Everyone wants a compact tablet these days, but which is the best platform - iOS, Android or Windows 8? Find out in our head-to-head comparison
It's an unavoidable truth that most of us tend to focus on the hardware when we're out to buy a new tablet. A high-resolution display, attractive design and fast core hardware tend to dominate our thoughts long before the software running on the device.
To a large extent, this is due to the fact that most of us are simple beasts: we see a device in the shop, we play with it, talk to a salesman, and we fall in love (with the tablet, not the shop floor assistant).
However, we'd advise a more perspicacious approach. Before you buy, consider the software, too; although closer than ever before, there are fundamental differences between the three major operating systems available on tablets today – differences you should take note of.
Design, look and feel
Android, iOS and Windows 8 all have their own visual style. iOS favours a minimalist look (at least it has since version 7) and a simple layout, with shortcuts to launch apps displayed in a grid, on an ever-expanding array of homescreens. There's a "tray" of persistent shortcuts at the bottom of the screen that's customisable, and apps can be organised into folders.
That used to be all there was to the iOS front end, but it has progressed in recent times to include a notifications menu, accessible via a pull down from the top of the screen, and the Control Centre with a pull up from the bottom of the screen, which gives quick access to commonly used functions such as screen brightness, rotation lock and flight mode.
Beyond a few, small cosmetic differences, the basic Android front-end looks very similar, hosting shortcuts to apps on a series of sideways-scrolling homescreens, with a pull-down notifications menu at the top. There's no Control Centre in Android, but these functions are instead built into the notifications menu.
Apple iOS vs Android vs Windows 8 – what's the best compact tablet OS?
The Android UI is different in a couple of fundamental ways, though: it allows you to drop widgets (interactive, data rich panels) as well as shortcuts onto homescreens, and to hide less frequently used apps away in the app drawer.
Amazon Fire OS
There's another operating system that we haven't included in this comparison: Amazon's Fire OS, which you'll find running on all the firm's Kindle Fire tablets.
At its core, Fire OS is an Android OS, and there are some similarities with standard Android. You can run Android apps and games on a Kindle Fire tablet, you can even sideload apps if you wish, and you can drag and drop files to the device over USB.
However, in other respects, Fire OS is a completely different animal. Instead of putting apps front and centre, Amazon's OS places content – books, movies, music and so on – at the forefront, and makes shopping online for that content, via Amazon's services, naturally, as easy as can be.
The downside is that Amazon tablets don't give you access to the Google Play Store as most other Android tablets do. Instead, you're forced to buy your books, movies, music and even apps from the online retail giant. Amazon's tablets miss out on the core Google Apps, too (Maps, Gmail, Google+, and Calendar, for example), although it does replace some with its own versions.
Alas, the Amazon Appstore is a pale imitation of Google Play, with a far poorer selection of apps and games.
Google also gives hardware developers free rein as far as customisation is concerned. Thus, your Android tablet can run plain Android, exactly the way Google intended it; it can look entirely different, like Amazon's Fire OS (see right); or it can be somewhere in between like the software found on Asus' recent Android tablets – the Memo Pad 7 ME176CX, for example.
The software that runs on your Windows tablet (unless it's the cut-down Windows RT) is identical to that which runs on any Windows laptop or PC. In some respects, this works well on a tablet: links to apps and web pages are displayed in the form of a continuous grid of sideways scrolling tiles, which can be moved around, grouped and resized. It looks very different from Android and iOS, but it's just as fluid and largely as easy to use, once you've learned what all the various "edge swipe" gestures do, plus you get the added bonus of being able to run full-fat desktop applications such as Photoshop and Microsoft Office.
Indeed, add a keyboard, mouse and external monitor, and your Windows tablet turns into a full-blown desktop machine; neither Android nor iOS can compete with that level of versatility.
Compared to those platforms, Windows does fall down in some areas. Our big gripe is that there's no single place where notifications are grouped together; instead you're reliant on Live Tiles on the homescreen to pass this information on, but since not all apps have Live Tiles, it's an unsatisfactory way of doing things, and can make it difficult to keep up with what's going on.
Our other issue with Windows on a tablet is that the settings are scattered all over the place: some are accessed via a touch-friendly menu; others must be changed via the desktop settings dialog box, which is a nightmare to operate with just a finger.
Winner: Android and iOS at level pegging, with Windows lagging a short way behind
It's an unavoidable truth that most of us tend to focus on the hardware when we're out to buy a new tablet. A high-resolution display, attractive design and fast core hardware tend to dominate our thoughts long before the software running on the device.To a large extent, this is due to the fact that most of us are simple beasts: we see a device in the shop, we play with it, talk to a salesman, and we fall in love (with the tablet, not the shop floor assistant).
However, we'd advise a more perspicacious approach. Before you buy, consider the software, too; although closer than ever before, there are fundamental differences between the three major operating systems available on tablets today – differences you should take note of.
Design, look and feel
Android, iOS and Windows 8 all have their own visual style. iOS favours a minimalist look (at least it has since version 7) and a simple layout, with shortcuts to launch apps displayed in a grid, on an ever-expanding array of homescreens. There's a "tray" of persistent shortcuts at the bottom of the screen that's customisable, and apps can be organised into folders.
That used to be all there was to the iOS front end, but it has progressed in recent times to include a notifications menu, accessible via a pull down from the top of the screen, and the Control Centre with a pull up from the bottom of the screen, which gives quick access to commonly used functions such as screen brightness, rotation lock and flight mode.
Beyond a few, small cosmetic differences, the basic Android front-end looks very similar, hosting shortcuts to apps on a series of sideways-scrolling homescreens, with a pull-down notifications menu at the top. There's no Control Centre in Android, but these functions are instead built into the notifications menu.
Apple iOS vs Android vs Windows 8 – what's the best compact tablet OS?
The Android UI is different in a couple of fundamental ways, though: it allows you to drop widgets (interactive, data rich panels) as well as shortcuts onto homescreens, and to hide less frequently used apps away in the app drawer.
Amazon Fire OS
There's another operating system that we haven't included in this comparison: Amazon's Fire OS, which you'll find running on all the firm's Kindle Fire tablets.
At its core, Fire OS is an Android OS, and there are some similarities with standard Android. You can run Android apps and games on a Kindle Fire tablet, you can even sideload apps if you wish, and you can drag and drop files to the device over USB.
However, in other respects, Fire OS is a completely different animal. Instead of putting apps front and centre, Amazon's OS places content – books, movies, music and so on – at the forefront, and makes shopping online for that content, via Amazon's services, naturally, as easy as can be.
The downside is that Amazon tablets don't give you access to the Google Play Store as most other Android tablets do. Instead, you're forced to buy your books, movies, music and even apps from the online retail giant. Amazon's tablets miss out on the core Google Apps, too (Maps, Gmail, Google+, and Calendar, for example), although it does replace some with its own versions.
Alas, the Amazon Appstore is a pale imitation of Google Play, with a far poorer selection of apps and games.
Google also gives hardware developers free rein as far as customisation is concerned. Thus, your Android tablet can run plain Android, exactly the way Google intended it; it can look entirely different, like Amazon's Fire OS (see right); or it can be somewhere in between like the software found on Asus' recent Android tablets – the Memo Pad 7 ME176CX, for example.
The software that runs on your Windows tablet (unless it's the cut-down Windows RT) is identical to that which runs on any Windows laptop or PC. In some respects, this works well on a tablet: links to apps and web pages are displayed in the form of a continuous grid of sideways scrolling tiles, which can be moved around, grouped and resized. It looks very different from Android and iOS, but it's just as fluid and largely as easy to use, once you've learned what all the various "edge swipe" gestures do, plus you get the added bonus of being able to run full-fat desktop applications such as Photoshop and Microsoft Office.
Indeed, add a keyboard, mouse and external monitor, and your Windows tablet turns into a full-blown desktop machine; neither Android nor iOS can compete with that level of versatility.
Compared to those platforms, Windows does fall down in some areas. Our big gripe is that there's no single place where notifications are grouped together; instead you're reliant on Live Tiles on the homescreen to pass this information on, but since not all apps have Live Tiles, it's an unsatisfactory way of doing things, and can make it difficult to keep up with what's going on.
Our other issue with Windows on a tablet is that the settings are scattered all over the place: some are accessed via a touch-friendly menu; others must be changed via the desktop settings dialog box, which is a nightmare to operate with just a finger.
Winner: Android and iOS at level pegging, with Windows lagging a short way behind
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