In the world of tablets, the thinner the better. That's why Apple went all out to design the iPad 2 with an impressive 8.8 mm thickness throughout. 8.8mm is thinner than what most smartphones can manage, and is almost scary to hold, thanks to the all-pervasive feeling that it'll slip through your fingers or that you'll snap it in two.
8.8 mm is not easy to achieve either. The iPad 1 is 13.4 mm thick -- to reduce that to 8.8mm while bumping up the specs and keeping the battery life intact took a radical re-tooling of the innards. For starters, Apple drastically thinned down the mammoth battery (a 59% reduction in thickness of the battery) and other components like the display. You can take a look at the iFixit (www.ifixit.com) teardown of the iPad 2 to get a sense of what this means.
8.8 mm is not easy to achieve either. The iPad 1 is 13.4 mm thick -- to reduce that to 8.8mm while bumping up the specs and keeping the battery life intact took a radical re-tooling of the innards. For starters, Apple drastically thinned down the mammoth battery (a 59% reduction in thickness of the battery) and other components like the display. You can take a look at the iFixit (www.ifixit.com) teardown of the iPad 2 to get a sense of what this means.Now that Apple had their say with the iPad 2, its Samsung's turn. They pulled a shocker just a couple of days back at the CTIA Wireless 2011 show in Florida - two brand-new tablets with Android 3.0; a 10.1 inch and an 8.9 inch Galaxy Tab – both thinner than the already hot-selling iPad 2. Impressively, the Tab 10.1 is also lighter than the iPad 2, though not by much (595 grams versus the iPad 2's 601 grams).
The 8.9 inch Galaxy Tab was expected around this time, but the surprising bit is that Samsung had previously showcased the 10.1 inch Tab at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. The 10.1 inch Tab showed at CTIA is a very different beast from the one shown at MWC. For starters, the MWC version of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 was 10.9 mm thick, weighed 599 grams and had an 8 MP camera around back. The CTIA version is 8.6 mm thick, 595 grams and has a 2 MP camera at the back. It's also a completely different design.
It almost seems like Samsung had initially chosen to launch the fatter 10.1 Tab - but they had a thinner backup tablet waiting in the wings the whole time. Because there's no way that they could conceptualize, build and finalize a whole new design within the space of about a month. If they actually did – hats off Samsung! They've also managed to better the screen resolution of the iPad 2 (1280 x 800 versus the iPad's 1024 x 768) and match the iPad 2 pricing.
When they start selling in the US in a few months time, the 16GB 10.1 inch Wi-Fi model will cost $499 and the 16GB 8.9 inch Wi-Fi model will cost $469. At this point, it's not clear what happened to the Galaxy Tab 10.1's poor, fatter cousin. But it does look like gadget enthusiasts in India will have a lot more than just the iPad to choose from.
Hitesh Raj Bhagat
Hitesh Raj Bhagat
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