AppleTalk
Letters and more
I recently bought an iPad mini Retina, having become frustrated by the quality of apps on the Android tablet I’d been using, which was a first-generation Nexus 7. I was impressed by the quality of some iOS apps, but there were three things that killed it for me.
The first was the keypad. There’s only one, and it’s limited, with no multiple-choice predictive text or flow/swipe type entry, plus the auto-correct feature is unreliable. Entering text takes a lot longer than on Android. The other problem was failure to connect to certain networks, notably the London Underground Wi-Fi. I would enter my mobile number and password, as is normally required to connect, and it would tell me to contact customer services. I also found other websites would refuse my login, including my own blog! I figured the system was just not sending the password.
Last, a lot of apps look awful, because they’re only designed for phones and don’t scale. You can either have it displayed tiny or blown up. Most Android apps can be displayed on any Android device and look fine. I returned the iPad to the shop and bought an LG eight-inch Android tablet. While there’s no direct Android competitor to the iPad, the irritations seem minor compared to the iPad’s. Apple will never attract Android users unless it sorts out the keypad. Matthew Smith Matt Bolton says: Sorry to hear you didn’t get on with the iPad mini, Matthew. We’ve always been satisfied with the iOS keyboard ourselves (and some of the MacFormat team regularly test alternative devices for sister titles), but we know that for some hardcore users, keyboards such as Swype or SwiftKey are big reasons to stick with Android. (SwiftKey is available for iOS, incidentally, though only as a stand-alone app, SwiftKey Note, because Apple doesn’t allow developers to replace the keyboard system-wide.)
We can’t guess exactly what’s causing your login problems, but we’re confident it has little to do with the iPad, as such. We’ve happily connected to the Wi-Fi on the Tube, and it’s almost inconceivable that the iPad ‘wouldn’t be sending the passwords’.
Your last point, though, made us giggle a bit, since this is the one area where the iPad is incontestably ahead of the Android tablets. There are few tablet-optimised Android apps; mostly, apps just move phone-optimised elements around to make them ‘fit’ tablets, whereas – at the last count – nearly half of the million apps available on the App Store are designed for the iPad, either as a bespoke iPad app, or a Universal app that contains versions for iPhone and iPad in one. I’m not sure how you’re managing to find so many apps for the iPhone only. The App Store app should display iPad apps by default, but check when you’re searching for apps that it’s not set to show only iPhone apps.