I got lucky, and I sold off my iPad 3 and got this wonderful Asus TF700T for the same money.
Now I can finally forget about iTunes, Quicktime and all that useless stuff, as well as idiotic limitations and frustrating peculiarities.
For that, I got a desktop with widgets, the all-mighty Firefox with Adblock, desktop Sync and of course, Flash. Whatever Adobe says, Flash won’t die on end sites for a long, long time.
I also got Far Manager, VLC Player, BSP Player, desktop-like keyboard with arrows, numeric fifth row and even all the twelve function keys, which I’m still having trouble to believe. And some minor pleasant things like a workable torrent, an single all-format reader and a theoretical Ubuntu Linux dualboot.
The tablet itself – of the miracle! – has a standard screen ratio and a standard FullHD resolution. Picture quality is as good as on the overhyped Retina. And I also have a SD card slot right on the device, no need to use those bulky semi-working adapters.
To prevent all this sudden normality from overwhelming an unprepared ex-gheipad user, Android tablets manufactures still keep that long dock-connector, incompatible with anything. Dear Santa, please stick it into their…
Nevermind.
I’m used to hearing people whining about sloppy Android being slow even when launching apps.
Well, actually I also got that feeling at first, but that is just a feeling, a perception. I’ll explain.
First, iOS is a castrated operating system – I mean, it has no widgets, no desktops, no real multitasking, no Adobe Flash, etc. – and it would be very strange if it ran slowly with so little to offer already.
But the main point is that fast iOS is an illusion. If you use an instant messenger for iPad or iPhone, you probably noticed that the moment you open the chat it shows some old messages which immediately replaced by new.
If you’re attentive enough, you would notice that previous messages are exactly the messages that were in the chat when you closed the application. The truth is, when closing an app, iOS creates
a screenshot of the app current state. And when you launch it again, iOS first opens this picture of the previous state, and while you stare at the screenshot from the past deciding where to click, the system loads the actual app.
So seemingly fast Apple device is just a deception, a cheap magician trick. If you don’t pile up resource hogs running in background, Android tablet is as fast as an iPad