "proprietary" bit. Unless "resembles the operation of a real computer" means "playing emulators" then I don't know what you're talking about.

The small kernel of truth in that statement is the "mishmash" part. The reality is that Duarte is evolving Android away from a solid-but-uninspired UI in the 2.x era to a more fluent and natural UI in this 4.x era.

The 2.x era UI is neither particularly bad nor particularly good. It's just... there. It's the mobile equivalent of Windows XP, something so familiar and commonplace and routine that you don't really even notice it after a bit, but never making you gasp in amazement at some particularly brilliant touch.

The 4.x era is much better, with lots of really nice touches, and fundamentally great UI models. And it's getting better all the time, with 4.1 more polished than 4.0 and 4.2 significantly improved over that, and apps that follow the 4.x model look and function excellently.

But so as to the mish-mash, the thing is that there are still a lot of 2.x apps out there, the ones that want a menu button, that use the back button for internal hierarchical navigation instead of using the action bar, etc. And modern Android is pretty graceful about how it handles those (particularly on the onscreen-button devices that Google obviously views as the correct approach for Android, but which no other phone maker implements), but it is a bit of a mish-mash to have two styles of app in there.

Still and all: All the native Android apps (and all of Google's apps, which are not quite the same thing) are updated to the 4.x UI standards, and if you don't think iOS third-party apps have some inconsistencies in their UI, you're not paying attention there. (In fact, I'd argue that iOS's native apps have more inconsistency than Android's, c.f. all the chatter around skeuomorphism in the Applesphere.) And if you look at Android 4.2 and its first party apps on a Nexus device and see something "dreadful," then I really haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about in any way, because I think Android 4.2 properly implemented is elegant and powerful and beautiful, and that Matias Duarte is finally delivering on the promises he made in WebOS.

(Though I should add that there are some apps that have totally horrendous UIs that don't conform to system standards -- but you're talking about the kind of indie, GPLish, geek-centric apps that you use because they do something awesomely useful despite their UIs. And their UIs aren't awful because they're on Android -- they're awful because the guy making the app is a terrible UI designer, it's just that the apps exist on Android at all and not iOS because Android is where the people making that sort of app go.)

Presumably you don't use GMail. I wonder what percentage of Android users use a non-GMail client?

I think that's on Asus, not Android in general. I've said this before in this thread, but the Nexus 7 is much faster in practice than my TF700, despite the TF700 having theoretically higher-end specs. I've read that Asus put in super-slow storage and that anything that hits I/O is bad on those tablets; I've read that they have some services running that kill performance; but it all seems folklorish and unreliable, in terms of explanatory power. But the upshot is that you're using a close relative to the only Android device I've ever used that actually has noticeable performance problems.

I think the other thing to remember, is that up until Samsung say 12 (or even 18) months ago on phones and about 6 -12 months ago on tablets, the apple /iOS hardware was better. That gave them a very healthy head start.

Now of course the Samsung galaxies (phone) and nexus 7 / nexus 10 / Samsung tabs are just as good (if not better in some areas) than their direct apple competitors.

I think you're mostly wrong about the phones, from a pure hardware perspective. Apple had their brief moment of jumping ahead with the iPhone 4's Retina display, but up until then (and after then, with the caveat that competitor's displays weren't as good for a while), the hardware was pretty similar.

On the tablet side, the hardware was irrelevant up until very recently, because Honeycomb was a junk hack, and it wasn't until the ICS devices started appearing (really not even a year ago now, with the Transformer Prime, although now that I think about it, I think that launched with Honeycomb with an ICS update promised?) that there was a single one worth buying no matter what hardware it was running. (Although it didn't help that Tegra 2 was way too slow, either.)

And wow, I actually had to look up that timeline to remind myself that it was real. It's kind of amazing that in the course of a single year, Android has gone from total non-factor in the tablet market to having an OS as polished as 4.2 and hardware as nice as the Nexus 7 & 10.

Reading these apologies for the android UI is like that conversation everyone always has with Christians when you're like "Well, what about how the inquisition killed and tortured people?" And they're all "Oh, see, that wasn't REALLY Christianity". (Or pick some less dramatic example where "killed and tortured" is replaced with "even minimally bad thing". "Some guy called me a filthy Jew and said I was going to hell!" "Oh, well he wasn't a real Christian then")

"Android UI was never bad, except on the vendor devices (which is only about 98% of them) but if it was, it's much better now since Lollipop 5.3 came out next month."

But this is not something I want; I really do not want to choose an interface. I am very happy with the freedom from choice that Apple offer on my iPhone and iPad in this regard. I realize there are things I cannot do on iOS, and if those things were important to me I would get something else. Maybe I will in the future, but somehow I doubt it. For me, more choice is not always better.

*Shrug*. I haven't ever thought Android UI was especially bad (although I didn't use 1.x so I can't speak to that), and I'm just saying that if you do think the UI is bad, you're in luck because you can quickly and easily replace it with something else, including the iOS interface if you like it so much better. It's not a defense of the UI, it's a simple statement of fact; if you don't like the Android UI there are other options. Whereas if you have an iOS device and don't like the UI, you're SOL.

It's not an apology on my part, it's trying to maybe explain how someone could hold such a weird opinion as thinking that Android has a bad UI, and putting context around it.

And as to your "no true Scotsman" point, well, if there weren't a clean Android device out there -- if you couldn't buy a Nexus of any sort -- it'd be a fair cop. But you can (and if you're talking about tablets, as we are in this thread, you probably should), so if you want to talk about what Samsung or HTC are doing to the Android UI, you should talk about your opinion of TouchWiz or Sense, not about Android itself.

No you can't! You can replace elements of the UI -- you can change the home page and keyboard easily, you can retheme standard controls and replace the lock screen with somewhat more difficulty, you can always swap out calendar/contacts/etc. apps for others -- but the fundamental UI of the device is what it is, and the UI paradigm that apps are supposed to be built with, the platform guidelines, is also going to remain.

You can swap out all the stuff you want, but the instant you launch (say) Google Reader, you're using Android app conventions. Trying to make the system look like a half-assed, wildly inconsistent iOS is not going to please anyone who wants iOS, and will just make it seem janky and junky and weird.

There are good reasons (sound functional reasons) to replace keyboards and launchers and what-not, but not liking the Android UI isn't one of them.

I think it only makes sense to judge a product by its latest generation. I mean, I bought an Android phone a few months ago because it supported LTE, but there's no point in complaining about iOS any more in that regard.

Sorry, by "the Android UI" I thought they were talking about the basic launcher/lock screen/keyboard/etc stuff not the UI in every app. Those vary wildly anyway, though, which is why I wouldn't really lump them in with "the Android UI," and in any case I don't see how you can say the UI is good or bad as a whole if you're counting all of the very different interfaces available across all Android apps.

Im voting for the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1....thing is awesome. UI is a hell of a lot better than where Wiz was just a few years back and the stylus makes it feel like a true tablet experience. Ive' added this Note 10.1 Aluminum Keyboard to my flying spaghetti monster wish list and hope to make it like a small laptop...if all goes well, i may just sell my laptop!

I just got a Nexus 10 in the mail, because I am that committed to making a good recommendation to you, plus also maybe a gadgethound.

The Nexus 10 is marvelous, absolutely wonderful. It is fast (it feels faster than my N7 and my S4-based phone, and is a zillion times faster than the pokey Infinity). It has the best screen I've seen on any non-phone device (and doesn't give up much to even a great 720p phone). The physical construction is really nice, with a grippy plastic that feels wonderful in the hand, way better than the metal back of the TFI. And its rounded corners look weird in pictures, but look classy in person and feel good in the hand. The front-facing speakers are much nicer than the rear-facing ones in the TFI. And it's running stock 4.2 and will get fast Nexusy updates.

The keyboard dock of the TFI is great, and I really really really want one for the N10. But even without, there's just no contest. The Nexus 10 is vastly, enormously, unquestionably better than the TFI, and is certainly the best big Android tablet.

How the heck did you get one? The Google Play store perpetually shows SOLD OUT. And I still haven't seen one in a store anywhere. I actually thought it was still unreleased.