So, to say that iOS was not developed for tablets would be incorrect.

In the end, we don’t get impressed just with tech specs. It’s the execution, user experience and the ecosystem which makes a product successful.

If you isolate just the tech specs and talk about more RAM and more megapixels then maybe you have a point.

But, if you view Stephen’s opinion while keeping in mind what the iPad already does for you then it just makes sense.

Stephen is an iOS developer too so he knows what he is talking about when he is writing about the future of mobile gaming on tablets.

When a user buys an iPad, they are getting tech which has been tried and tested by millions of customers, have access to more than 65,000 apps and a developer community which is more than happy to support iOS than any other platform.

We strongly believe in presenting balanced opinion and if Xoom in future can do what the iPad has already done then we would be sure to highlight it. I agree Xoom is certainly a good competition for Apple’s iPad but it still needs to mature further. ^Ravin

And for software, if iOS came out in April 2010, how can it be “2 years ahead” of Android? Even if you go back to the earliest versions of either OS (which would be silly since back then they were aiming both OS’s at phones, not tablets) there still isn’t a 2 year gap between OS’s. And I should also point out that iOS isn’t specifically built for a tablet, it’s a cross product OS, whereas Honeycomb 3.0 is built specifically for tablets, which by definition means Honeycomb would be better attuned to a tablet than iOS.

This opinion piece is about the leap for mobile gaming that the iPad 2 offers.
For mobile gaming to work devices need to cover a lot of bases. Not least great visuals and sound, and a battery life which can do more than a 10 minute bus ride. To date there is no tablet out there that offers that same balance.

So my overriding opinion, and it is only my opinion, is that the iPad 2 is streets ahead of the competition when looked at as an entire package; HW, SW and OS.

There is no reason for us to censor your comments for making valid arguments.

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There is no reason for us to censor your comments for making valid arguments.

Please note: Comments with external links might take a while to appear as they go through manual approval process.

And it’s interesting to me that the same website had a few negative things to say when the iPad came out, largely due to only being able to run one program at a time, and not being able to play online video. In other words, features that were brought on line after it had been released.

And I can cherry pick good / bad comments too:

“Android is a much more open, customizable system than iOS”

“Honeycomb and the Xoom are spectacular”

“In conjunction with Android 3.0, the XOOM rivaled the iPad on any given day”

“The Honeycomb OS is highly intuitive”

“Overall, Android Honeycomb was the sexiest, most highly functioning Android OS to date”

“The iPad 2 is largely an incremental improvement over the original”

“…no plans to purchase an iPad because I don’t want to buy a product that is intentionally closed so that I can only buy manufacturer-approved applications”

About iPad2: “seems like a nice iteration, but nothing amazing”

The point is, you wrote this article with a forgone conclusion in mind. All I’m asking for is a bit of balanced reporting, please.

“The software is not particularly stable or robust”

“Users have to rely on the MTP protocol to manage media on the device”

“The built-in e-mail client has extremely poor protocol support”

“Very few websites handle the Honeycomb browser’s User-Agent string correctly”

“The browser’s support for advanced CSS3 features lags behind Safari’s”

“Key features like Flash and the microSD slot don’t work at launch”

I’d say I am being fairly generous with my initial comments.

My POV is two fold.

1. The hardware is not as refined as the iPad’s. By that I mean focussed on being a light-weight power-efficient device with its designated OS. i.e. The hardware and software are designed in concert. So it may be a fire breathing monster. But it is a crippled one.

2. It is generally accepted (and simply commons sense) that both Android (for tablets) and Windows Phone 7 are *at least* 2 years behind iOS – simply because they were later to the market.

It’s all very well having all the bells and whistles. But the whole package needs to work. Which is why very often “less is more” with Apple, and “more is more” doesn’t necessarily hold true for rushed high spec hardware which is not developed as a cohesive marriage between OS and HW.

On the A5, even with the limited knowledge we have of the exact spec., the difference is we have a minimum of 2 times the overall processing power on both the CPU and GPU sides of the SoC. That turns things that have been developed as more or less proof of concepts on current hardware into reality on this next iteration.