iPad mini New iPad Mini owner...impressions coming over from Android Tablets

Saturn1217 said:

Also a nexus 7 owner planning on making the switch.

The web browsing experience on the nexus 7 is slowly driving me up a wall. I am hoping that either the iPad or the iPad mini will provide a better web browsing experience but I'm a little afraid that I'll discover things I take for granted in Android that I will miss when they are gone in iOS (such as the ability to adjust font sizes in safari??? come on Apple!)

But I am willing to take that risk. Just waiting for the new iPads to come out so I can make a decision between an iPad 5 or an iPad mini 2.

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As a fellow Nexus 7'r, i feel your pain.
For web browsing, first ditch Chrome. I'd recommend Maxthon, free, and has full screen and gestures.

This still leaves you with the ridiculous 'soft buttons' for back, home and app tabs sitting there at the bottom of what's left of your 7" screen.
Hopeless.
Absolutely ridiculous.

The d@mn nexus 7 has a notification bar that can be swiped down when needed from the top of the screen... yet these dumb buttons sit there, with no auto hide option. Stupidity.

You can get the option to fix this... but you need to root your tablet ( oh, the humanity... having to fix badly designed sh@t) then you can install free GMD gesture control... which also gives you better control of touchscreen gestures... on a tablet screen... bah!

There's a new rooting method which doesn,t reuire unlocking the bootlocker ( don't ask... i couldn't be arsed to delve too deeply in to it) but suffice to say if you do the 'standard' unroot you first need to unlock the yadda yadda which removes allyour settigns, maybe installed apss and who knows.... oh, the ...dear fea,kng god...

but i did the new method on my Mac Pro using my Win XP On my Virtual Box VM, so it works fine.
it's here
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2233852


But still, i finally succumbed and had a play with an ipad mini at a store today.
@ sigh@

That extra inch makes a huge, huge difference...

I'm waiting for the retina mini anyway... it's why i got thos nexus 7 anyway, as i can use it with a spreadsheet at work... and eventually...
well, plan was to do away with travelling to oil rigs with a laptop altogether, but that will have to wait for the real deal mini ipad retina and a wireless 1 tb disk thingy...

I'm considering buying my first tablet which Is the iPad mini. But I don't know whether to purchase the new upgrade later this year or wait for the retina version If It will ever happen..

Zellio said:

At this point I hate ios (And my god, ios7 the horror!), but Apple easily makes the best hardware.

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Actually, it is mostly the operating system (iOS) that makes the user interface run smoothly.

Zellio said:

At this point I hate ios (And my god, ios7 the horror!), but Apple easily makes the best hardware.

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It must be tough hating inanimate objects.

skiltrip said:

I actually vastly prefer iOS as a tablet OS over Android, while I strongly prefer Android as a phone OS. I'm glad brand/platform loyalty isn't mandatory. Lol.

I use my Galaxy S3 and iPad mini for very different things and each OS serves my needs brilliantly.

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This is how I feel too. I love my iPad 3 way more than any Android tablet I've used. But, the iPhone can't touch my Note II. I definitely prefer Android phones. It might just be the size, I'm not sure, but I suspect it still the hate in my heart from when I had an iPhone 3g. That phone had the ********* reception ever and would drop to Edge every time I tried to do anything, even though my friend with a Droid standing right next to me had 3-4 bars of 3g.

Anyway, I switched to a Droid back then and haven't looked back. Now, it's hard to imagine a better phone than my Note II. I'm not at all turned off by the fact that its plastic. I love that its so big when I'm trying to read or surf the tubes.

My dream is the iPad mini retina. I'll be the first in line if they make that happen. The mini feels so perfect in my hands. Its so hard to resist! It makes my iPad 3 feel like a brick

OP, grats on your new iPad!!

Android 4.3 fixed all these slow down issues for me on my Nexus 7. Also I'm now using an alternate browser (Dolphin). The Nexus 7 is super fast again and I've been using it a lot again.

The new Nexus 7 seems to have hit the ball out of the park, with Qi wireless charging, more than 1080p IPS display and being even lighter than the iPad mini. I really hope Apple can hurry up with the retina iPad mini.

dingdongbubble said:

Android 4.3 fixed all these slow down issues for me on my Nexus 7. Also I'm now using an alternate browser (Dolphin). The Nexus 7 is super fast again and I've been using it a lot again.

The new Nexus 7 seems to have hit the ball out of the park, with Qi wireless charging, more than 1080p IPS display and being even lighter than the iPad mini. I really hope Apple can hurry up with the retina iPad mini.

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I've always been an iOS owner but I just purchased the new nexus and i must say I'm liking it a lot. I wanted something with a smaller form factor than my iPad 3 but didn't want to get into a mini. Frankly I'm bored of iOS and jailbreaking my iPhone and iPad is what kept me around. This is my first android experience and while not as refined it's still a good OS.

The biggest disappointment thus far as been the incompatibility of apps with 4.3. I feel it's pretty absurd that I bought the latest hardware from Google and quite a few apps are not yet compatible. But I guess fragmentation has always been Android's problem.
Also the overall app quality lags behind the iOS versions but I'll just use my 3 at home and nexus on the run.