Battle of (with?) the PRO tablets

I am changing job so I had to turn in my MacBook Pro. I am also doing some travel vacation. I have various devices at home, but I was left without a power-house laptop, being intellectually idle is not in my nature, so started to feel the loss already on the second day.

Before you judge me, please consider that I work with the mobile technology, it is my job to collect and try various gadgets.

I have an arsenal of Raspberry Pi variants, but they are all configured for command line only. I have a Linux box with good NVidia GPU for my Machine Learning training tasks, but again, it is set up for command line only. I have been using Ubuntu desktop in the past, but it is out of scope of this exercise. I am traveling, so I need to be mobile.

And then, I have 3 tablets:

• Apple iPad Pro
• Android Galaxy Pro
• Windows Chuwi Hi 8 Pro

I have figured, I can use one of them, on vacation, until I get a new MacBook laptop from my future employer.

It is not a fair study, I admit, as I should include in this comparison the Windows Surface Pro variant, but then if I had one, I would not be frustrated enough to write this post. I was forbidden to buy a personal computer laptop by my chief financial officer (CFO), err, my wife.

Let’s start with form factor comparison.

Apple iPad PRO, $1400, has the biggest, beautiful screen, the best integrated keyboard cover and the fingerprint scanner (TouchID) that saves a ton of password typing frustration. The battery life is excellent. I can say that, by far, Apple iPad has the best hardware. The Apple pen is marvelous, but it is not integrated so at this very moment I am not sure where it is.

Samsung Galaxy PRO, $800, has a beautiful, one inch smaller screen. It came with a Zagg Bluetooth keyboard that was not very good to start with and unfortunately fell apart, anyway. Now, I am using this tablet with a separate Apple keyboard and an adjustable aluminium stand which both work great, but add a lot of bulk. What drives me crazy is that I am stuck with Android 5 and currently there is a preview of 8 already out. This is a real disappointment when buying a really expensive Android device.

Chuwi, $120, comes with a tiny 8 inch screen that makes it very hard to use it with Windows 10, even in the tablet mode. The magnetic, Bluetooth keyboard has a very cool design, but the space key has to be force-pressed to work. Keyboard uses USB B and the tablet uses USB C to charge, go figure.

Usability of the PRO tablets:

Chuwi is severely under-powered and using the tablet is an absolute plain, I should have gotten the bigger, more powerful version, I would probably be happy.

The Windows anniversary update was not able to complete because of the space requirements, even after deleting everything possible, including the Android partition. Not to be able to install the updates, similary to Android is a deal breaker. Installation of the additional software is mostly out of question too, not enough space is left.

The battery on Chuwi is good enough to keep charge in case you kick the power cord off and do not realize immediately. Definitely not a solution for a train or an airplane flight.

Apple iOS is being silly. I am exercising an infinite loop of entering iTunes/iCloud password as if setting it in the first place was not enough. The two factor authentication is great, unless you are abroad and your phone number does not work, great job Apple, you just made it really frustrating for me. Why do I need the two factor authentication to download a free app from the Apple store, anyway? I already provided a TouchId, a numeric PIN and the correct iTunes/Apple ID password, why do you ask for cell phone verification every 5 minutes?

In iOS, I am not able to save and manage the received email attachments to send them to my print service. Not a “delightful experience”, not a PRO, either.

The keyboard attaches only in the landscape position, which, I guess, is standard, but I like writing articles in the portrait mode as it makes more visual sense. I find iPad keyboard very good, even on my lap.

Finally, the iPad is a single user device, so to use it I would have to delete my wife’s setting, including her drawings, I find it hard to swallow. After much frustrations I has to factory reset the iPad and were able to install all the necessary apps, including my favorite password manager. It made a world of difference, now I like using it more. It is still an addition to your personal computer, not a replacement.

Android on my Galaxy PRO is little better than iOS. To start, it is a true multi-user system. It allows file management, too. It allows me to use both Terminal and Python (iOS has it too), but it lacks a good IDE. It is possible to do, but you would have a really hard time writing Android apps on Android, which is beyond me as I would love to have a full Android Studio on the Android PRO tablet.

Android is far from being a laptop replacement, it is still inferior to Windows 10 tablets and far behind even the cheapest MacBook.

In general on mobile:

The mobile Microsoft Word app does not allow opening password protected files. It makes it kind of useless if you try to deal with agencies that require it.

Medium app does not support spellchecking and syntax checking which is probably obvious to the early-revision readers of this posts. For spellcheck on Medium, I have to go to Windows 10 on Chuwi. What is worse, Medium app does not support “select and copy all” beyond a single paragraph, even if I wanted to use Grammarly. The formatting of the document flow is sometimes off, too. Undo functionality has only one item in history and that works only if you have a keyboard to press Control-Z.

Grammarly by the way does not have a mobile version, but you can get it to work in the “desktop version” of the Chrome browser.

I am both Medium and Grammarly paying customer in case you wonder that I am ungrateful complainer.

These are only couple of examples of “app world” shortcomings, but they do multiply rapidly if you want to do anything else than respond to emails, read a website or watch a movie for which, I admit, both large tablets as superb.

So, which tablet would I take for my vacation?

I would not recommend any of them.

If I had money to burn I would double-time to the Best Buy store and get Microsoft Surface PRO.

Initially, I found Apple iPad PRO to be the least useful of the three during travel abroad, mostly because of the authentication fiasco. It is great as media consumption device, and a brilliant drawing pad for my wife. After the factory reset and installation of all my apps it became my best device.

The Chuwi tablet is a real brick most of the time, I gave up on it a long time ago. However, when I had to fill out some forms, manage some documents, I have plugged Chuwi via mini HDMI to the big monitor, used external Bluetooth Apple mouse, and, with seriously infinite patience (it performed like a machine circa 1998) I was able to finish the required tasks because it is a full Windows 10 after all. I was able to edit Medium article in Chrome browser, too, including a spellcheck. Would I write everything on Chuwi? No, I would not. It is too small, the keyboard is hard to use and battery does not last at all. However, this $120 tablet is more “PRO” than $1,000 more expensive Apple iPad! I do not advise you, however, to buy Chuwi, as it is a waste of money, it would have to have at least 4GB, or 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage to work well with Windows.

This tells you what I think about these “PRO” tablets. None of the above tablets deserve the “PRO tablet” designation in their name, if you want to do some work “on the go”, then buy premium version of Microsoft Surface PRO or similar 2-in-1 laptop.

I ended up traveling with Apple iPad PRO considering the screen size, the battery, the integrated flat keyboard and the quality of the apps available.