iPad vs Kindle Fire vs Galaxy

We’re looking at getting a tablet.  The big question is which one? I’ve look at a few comparisons and still don’t know.

iPad

The iPad may not have been the first tablet but it was the first mass market tablet. It seems to be the standard bearer for tablets.  The Apple App store is huge and has lots of options.

But I’m not a fan of Apple. I don’t want a special plug just for the tablet. Every other electronic device uses micro-USB and interchangeable chargers. It’s also much more expensive.

Kindle Fire

We buy a lot of things from Amazon, including all the television we watch that doesn’t come via Netflix. We have Amazon Prime. This one is cheap and would be easy to get our video content.

The downside I gather is poor app market place. It seems to pale in comparison to Apple and Google Play.

Galaxy or Nexus

The other Android tablets have a lot going for them. Our phones are also Samsung so we already have apps on the Google Play store. I even picked up Spaceward Ho! for my phone but the interface was to small. One of these tablets would let me play it. Additionally, our lives are much more integrated with Google, with gmail and picture storage. All of our music is already uploaded to Google Music.

The downside seems to be less available internal memory on theses devices. Google Play has less apps than Apple. And the most annoying, there doesn’t seem to be an app to play Amazon video. So we might not be able to stream all the videos we’ve purchased from Amazon on the tablet, which is one of the purposes of a tablet.

In general, we’re only going to use the device on a wi-fi network, so 3G or 4G doesn’t matter. All the displays appear similar enough that that’s not necessarily a deciding point. Battery lives also appear similar.

In the end, the only thing keeping me from the Android devices is the lack of Amazon video. The thing keeping me from the Kindle is the poor app market and the feeling that I have to buy it to watch the video I’ve already purchased. And the thing keeping me from Apple is a dislike of Apple.

We could start getting tv from the Google play store, but we’ve already switched content providers once and don’t really want to again. We used to get video on the Xbox. Then the Amazon app was added and we started getting it through Amazon, to avoid the stupid Microsoft point conversion annoyance. Now we use the Roku with the Amazon app.

Thoughts? Anyone have any of these devices and can give some personal experiences?