Well, it's finally here, Apple's new hotness. But how does it compare to the new hotness from Asus, Samsung, Amazon, BlackBerry, or heck, the iPad 2? We've got you covered with this head-to-head spec sheet.


Clearly the toughest competitor in this chart is the Asus Transformer Infinity. The new iPad has it beaten on pixels per inch, but not by a ton. On paper it looks like the Transformer Infinity crushes the new iPad in terms of guts—the quad-core Tegra 3 is one mean mother—but we'll have to wait and see how Apple's new A5X performs in benchmark tests. Similarly spec'd Android tablets will be coming out all year, which means, considering this is a new product, Apple may not be as far of the curve (technology wise) as one would hope. At the same time, Apple products have a long history of outperforming their specs so let's not jump to conclusions just yet.


The new iPad pretty much beats everything else in the chart. It's hard to see a single compelling reason to take the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 over it or the Transformer (other than price). Amazon's Kindle Fire and BlackBerry's Playbook likewise get chomped, but here at least there is a significant difference in price. $200 is very cheap. For people who primarily want a tablet for reading books and watching the occasional movie, the Kindle Fire might just be a more frugal investment.

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iPad starts is $500, $600, or $700 for the 16GB Wi-Fi only version at 16, 32, and 64GB, respectively. For Wi-Fi plus 4G it's $630, $730, and $830, for the the 16, 32, and 64GB versions, respectively.

*Note the forthcoming 4G LTE version of the Transformer Infinity will feature Qualcomm's dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor in stead of the quad-core Tegra 3. You might think that's a step down, but initial benchmarking of the S4 has been extremely good, so in most contexts performance is likely to be just as solid.


P.S. Note that while Tim Cook spent a lot of time talking about the new iPad's four core GPU, that does not make it a "quad-core tablet." That's the graphics processor. The CPU (the main processor) is dual-core. By comparison, the Transformer Infinity has a quad-core CPU and at 12 core GPU. Got it? Good. And yes, they were deliberately sneaky about that, knowing that only geeks would know the difference.

For our complete new iPad analysis, head right on over here.

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