I recently bought myself an iPad Air (5th Gen) with the primary purpose of reading books and other things of professional interest. As a Android tab user I could easily pinpoint some pleasant experiences with the iPad compared to my old Galaxy Tab and the newer android tablets:
1. Firstly the screen orientation of 4:3 is better for reading books, webpages, PDFs, papers and so on. It just looks and feels better than a 16:9 screen on android tablets (even teh latest galaxy Note 10.1 2014). I had a kindle before and I was tired of formatting books and free papers for it or endlessly trying to zoom and pan to read (what a productivity nightmare !!!). Wish Amazon could bring out a 4:3 E-ink reader of around 10"+ screen size in India at reasonable prices which does not depend on only their content and with the touch features.
2. If the superiority of the browser beacuse of the 10" Inch screen was not enough, the Apps that are customized for iPad screen are much better than the somewhat resized Android applications. Infact at times I feel that the browser itself is enough beacuse teh web interface gives you so much functionality that a native app is not able too. I am nots sure why Apple got into the iPad Mini business. The big iPad is the real deal ...
3. Third Party accessory eco-system (I have logitech folio case, Jotscript pen & ultrathin keyboard) is way superior compared to Android or Windows tablets. Infact using that keyboard I am writing blogs, comments, big emails and other lightweight content creation on the iPad. If that was not enough, i also ssh on to my linux workstation and program using my iPad beacuse the screen is so pleasant to read.
I think this could be enough for many to give Android tablets a wide berth as of 2014. But there are some shortcomings on both the Hardware and Software front on iPad Air (which I hope will be addressed in subsequent versions of iPad Air and IOS). I am sold on the IOS and iPad ecosystem, but not on the upgrades. Reasons below:
(1) Apple has being stingy with RAM. It looks to be around 1 GB. If too many background processes are running the free RAM reduces to under 5% and you get lot of app crashes (low memory diagnostic logs). The same can also happen if too many apps are open. Its possible the switch to 64 bit has worsened this problem. While apple does some paging to overcome the second problem, the first is not properly handled by this. I had continuous crashes of Adobe reader (my tool for reading books) because of this. Their is also a limit on how many tabs safari is able to open. In low memory situation safari unloads the 1st tab (pages to disk or throws away the content), if the 2nd or 3rd tab is opened. when you switch back, you will find to your surprise the page is loading again. It sucks bandwidth and time. The workaround as of now is to not open many applications in background (double tab home button and swipe up the apps not needed) and ensure that many applications do not run in background (from the background app refresh options in Settings -> General ). It has defintely pushed the problem a little further, but this is not the right way to solve the problem. it has made the device dumber. It will take a long time that OS and Apps will improve their footprint to offset the transition to 64 bit (maybe 30%). Had it not being better to increase the RAM to 2 GB rather than make $150 profit per device at the expense of customer satisfaction ?
(2). On the software side, the apps need to improve data sharing. On android you could practically share data from one app to any other, but the same is not true for IOS. it is limited to Apple apps and some others. I am not sure if their is a way to fix this already. The reason I hate this is that it is a productivity nightmare. Wat I could do with one operation, i have to indirectly do in multiple steps taking time, bandwidth etc.
Apart from this the use dual core instead of quad core CPU, No SD card, lack of 802.11ac is not so much of an issue.
I would however suggest the buyers to not buy the 16 GB version, but go for atleast the 32 GB version. I made a big mistake for settling for the former. Sometimes you need to take some big content along and right now I cannot do it at all as their is no way to connect it to iPad and its app specific data principle. I few extra 100$ will save you the inconvenience. I am now looking for a Portable Wireless Disk with Media server and ability to share *ANY* file type with iPad ;-((
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