The iPad is the current pinnacle of tablets: It combines solid hardware with user-friendly software, and plays nice with the rest of the Apple ecosystem. Although Android and iOS are on more or less equal footing in phones, Android tablets lag far behind Apple's iPads in ease of use and amount of tablet-optimized software.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 edition) is a good example of what's wrong with Android tablets and serves as a reminder that high-end specs don't always equal high-end performance. Samsung's approach of cramming as many features as it possibly can into its devices—sometimes at the cost of removing core Android functions—may have finally come back to bite it in the butt.
I don't want a Samsung account
IMAGE: Michael HomnickThe Note 10.1 (left) next to its biggest rival (right).
It's hard to even call the Note 10.1 an Android tablet: So much of what makes Android Android has been stripped away in favor of custom Samsung apps and extras. Everything would be hunky dory if these additions performed the same or better than their Google counterparts, but most of them just plain suck. Apart from the bugs and random crashes, a number of the preinstalled apps require a separate Samsung account, and the benefits don't really outweigh the time it takes to set one up.
You can still use most of the features of the Note 10.1 without creating a Samsung account, but then you just have a bunch of apps that are taking up space on your tablet for no reason. The same could be said for Samsung's software extras, many of which sound neat until you actually get around to using them.
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