Once upon a time, one tablet ruled over the post-PC world, and this tablet was called iPad. Competing Android tablets soon entered the market, but an “iPad Killer” was nowhere to be found. Life was simple.

However, three years after the first iPad has been unveiled, the tablet world is rapidly shifting. Microsoft entered the market with its Surface tablets, and Android powered devices such as Google’s Nexus 10 lure consumers with better hardware specs than the mother of all tablets – the iPad.

There are several detailed reviews out there that compare the iPad 4 with Google’s Nexus 10 Android tablet (see here and here), and all conclude that the Nexus is the closest competitor to the iPad. In many hardware specs, including screen resolution, the Nexus indeed outperforms the iPad! Maybe it makes you wonder: Is the iPad still the best choice for you? Maybe you can save some dollars by going for a less expensive Android tablet? (I willfully ignore the new Windows tablet for now, whose initial sales and reception were quite a disappointment.)

The “Android vs. iPad” decision is a tough call because of its long-term consequences: I don’t know about you, but I rather build and fine-tune my computing workflow only once. And the situation is even trickier when not only your own time and dollars are on the line, but when you are trying to decide what platform should be adopted for a school-wide tablet program.

I don’t pretend to have the answer here. I don’t even have an unbiased opinion, since my own workflow is heavily based on Apple’s ecosystem: I sync between my iPad and my Mac when annotating papers, organizing my tasks and notes, conceptualizing ideas, and I use all kinds of helpful iPad apps in my research and studies.

See, I am a big advocate of integrating tablets with traditional computers, which gives me a somewhat different perspective on the iPad vs. Android debate: Hardware specs are less important than you think – its the ecosystem that is all important! [Read more…]