Media tablet showdown: Retina iPad Mini faces newly beefed-up challengers
The Retina iPad Mini, Kindle Fire HDX, Nexus 7, Dell Venue 7 and Venue 8 Pro, and Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 go toe to toe in InfoWorld Test Center's review
By Galen Gruman
Executive Editor for Global Content, InfoWorld |
What a difference a year makes. Last year, the then-new iPad Mini was the unquestioned top pick for a media tablet, thanks to its friendly iTunes software for managing your personal media and its superior hardware, which easily outperformed the corner-cutting componentry used by competitors to gain a price advantage.
This year, Apple has added the higher-quality -- and higher-priced -- iPad Mini with Retina Display to its lineup, and both Google and Amazon have significantly upped the hardware quality of their respective contenders, the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HDX. Samsung's Galaxy Note 8.0 also received a hardware face-lift earlier this year. Further, there are now several 8-inch Windows tablets that could act as a media tablet; I tested the Dell Venue 8 Pro here, as well as its smaller sibling, the Intel-based Venue 7 Android tablet.
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Today, you can choose from a wide range of tablets to read books, listen to music, watch movies and other videos, casually surf the Web, keep up with social networks, and otherwise entertain yourself. Their sizes and shapes vary, as do their capabilities -- I was surprised at how differently the various Android devices handled key features such as personal videos and video streaming, for example. Yet they all now have front and rear cameras. The media tablet is still very much a work in progress.
Here are the contenders: the Amazon.com Kindle Fire HDX, the Apple iPad Mini with Retina Display, the still-sold original iPad Mini, the Dell Venue 7 (which runs Android) and the Dell Venue 8 Pro (which runs Windows 8.1), the Asus-made Google Nexus 7, and the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0. Read on to see how today's media tablets stack up.
Media tablet showdown categories:
| InfoWorld Scorecard | Media support (20.0%) |
Web and Internet support (15.0%) |
Usability (15.0%) |
Application support (20.0%) |
Business connectivity (10.0%) |
Hardware (10.0%) |
Security (10.0%) |
Overall Score (100%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Kindle Fire HDX | 7.0 | 7.0 | 8.0 | 7.0 | 7.0 | 8.0 | 7.0 | |
| Apple iPad Mini with Retina Display | 10.0 | 9.0 | 9.0 | 9.0 | 8.0 | 9.0 | 9.0 | |
| Asus Google Nexus 7 (2013 edition) | 8.0 | 9.0 | 8.0 | 8.0 | 7.0 | 9.0 | 7.0 | |
| Dell Venue 7 | 8.0 | 9.0 | 7.0 | 8.0 | 7.0 | 7.0 | 7.0 | |
| Dell Venue 8 Pro | 6.0 | 7.0 | 6.0 | 7.0 | 6.0 | 6.0 | 9.0 | |
| Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 | 8.0 | 9.0 | 7.0 | 8.0 | 7.0 | 8.0 | 7.0 |