Gadgetory

the iPad Mini or the Nexus 7 with the holiday season right around the corner these are the two tablets that are going to be competing for your hard-earned cash this is the Battle of the midsize tablets of 2012 go ahead and hit that thumbs up button and let's begin so this is a new product category that was born in the second half of 2012 with the Nexus 7 the devices are bigger than the largest smartphones but smaller than your traditional 10-inch tablet starting on the outside in terms of pure Hardware right off the bat these are very different tablets on the outside the iPad Mini takes the thinness crown and it takes on a bigger footprint thanks to that slightly larger display which we'll talk more about in a second and the Nexus 7 on the other hand does feel a little bit more natural to hold especially with one hand and that's partially thanks to that soft touch material on the back and those rounded edges that make it pretty comfortable compared to the iPads more premium feeling industrial square style design now besides the Lightning port on the iPad these tablets have a pretty similar port and button situation going on although the iPads power button is up top so that could get a little awkward when trying to one-hand it but the iPad Mini does have the back camera advantage so in the event you need to take photos or video with your tablet the iPads your choice both do you have a front-facing camera though so that's convenient also on the speaker's the Nexus 7 has an average tablet bar speaker on the back of the device it fires backwards but the iPad Mini has a much louder speaker but the iPad Mini Speaker faces to the side of the device meaning when you hold the device in landscape mode it fires sideways now for some reason the Nexus 7 speaker didn't bother me but the sideways audio from the iPad Mini drove me a little bit insane when trying to game and watch youtube videos and speaking of watching stuff the displays are very important because that's what you interact with that's why you're constantly looking at when you're using the tablets the Nexus 7 has a pretty average display it's not bad it's a 1280 by 720 seven-inch display which gives it a pixel density of 216 PPI it's a pretty decent display honestly it's not the brightest in the world but it's responsive and kind of crisp and it gets the job done for the price you pay the iPad Mini on the other hand has a 7.9 inch display with a thinner smaller bezel with a resolution of just 1024 by 768 this gives it a pixel density of just 163 and I think this here is the iPads biggest flaw least from my experience Apple really skimped on the display and it is noticeable even when not directly comparing it to a super-high resolution display side-by-side I noticed pixels especially with text on the iPad Mini now that being said the next generation I've had mini absolutely will have a Retina display of some sorts but until then this is sort of the feature that does it down for me I can see pixels everywhere either way with this thinner bezel sometimes you end up resting your finger partially on the display so there's a neat improvement made to iOS specifically for the iPad Mini to reject that accidental input so that's really cool the Nexus 7 has a thicker bezel though so they I guess trust you in the software not to accidentally touch the screen but of course outside of the hardware the other difference between these two tablets is their operating systems Android 4.2 jelly bean on the Nexus on iOS 6 on the iPad now besides coming down to peer preference there are some tangible differences like this means you can pick between the Google Play Store and its 700,000 apps or the Apple App Store and it's 1 million apps one huge advantage for the iPad here is at least because of this 1024 by 768 aspect ratio this is the same aspect ratio as the iPad 2 and 3 & 4 so all of the tablet optimized apps and games that work perfectly on the iPads will work on the Mini just fine with no letterboxing or stretching required so it has the apps advantage here but then again Google Maps or Apple maps Google now or Siri YouTube or no YouTube it's your choice I've also found that the battery life on these two tablets is about the same sometimes the iPad lasts a little bit longer on standby when you're not using it but once you really get to using these two they're about even with each other and for performance it's the nexuses quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 versus the iPads dual-core a5 from the iPad 2 and in real world performance both are quite snappy no performance issues here but I would say the iPad is overall smoother but the Nexus is overall faster and I guess what I mean by that is the frame rates and animations will be faster on the iPad thanks to better graphics but the load times will be faster on the Nexus 7 thanks to better processing so in the end the Wi-Fi nexus 7 starts at 200 bucks while the equivalent iPad Mini is 330 bucks but I got to hand it to Apple for giving it a 4G option which is nice while the unlocked Nexus will get you HSPA+ speeds overall you might go with the iPad Mini if you're familiar with or enjoy that simplicity of iOS it's like a large flattened out iPod Touch for 30 extra bucks think about that or you might go with the Nexus 7 if you enjoy messing around with Android or if your budget is lower or if you do a lot of video watching on a 16 by 9 display or youtubing does that YouTube app but you can't go wrong either way I'm sure whichever you choose this holiday season you won't be disappointed either way thanks for watching if you enjoy the video feel free to +1 or give it a thumbs up here and enjoy your turkey day if you celebrate it and I'll talk to you guys in the next video peace