From TechCrunch "On the Apple side, the company sold nearly 60 million iPads during its 2012 fiscal year. But that’s a different market, one that Apple forged itself. How the iPad mini performs remains a separate question, even though Apple on stage at its event last week framed this as essentially a way to replicate and continue that existing success. Still, the iPad mini goes on sale in many more countries with an ecosystem that’s much more globally available than its small tablet competition, so it’s fair to assume Apple will beat competitor device sales, but by how much remains a key question."

The reason the second issue stands out is that I would like to gift these to my niece and nephew. When using my iPad or their parents smart phones they love to use the camera to take pictures. So I am was a bit disappointed over the omission.

The main point in the Nexus 7's favor for me is its price. So the make or break will be software, namely some learning apps and games.

I would prefer to avoid buying an Apple product; I own many; based on their emphasis on lawsuits recently but they do have some features on their tablet that are hard to pass up and the old adage reworded for our age probably holds true, no one will be disappointed getting an iPad for Christmas. (the old adage of no one was fired for buying IBM)

If you're looking for "learning" apps for kids aged 2 - 14, I'd stick with iOS devices (for now).

My take would be that children change so much and so quickly that they're very hard to lock into a device or a platform. The things they cared about last week they don't care about next week which means that their old apps are largely irrelevant to them, and their brains are so adaptable the learning curve on a new device is no barrier at all.

The kids down the road from me have iPod Touches, the ones with phones have a BlackBerry and an HTC Android phone respectively, they share the family iPad and both have or use Windows 7 PCs. They move between these without a second thought depending on what they're doing, what's nearest, their mood or who the hell knows what other reason.

Let children choose what they want to be interested in and encourage it without pushing any prejudices you may have on them. This is technology - how much of what we thought was a big deal 10 years ago remotely matters today? Anyone still fretting about Microsoft's monopolistic attempts to take over the internet?

I am not arguing from an ideological perspective. I am not concerned that their use will teach them soley the iOS way of working. I am concerned about actual lock in.

Apple spends a lot of money on ensuring that their flagship functions (iMessage, AirPlay, Maps etc) are strictly available only on their hardware or through licensed solutions.

Having all of your music in iTunes/iCloud, having most of your friends on iMessage, owning physical hardware with only iDevice connectors or software support etc. These are the future ramifications I am concerned about.

Maps, I'm curious as to how this is a lock in, or who it is who is desperate to get Apple maps on their non-iOS device but I'm sure as this is an Apple issue you'll be able to point me at where I can get the great official Android Maps / Navigation app for my Kindle Fire then? Oh yeah, it's official licensees only.

And the version of BlackBerry messenger for iOS? Or Android?

And I can access Microsoft Windows Phone Rooms from Android can I?

Specific functionality offering competitive advantage are only ever shared by people when it's in their interest. That's not an Apple specific issue, you'll see the same with pretty much every device.

And physical hardware connectors - Micro-USB as a standard for charging is fine but the fact that they both have a Micro USB port doesn't mean that you can use Android peripherals other than a charger with a BlackBerry or Nokia Lumia.

And for chargers - kids don't need dozens of chargers, in most cases the one in the box will be fine. If not $10 on eBay will get you another one - hardly a massive issue when we're talking about phones generally costing hundreds of dollars.

The reality is that device change has always had barriers but Apple's don't seem to me to be significantly worse that anyone elses.

I'm a longtime Apple technician and things started going downhill when the iMac came out. The Apple machine is pretty on the outside. Perfect for the folks that buy them.

Apple does use standard screws. They're just Torx or tamper resistant Torx.

You can buy the screwdrivers at most home repair shops, even for the tamper resistant ones.

While they're not that common, they're definitely standard screws.

I also won't tell you which major tablet is user serviceable. Also, why would it need to be major? Is this a quiz?

My bad.

  > owning physical hardware with only iDevice connectors

I am not arguing that Android in-particular is superior, just that the ability to choose the vendor of your device is a significant freedom that can be lost.

I appreciate that Android always has Google as a vendor somewhere in the chain, and I'd like to see variety there too. It's possible to use App based ecosystems and respect everyone's rights at the same time.

I favour an independent app store where the majority of the computing and bandwidth infrastructure is taken up by the developer. This reduces the cost of the app store so they can operate without mandatory contributions and as a result permits unlimited flexibility.

And Google has been engaging in anticompetitive/illegal behaviour (FRAND patents), abusing privacy (Safari DNT) and capitulating over human rights (China). All the while basing their whole business on selling advertising.

For me Google sounds like the worst company to be sharing your children's data with. No ?

Absolute worst case (which is massively unlikely) I'm a few hundred dollars down (which I can afford). Realistically any unpleasant constraints would come in gradually and I'd just buy a non-Apple phone at the point I would have upgraded my iPhone and I'm not even financially down.

How am I constrained in any real, meaningful sense?

But more seriously, your solution works only as long as there is "something else". So you're predicating the whole thing on the fact that there's an external entity out there for you to flee to. The problem is that we're moving headlong into a dystopian future where there simply isn't any ecosystem left where you can go. The least worst option at the moment is Android because it allows side loading and is open source so if Google turns evil enough you can be sure that someone else will come in and fork it to compete with them (you can argue that already happened). You can even create your own builds and deploy them to your phone if necessary. Now I'm not advocating any such extreme tin-foil type things in reality, but I do think it's vitally important we preserve at least the ability or freedom for these options to occur, because they keep all the other players honest.

That bunch of applications on the Apple Store that gets bigger and bigger? They add up. You'll clench your teeth and try to ignore the constrains.

With Google you go here http://www.dataliberation.org/ and get everything out. Hell, you have the source for android, you can build your own system http://www.idroidproject.org/ and use your apps as well.

Yes, Google are involved in most Android devices. They don't however mandate any dominance over the device. Using an Android device without Google's apps is not only plausible, but common.

If I were a kid today the first thing I would do is jailbreak my iPad, a process waaaaay easier than getting on the internet and finding apps for Palm before the age of filesharing.

Of course the difference being that I didn't lose the warranty on my Palm pilot for not using official software, but I would for jailbreaking my iPad.

Playing farmville all day does not a hacker make, but coding your own apps? tweaking the OS? that's a great start, too bad first you have to convince your parents of letting you void the warranty on a $500 device.

Good luck with that.

"“I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”"

http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

http://www.spartacusrex.com/terminalide.htm

Just that there are much better choices than Java/Android SDK.

I'm pretty happy with everything on my phone: the Google apps are great, the Kindle app is completely fine, AndChat, Grooveshark, Songbird, a bunch of emulators for games...all works just fine. Some apps don't look great on the tablet, but I use the tablet almost exclusively for Kindle and ePub reading (works fine) and some web browsing (ditto).

I've tried many mail apps for my Android tablet, and none comes close to the mail app for iOS. The one exception is the Gmail app -- but I don't use gmail (ironically, for lock-in reasons).

I dupe all my email from my Google Apps accounts to a local server, so it's not a big deal for me.

Why ? Because Apple/community encourages developers to rethink the tablet experience. Android encourages them to simply scale.

One area Apple have a significant advantage is with kids who've grown up with iPod Touches (or iPods Touch for the pedants) and are therefore familiar with iOS and the apps available on the app store.

If I were looking for a present (a very generous present I might add) for kids between 8 and 18, I'd be hyper aware that they may have opinions on what they want and be guided by that.

The learning curve is nothing at that age.

Being children their interests do change often but helping them in their schooling, something that is self directed so when mom isn't around to encourage them the software itself is engaging enough to do so.

So I am up for recommendations. I am more than willing to load up apps for whichever tablet I give them and in fact would be much happier if I could deliver them experience out of the box.

But from what I've seen so far, people use it exactly like a bigger iPad. It seems too big to use it as a 4"-7" device, covering it from the back with your hole hand. You'll probably end up using either with 2 hands, or by the side, like the bigger iPad, so there's not much improvement over the bigger iPad there. It is lighter, though.

That wasn't true of the iPad, nor of the 10" Android tablet (a development board) I had at home for a while. With those, the choice was always between the big tablet and the laptop, and my experience was the laptop always won.

Obviously, the one spot where a 7" tablet fails is the important use case of carrying it around while not using it. So the phone isn't going away. Nor, obviously is the laptop.

But my surprise is that, unlike the 10" model, there was space in my life for a 7" tablet. It's really a very different kind of thing, and it's not surprising Apple wants to play in that world.

The 1.5 cm is a huge difference for most people being able to comfortably hold it the way I and most people I've seen seem to prefer to hold the Nexus 7: in portrait mode, with my thumb on one side and my four fingers on the other. I found a book that is the exact width of the iPad Mini (and it's lighter) and it hurts my hand to try to stretch it that way.

I'm sure some people with large hands will be able to hold it that way, but my opinion (I don't think you're insane if you disagree) is that most people will not be able to do so comfortably.

In short, 15 mm isn't a large difference in the abstract, but it's quite a lot of difference "at the margin," which is what I think we're talking about. I think it takes you from dimensions that maybe 80-90% of people can hold comfortably in the way I've described to ones that perhaps 10-20% of people can.

I sold my Nexus and have preordered an iPad Mini to see if it'll be more usable while still retaining the portability of the Nexus (which I loved - you could actually stick it in your jeans back pocket)

Browsing the web was fundamentally frustrating for me on the Nexus 7 because you'd either be served a mobile site which looked awful because it was meant for a 4 inch screen or you'd be served a desktop site where you had to do a lot of pinching and scrolling to get the text to a readable state which felt like more work than it was worth.

Especially in horizontal mode the Nexus 7 felt like browsing the web through a letterbox because the OS is quite greedy with the screen real estate and the 16:10 doesn't have that many pixels to begin with.

I find I use the nexus 7 far more than any other tablet I have (though admittedly, I don't have an iPad, and even the iPad mini is slightly priced out of my "purchase without thinking twice" range. The only time it isn't ideal for me is when I'm trying to read schematics. At that point I tend to grab one of the 10" tablets I have.

It's not that I'm planning on rocking it like this often, but it's really practical for when you're moving between rooms and have a lot of other stuff to carry.

Home to measure my jeans pockets I guess.

Again, this seems like splitting hairs to me -- trying to come up with something that makes the mini "special" and not just another 7" tablet. Why can't it be just another 7" tablet?

Neither seems particularly significant to me when compared with a 4" phone or 10" tablet which are vastly larger jumps. But obviously that won't stop folks from arguing about it.