Now that the iPad 2 is out, is it really the best tablet on the market?

The Motorola Xoom may not be as thin as the iPad 2, but it has the fastest processor in the tablet market
The Motorola Xoom may not be as thin as the iPad 2, but it has the fastest processor in the tablet market

If you are thinking about going out and buying the iPad 2 today, then read this before you run out an spend your hard earned money.

The Android tablet has taken almost a year to catch up with Apple’s iPad release with many of the previous releases on Android showing considerable immaturity without the new Honeycomb 3.0 Android tablet interface and many lacking basic features. Now the more mature products are hitting the market just as the iPad 2 is released.

HTC Flyer

HTC recently made their first tablet release with the HTC Flyer, a smart, aluminium cased 7 inch screen, running at 1024 by 600 pixels. At only 420g it’s extremely light and brings HTC’s well regarded user interface Sense to a tablet for the first time. The Flyer is unusual compared to its competition because it runs on a single core 1.5 GHz chip when most of the other top tablets use dual core chips running at 900 MHz (iPad 2) or 1 GHz (Motorola Xoom). In non geek terms, this means that it will carry out single tasks more quickly and powerfully than other tablets.

The Flyer would be slower at multitasking such as browsing the web while listening to music which, even though neither task will max out the processor may still cause lags and stutters. This is matched with a full GB of RAM, impressive and market leading, on a par with the top smartphones and tablets and twice the processing memory of the iPad 2.

Storage can be increased to 32 GB with a microSD slot, putting the storage equal to the mid-range iPad 2 and it can be upgraded further to match the top model. The HTC Flyer costs £600, though and if you were to go out and buy the 32 GB microSD that would cost another £80, so this is rather expensive when the top iPad 2 model has 64 GB of storage and is available for £550.

The cameras are a 5 megapixel rear-facing, for taking photos and recording videos and a forward facing 1.3 megapixel camera for making video calls and internet phone calls, such as with Skype.

Motorola Xoom

The Motorola Xoom is now the most powerful Android tablet in the market, it is also based on the Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system and has a 10.1 inch screen at the highest tablet resolution seen so far of 1280 by 800.

It does weigh a lot more than the HTC Flyer, at 730g – almost twice the weight of the Flyer and slightly heavier than the 600g iPad 2. It also has the thickest body, making it a far more bulky shape than the even slimmer iPad 2, but it’s similar to the HTC Flyer. The Motorola Xoom has the most powerful processor of the three tablets.

Cameras are present front and back at 5 and 2 megapixels and the front facing camera is surprisingly high quality, giving good images.

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