This android tablet is a worthy
challenger to the iPad, boasting a fantastic screen and an even better price
We've been saying it for ages now. It's no
good rival tablet manufacturers pricing their 10in products at the same price
as the iPad if the quality isn't at least as good. The all-round quality of
Apple's hardware allied with the sheer weight of tablet-specific apps means any
similarly priced Android tablet has its work cut out. At last, though, it looks
as if we have a contender at this size: Google's Nexus 10.
Hot on the heels of the excellent and
well-priced Nexus 7, the Nexus 10 undercuts the Pad by $70, yet on paper it
surpasses Apple's tablet in almost every regard.
The Screen
It all starts with the 10.1in screen, which
takes the Retina concept and, incredibly, pushes past it with a resolution of
2560 x 1600 and a pixel density of 300ppi. On both counts the Nexus 10 display
beats the Paid, which lags behind at 2048 x 1536 and 264ppi. It's the highest
resolution screen available on any tablet, and everything on it looks as sharp
as cut glass. Text in eBooks and web pages looks fantastic no matter how close
you zoom in, high-resolution photographs look glorious and Full HD movies are
an absolute joy to watch.
It
all starts with the 10.1in screen, which takes the Retina concept and,
incredibly, pushes past it with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 and a pixel density
of 300ppi.
The resolution is an impressive feat on its
own, especially at this price, but it isn't only the numbers that stock up. Set
the two tablets side by side and you'll see that quality is close too. The
Nexus 10's IPS panel is bright, reaching a maximum of 415cd/m2' and has a
contrast ratio of 807:1 - both figures that aren't far off the iPad's 426cd/m2
and 906:1.
Colours on the Nexus 10 seem flatter than
on the Paid, however, and a touch less saturated. Viewing angles aren't quite
as good either, with brightness falling off more quickly as you move away from
the perpendicular, but the iPad's display does have a tendency to crush darker
shades of grey into black, resulting in loss of detail. To our eyes, we'd put
the iPad's display in front, but only by a whisker.
The Nexus' physical design is much less
spectacular: it's entirely clad in plastic rather than metal, and a rather
flexible plastic at that. The soft, rubbery finish feels strangely sticky under
the finger. It won't slip out of your hand easily, but doesn't feel luxurious.
And yet it's the sort of design that slowly
grows on you. It's slimmer than the Paid, measuring a mere 9.2mm from the
screen to the thickest part of the case, and weighs only 603g, which makes it
59g lighter. The glass front of the tablet is shatter- and scratch-resistant
Gorilla Glass 2, which gives us much more confidence in its ability to overt
disaster than the iPad's unbranded glass.
It's also worth noting that the Nexus 10
has GPS where the Wi-Fi only Paid has none, and there's an integrated
micro-HDMI output - with the Pod, you have to pay extra for an adapter.
However, there's no microSD slot to expand the integrated 16GB (or 32GB)
storage.
Performance
Google's Nexus 10 copes with the
performance demands placed upon its core hardware with aplomb. Despite having
as many pixels to manage as a 30in professional monitor, it feels responsive
and smooth.
That's down to the tablet's ARM 15-based
Samsung Exynos CPU a dual-core unit running at 1.7GHz with 2GB of RAM. In
SunSpider, this combination returned a quick time of 1362ms faster than every
other tablet we've tested aside from the fourth generation iPad (see panel,
below). In the Quadrant it scored 4626, only 315 points behind the Tegra
3-powered Asus Transformer Pad Infinity 700, and that had a lower-resolution
display of 1920 x 1200.
Google's
Nexus 10 copes with the performance demands placed upon its core hardware with
aplomb.
All the games we threw at it from Asphalt
to Shadowgun ran without a hitch and performance in and around the OS was
smooth. The onscreen keyboard is as responsive as we've seen, with none of the
irritating lag that afflicts so many rival devices. As soon as you've pressed a
key, the tablet responds with a click or short buzz, and letters appear
instantaneously.
Complicated web pages and those heavy with
high-resolution images caused the tablet to momentarily catch as we pushed and
pulled the pages around, so it isn't completely perfect. However, we didn't
find this spoiled the fun.
Battery life is fine, too. Although our
initial tests suggested poor power management, with times well shy of eight
hours, a software update resolved the issue. The Nexus 10, fully updated,
lasted 9hrs 42mins in our looping video test. It matches the fourth-generation
iPad almost to the minute.
Finally. The-5 megapixel camera although no
match for the best smartphone snappers isn't bad at all. In good light it
captured scenes with ample detail and, surprisingly, is accompanied by a single
LED flash. Low light shots exhibit a lot of noise and grain, but for casual use
it's acceptable.
Software
Not content with upping the hardware ante,
the Nexus 10 also marks the first time we've seen Android 4.2 on any device,
which adds a handful of useful features to the Android toolkit. The most
significant is the addition of user accounts. You can create separate logons
for each member of your family, say, with each person able to have his or her
own set of apps and accounts.
Android 4.2 adds lock screen widgets,
including the ability to preview your calendar and emails. Google has added an
extra feature Photo Sphere to the camera app, which can be used to create full
360-degree pictures. It's a gimmick, though, and the results are crude, with
the software struggling to line up frame edges. The new keyboard is a more
successful affair. We've already mentioned its excellent responsiveness, and
Google has added Swype-alike word tracing, which allows you to enter text by
dragging your finger from one letter to another.
Android
4.2 adds lock screen widgets, including the ability to preview your calendar
and emails.
This brings us to the matter of apps.
Android's selection still isn't great when it comes to tablet-specific designs
compared to the library available for the iPad, although it's steadily
improving. And the Nexus 10's high-resolution display causes problems. While
many apps worked as expected, we came across a handful that were unusable
disappointingly, that included Adobe Photoshop Touch and Documents To Go, whose
toolbars and buttons proved impractically tiny.
Verdict
It's likely most big developers will fall
over themselves to get their apps looking right on the Nexus 10, because this
is the benchmark 10in Android tablet. The screen is superb, performance swift,
and the price remarkable. The extra features of Android 4.2 are valuable, too.
We won't be promoting it to the top of the A-List above the iPad just yet,
though. It isn't quite polished enough, and the iPad's library of
tablet-specific apps means it just about holds the edge. But the gap is
narrower than it's ever been.
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Basic Specs
·
Thickness: .35 inches
·
Weight: 1.33 pounds
·
Screen size (diagonal): 10 inches
·
Operating system: Android
·
Launch OS version: 4.2
·
Media streaming: DLNA, Miracast
·
CPU brand: ARM
·
RAM size: 2GB
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