Looks like an iPad, right?
Got the flat edge, the rounded liquid retina corners,
smart connector, four sets of speaker grills.
But it's not an iPad.
It's a Samsung Galaxy Tab S8.
On a Mac channel?
Yes, because I've often long wondered
why people buy Android tablets.
Sure, there are many options available,
especially at lower prices.
But from what I've read in tech publications and reviews,
Android is just nowhere near iPadOS in the tablet space.
And yet, one of my best friends
has been an Android tablet faithful for years.
And real recently, my dad made me help him
find a suitable Android tablet,
despite my mother and I insisting on an iPad.
They may not be many, but people are buying Android tablets.
And I don't know, maybe I'm missing something.
Maybe Android is worth some attention.
So, let's get started.
I used this one for 10 days to find out.
Can I get a white mocha?
At Google's latest I.O.,
they announced an upcoming Pixel tablet.
And that might actually bode well for this guy,
because it means that Google's putting effort
into making Android work for tablets.
The thing is, they've tried this before,
many times, in fact.
Let me rewind.
A year after the launch of the iPad,
Google released Android version three, Honeycomb,
made exclusively for Android.
It featured a two-pane UI for email and contacts,
browser Windows with tabs,
and a larger keyboard for larger screens.
The hope was that developers would write tablet apps
like they were doing for iOS, but they didn't.
So what we ended up getting is just very wide phone apps.
The Nexus 7, released a year later, was more reasonable.
Basically a big phone before phones got really big.
The extra real estate made it nicer for watching and reading,
but didn't push the capabilities.
And because it was only $200,
people didn't have huge expectations for it either.
Apple dutifully and incrementally worked away
at their iPad in that time,
making it more useful through some multitasking,
new features, and accessories.
This evolution was a test of patience,
but it's quite staggering how much more capable
the iPad is than its predecessor or its competitors.
Oh, right, the Samsung.
Sales-wise, Samsung is the only game around
in the Android tablet space.
And this, their brand new Galaxy Tab S8,
is the flagship model.
It's available in three sizes and many prices.
This is the smallest and provides the closest competitor
to the recently updated iPad Air.
I'll happily admit that it's a decent tablet.
Performance is snappy,
and the high refresh rate screen looks nice.
It's a pleasant departure from the experience I had
with the Samsung Galaxy A53.
And it even has many compelling features
that the iPad doesn't even offer.
The webcam is in the correct place.
On the long side, there's a fingerprint reader
and face recognition.
And perhaps the feature I'm most envious of
is the micro SD card slot for expansion.
Handy if you wanna back up photos taken
with a non-mobile phone camera,
or just expand storage without shelling out hundreds
of dollars.
This is what made the iPad a non-starter for my dad.
So the Android tablet looks pretty compelling.
They fixed it.
Well, not quite.
And let me explain why after a word
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So yes, it has an SD card slot, but look at it.
It's not centered.
Neither is the USB-C port either.
Okay, so this is pedantic hardware niggles.
But take a look at this.
If I have to continue to type on this on-screen keyboard,
I'm going to pull a phalange.
These wide buttons are just ridiculous.
Apple, in their wisdom,
kept their on-screen keyboard proportional.
Samsung's isn't even that bad.
Look at Google's.
I swear their honeycomb keyboard was better.
Unfortunately, there are some great tablet apps
that I use regularly that aren't even available on Android.
Craigslist is a great app.
It's called Procreate, to name a few.
And most of the ones that are available
are just so much worse on Android.
It's not even close.
Here, take a look at this.
On iPad, Twitter takes thoughtful advantage
of portrait and landscape orientations,
whereas on Android, it doesn't.
Look at my tweets.
They span the whole width.
This is too big.
Some apps like AutoTrader or Kijiji
won't even rotate to landscape.
Same with Instagram.
Wait, what?
You can get Instagram on a tablet?
That's it. I'm buying Android.
Figuring out multitasking has been a pain point
on the iPad for a while now,
but on the Galaxy, whoa, is it ever unintuitive.
You wanna go into split screen?
You have to tap on an app icon in the app switcher,
but instead of that going next to the app
you already have open,
it asks what you wanna fill the other space with.
The app I had open.
Another option is to drag over this little nub,
which conceals a dock from where you can drag apps out.
And there's more.
You can make apps free floating,
a bit like slide over with some more flexibility
at the cost of usability.
And if you go back home,
they become a little bobble that groups together
if you have multiple floating Windows,
which reminds me of Samsung's DeX feature,
which turns your Android tablet into a desktop computer
ready for a mouse and keyboard.
It looks like a big Samsung phone.
Some people got mad at Riley for ignoring DeX
in his ShortCircuit Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra unboxing,
but there's really nothing to see here.
On a small screen like this, it's not a big deal.
It's really more of a hassle to be managing
and moving around all these Windows that are even smaller.
If you think that this is going to be
a suitable computer replacement, well, good luck to you.
This is the opposite of how the iPad works.
Since Apple assumes you probably have multiples
of their devices, they've given us universal control.
So instead of extending your tablet into a computer,
the iPad becomes an extension of your Mac.
But with iPad OS 16,
Apple appears to be going in Samsung's direction,
with Stage Manager.
It allows for the sort of app windowing
people have been pining for.
This, however, is not a desktop.
Windows can be grouped, resized, and moved,
but not to anywhere on screen.
And we're still in beta,
so we'll have to find out how it works later on.
Though this seems like the iPad is getting closer to DeX,
Apple is taking the approach of trickling concepts
from the desktop to the tablet in an intentional way,
instead of just dragging it around.
So this year, we've been working hard
to make Android tablets amazing.
With their tablet announcement,
Google showed the progress they made
on their tablet interface for Android 13,
and they updated apps to take advantage
of the larger screen.
Sound familiar?
I have the beta installed on this Lenovo,
and yeah, there are some good ideas in here.
They're so good, I swear I've used them before.
Hmm.
It's neat to see Android make sense in this new era.
But it's not the case for Android 13.
It's not the case for Android 14.
I mean, they're not the same as Android.
They're actually much better.
There's some progress in this form factor.
It's taken long enough.
Though we might actually see some progress this time around,
though they're going to have to act fast,
because as folding phones become more viable,
developers are going to want to make sure
their apps work well on them.
And folding phones are just small tablets.
That's a long ways off.
But what about now?
Well, if you have an iPhone, then you should get an iPad.
And if you have an Android phone,
well, you should probably still get an iPad.
I'm not even gonna save all that much.
This starts at $700.
This iPad Air is $100 less.
Sure, it's missing half the Samsung storage,
but the Samsung is missing so much more.
I missed GarageBand.
I missed Universal Control.
I missed the snappy app switching.
I missed the squarer, more flexible aspect ratio.
I missed slide over.
I missed all the tablet optimized apps.
I always debate people from our sister channel,
LTT, about the iPad.
They don't really understand
how a focused tablet-like device can be useful.
Why am I paying for two devices
when I can get one foldable laptop that does it all?
Well, maybe this mindset is present at Google too.
I mean, they still do sell Chrome OS tablets for some reason,
but it's the form factor, stupid.
And if you don't get it, you won't commit to it,
which is why after 11 years,
Google is starting all over again with Android.
I wish them luck, and maybe in a decade,
I'll give it another go.
Thanks for tapping into this Mac Address.
If you like the iPad more than Android,
give this video a like.
And if you have an Android tablet looking enviously at us
with iPads, then you must subscribe.
Now, when I wrote this script,
I didn't know about Apple unveiling State Manager
and the windowing mode in the iPad OS,
so it sort of changes the perspective just a little bit
from what I initially thought.
But I'm curious how you feel about the iPad
becoming a little bit more desktop-like.
Does it make it even better than an Android tablet?
Or a little bit more like an Android tablet?