Google’s Nexus 10 is Far Better than Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Apple’s iPad

When Google decided to challenge the leaders of the market, everyone
was surprised as to how they plan to conquer and when their product Nexus 10 surfaced, everyone was startled including Samsung itself who designed it in collaboration with Google. The best thing about it is its iPad-besting display: more than 4 million pixels, 300 per inch, spread across a 10.055-inch display. The 2560 x 1600 resolution is the highest on any tablet ever to hit the consumer market. Everything looks good. Books, magazines, movies, apps, photos. Everything.

Apple’s iPads (third or fourth generation) and their 2048 x 1536 pixel displays are still gorgeous. When you sit a Retina-display-equipped iPad side-by-side with a Nexus 10, the difference really comes down to personal preference. They’re both gorgeous, both nearly as good as the printed page. They’re so dense that distinguishing between pixels with the naked eye is nearly impossible. Hell, Samsung, the company that actually produces the Nexus 10 (which it designed in collaboration with Google) makes a lot of the Retina displays used in the Apple’s iPads. On top of all that, we’ve seen Android tablets with Retina-quality displays before — let’s not forget the beautiful Asus Transformer Pad Infinity while we’re talking big, beautiful tablets here.

But while it’s the display that will get the most attention here, the Nexus 10 really is about much more. I’ve been using one for the last day, and what I’m most surprised by is how much more satisfying it is to use than any of Samsung’s previous tablets. There are currently 15 Android tablets listed on Samsung’s website — a 7-inch Galaxy Tab here, a Galaxy Note 10.1 there. These are some of the best tablets on the market, but none of them feel terribly important or special. The Nexus 10 does.

First, because it’s a Nexus device, this tablet runs a pure version of Google’s Android operating system — specifically the awesome new Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. Free of any UI tweaks, skins, or overlays, this is easily the best Android experience out there. And it’s made even more so because of the Nexus 10′s horsepower, including 2GB of RAM and Samsung’s 1.7GHz Exynos 5 dual-core CPU. Everything feels fluid and quick, and that’s important, because Android tablets tend to stutter in even their most fundamental of functions, such as simple swipes between home screens or when multitasking.

Now, the Nexus 10 hasn’t been perfect in my time with it so far. There’s often a one-second delay as the OS catches up when I rotate from landscape to portrait, which is a bit bothersome. It makes me wonder if this problem would exist if Google had pushed for a quad-core processor (as are used in the Nexus 7 tablet and Nexus 4 phone) inside of the Nexus 10. Still, the Nexus 10 feels plenty fast.