by B.J. Tolentino

Created on: September 12, 2010

The 2010 IFA consumer electronic show in Germany saw the unveiling of (what most analysts consider) Apple iPad's chief competitor in the Samsung Galaxy. Apple may have been in an unchallenged position before but a barrage of up and coming competitors, led by the Galaxy tab, will make the market competitive. It will also bring down the price of tablet computers.

The Galaxy tab offers three features which the iPad doesn't currently have. It is mobile phone (with a speakerphone and bluetooth capability), a dual-side camera (a 1.3 megapixel front camera for video telephony and a 3 megapixel rear camera with LED flash and auto-focus) and it has an Adobe Flash 10.1 player support. These are additional feature which can heads turn to check out the Samsung Galaxy tab.

While the iPad runs on A4 processor, Samsung Galaxy utilizes the Hummingbird ARM Cortex A8 1.0 GHz application processor. These processors virtually come from the same family but the Galaxy Tab boast of twice the graphic processing power of the iPad.    

Samsung Galaxy runs on Google's Android OS 2.2 - Froyo (considered not optimized yet for tablet devices) against Apple iPad's proven iOS 3.2. Both are upgradeable to Android 3.0 (Gingerbread or Honeycomb?) and iOS 4.1 respectively. They are coming out very soon.

Will size matter in this race? The iPad weighs 1.5 pound - very light compared to a laptop. The Samsung Galaxy is almost weighs half that of the iPad - weighing merely 0.84 lbs! However, it has to shrink its screen size to 7 inches as compared to the iPad's 9.7 inches. In effect, the Galaxy Tab offers a 16:9 display ratio but with reduced resolution (from 1024 x 768 on the iPad to just 1024 x 600). Will dimension rule over resolution?

The Apple iPad also has one of the best display screen in the business. Besides efficient LED backlighting, it utilizes an in-plane switching (IPS) technology, which gives it a generous viewing angle and accurate color definition. The Samsung Galaxy utilizes  the cheaper and widely used thin-film transistor (TFT) - WSVGA screen technology.

Just by the sheer volume of iPad apps available (more than 25,000) in Apple App's store, Samsung Galaxy lags behind in this department. Even if we compare the number of Android smartphone apps against iPhone apps, Apple all the more outnumbers Google by a ratio of 3:1

However, there are those who don't like Apple's "walled gardens". Samsung will be able to draw customers who want more connectivity. Then there is the issue of price. The Samsung Galaxy offers a tablet computer at a lower price with 3 significantly useful features. No wonder, there are unconfirmed reports that Apple is aggressively launching (foregoing its traditional 12-month product cycle) a new Face-Time video conferencing standard and a built-in video camera into the seemingly weakened iPad.      

Learn more about this author, B.J. Tolentino.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.