NEW YORK: Apple’s much-awaited tablet iPad Air 2 has given a tough time to rivals Google, Samsung and Sony but readers will decide who is the ultimate winner. There is a slight difference in screen size of 9.7-inch iPad Air 2 with the latest Nexus tablet, the 8.9-inch Google Nexus 9. The two tablets offer the exactly same 2048×1536 pixels display resolution. The Google Nexus 9 with its comparatively smaller display offers a pixel density of roughly 288ppi, while the iPad Air 2 has a pixel density of roughly 264ppi because of its bigger screen. The Google Nexus 9 and the Apple iPad Air 2 are quite comparable in terms of resolution and pixel density. They both also feature IPS LCD displays. On the other hand, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 features a Super AMOLED display that is considered amongst the most vivid of the current generation of tablets. Bearing a 10.5-inch display with a resolution of 2560×1600 pixels, the Galaxy Tab S 10.5 has a pixel density of roughly 288ppi, pegging it right around the Nexus 9. Sony’s Xperia Z2 Tablet on the other hand, features a 10.1-inch 1920×1200 pixel IPS LCD display and a pixel density of 224ppi. Comparing the displays of all four tablets, we’d be hard-pressed to pick a winner, though the Galaxy Tab S 10.5’s display does stand out as the highest resolution of the lot, while tying for first place in terms of pixel density with the Nexus 9. Coming to camera hardware, all four tablet computers sport 8-megapixel primary cameras, except the Xperia Z2 Tablet, which differs slightly with a 8.1-megapixel camera. While the iPad Air 2 comes with a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera, the Nexus 9 houses a 1.6-megapixel camera, the Galaxy Tab S 10.5 a 2.1-megapixel camera, and the Xperia Z2 Tablet leads with 2.2-megapixel front-facing shooter. Of course, until we put the iPad Air 2 (and Google Nexus 9) through our camera performance test, we will not be able to tell you the qualitative winner. On the processor front, there can’t be one winner until the iPad Air 2 is torn down and put through a gamut of tests. It runs on the Apple A8X SoC, and the company hasn’t yet revealed (and probably will never) the clock speed, number of cores, or system memory, although some reports suggest that it is a dual-core 1.3GHz Cyclone (ARMv8-based) SoC with 1GB of RAM. The Google Nexus 9 is powered by a 64-bit dual-core 2.3GHz Nvidia Tegra K1 processor coupled with a 192-core Kepler GPU and 2GB of RAM. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 packs an Exynos 5 octa-core (quad-core 1.9GHz Cortex-A15 and quad-core 1.3GHz Cortex-A7) SoC with 3GB of RAM. The Sony Z2 Tablet comes with quad-core 2.3GHz Krait 400 SoC with 3GB of RAM. On paper, it looks like the iPad Air 2 with its dual-core processor is possibly the slowest of the lot, however, the company has an excellent record of hardware-software optimisation – in the past delivering industry-leading performance with meagre specifications. Notably, it is also hard to compare iOS device performance with Android devices, because of the paucity of common benchmarks.
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