iPad Air 2 vs. Nexus 9 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1: Tech Specs Shootout

It has been a busy week in the world of tablets. On October 17th, Google unveiled its flagship Nexus 9 tablet, which was followed by the launch of the iPad Air2
by Apple yesterday.

Now that the top tablets for 2014 are out, I take a look at how the new iPad Air 2 stacks up against Nexus 9 and Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1 under the hood in the comparison table below:

Click on this link for the bigger version of the comparison table

As you can see in the comparison table above, there is not much to choose between the three tablets when in comes to specifications. One of the biggest advantages of the iPad Air 2 over the Android based tablets is the huge selection of tablet-designed apps available on the App Store (650,000 and counting). While the selection of apps designed for the tablet are growing on the Google Play Store, it is still behind what iOS offers users. iPad Air 2 also comes with Touch ID fingerprint sensor and an anti-reflective coating, which should greatly improve your user experience.

There are still some unknowns about the iPad Air such as the amount of RAM (we’ve heard rumors that it comes with 2GB RAM) and the clock speed of the A8X processor. I’ll update the table as soon as I get those details. We will also need to wait for a week to get performance benchmarks of the new tablets to find out how they stack up when it comes to performance. We’ve seen that even though the iPhone 6 comes with lesser number of cores and is clocked much lower than Android based smartphones, it still manages to outperform.

Apple has addressed some of the limitations of iOS in iOS 8 by including features such as support for third-party keyboards, Safari extensions and custom actions. But Android based tablets still have an advantage, as they’re is lot more tweakable, which makes it a compelling option for power users. Nexus 9 is also $100 cheaper than the iPad Air 2 and Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1, which should appeal to users on a tight budget.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

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