But the new iPad? It has all of those things and more. I can only think of two reasons why someone might buy an Android tablet over the third gen iPad: if having a widescreen display is absolutely, positively, unequivocally your top priority and nothing else is close, and if you have some kind of problem with Apple stylistically, philosophically, or what have you.
The gap in the software ecosystems is gigantic. I've heard good things about Ice Cream Sandwich, but it is nigh impossible to find in the wild. With as scattershot as Android updates are, there's no way of knowing when devices will get the upgrade to it as well. Honeycomb just isn't that good, and the third party software support for Android tablets is worse. Go into the Android Market (Google Play Store?) and hit the category of staff picks for tablets. It's impossible to determine which apps are actually tablet apps and which are just phone apps that happen to scale nicely. Dont worry about it though; any given app is more than likely to be a phone app.
The new iPhoto only increases the gap between the platforms. It's a tough case to be made that a single app is a big point of differentiation, but bear with me on this one. You can get a browser, email, and Angry Birds on anything these days. The iWork apps are nice to have, but I don't think an office suite is a make or break thing on tablets just yet. iMovie and Garage Band are impressive, but I don't know how many people do heavy video editing, and even fewer do much with audio recordings.
But photos? Everyone does photos. The new iPhoto is incredible, and people's iPhone pictures will be coming into it automatically via Photo Steam. If, as rumored, Microsoft Office ends up on iOS, then you might as well turn out the lights in the Android tablet development department.
Look, I think it's very generous for Verizon to have loaned me this Droid Xyboard 8.2 as a part of its ambassadors program. That it came with unlimited 4G and tethering only makes it more so. I like the hardware (except the button placement) and the network is incredibly fast. I want to like this thing. I even wrote this post using Google's Blogger app on it with only a little cleanup done later on my laptop.
The problem is that Android and its ecosystem let the hardware and network down. The process of writing this illustrated the problem perfectly. Blogger is one of Google's A+ properties, but the app for it is a phone app that only has extremely basic post composition and editing features. You can't use it to look at stats, manage comments, or adjust the blog layout. If the developer for Android itself is going to have a shabby app for one of its top services, then what does that say about the platform as a whole?
I cannot in good conscience recommend this device to anyone now. I was on the fence about it before this iPad announcement, but when this tablet is only $30 less than the new iPad off contract, forget it. I can recommend Verizon's 4G network for the new iPad if you go with a model with cellular connectivity, though. That is one part of the Droid Xyboard experience that has been anything but a disappointment.
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