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Hi there! It's been a while hasn't it? I've been busy with the team at The Review
Room, lots of exciting stuff happening over there and more on that later.
Late last year, we touted Samsung's Tab 7.7 as the best 7 inch tablet in the market.
A year later, I still love it's design, the look and feel of the hardware. Way back
then, it really didn't have that much competition. Of course, this year has been the year of
7 inch tablets, culminating in the release of the iPad mini last week.
Now, I wondered, what if the Tab 7.7 had just been released? How would it stack up against
the new iPad mini? Let's have a look and see how this years old model does against
Apple's latest tablet.
Both tablets are designed to be held naturally in portrait mode and the front camera is positioned
accordingly on both devices. Because they're both manufactured with such precision and
with high quality materials, it's actually quite hard to tell them apart. Truth be told,
the Tab 7.7 is a little easier to hold because it is a little narrower.
The iPad is 7 point 2 millimeters thin compared to the 7.8 millimeters of the Tab 7.7, so
we're splitting hairs there. The iPad mini weighs in at three hundred and eight grams
and the Tab 7.7 is only 25 grams more - not even noticeable given the dimensions are so
similar.
The iPad Mini has a 5 megapixel camera on the back, where the Tab 7.7 has a 3 megapixel
camera. However, the Tab 7.7 fights back with a 2 megapixel camera on front which gives
it a small advantage for video calls compared with the iPad Mini's 1.2 megapixel camera.
Display wise, the iPad Mini has a ten twenty four by seven sixty eight pixel resolution
which delivers a hundred and sixty three pixels per inch density, compared to the Tab 7.7
which has a twelve eighty by eight hundred pixel resolution that provides a one hundred
and ninety six pixels per inch density. The iPad Mini uses an IPS screen for bright, clear
colours and wide viewing angles. However the Tab 7.7 has a Super AMOLED Plus display which,
even to this day, stands out as one of the finest small tablet displays I've ever seen.
The iPad mini is run by an A5 dual core processor with half a gig of RAM, versus the Tab 7.7
which is also powered by a dual core processor. When we ran some benchmarking, we got some
interesting results. For Geekbench computational scoring, the iPad Mini scored 758, and the
Tab 7.7 ????. In GLBenchmark, the 720p onscreen test gave the iPad Mini a fifty nine frames
a second versus the Tab 7.7 fifty one frames a second.
In browsing, the iPad mini scored one hundred and twenty thousand on Browsermark, compared
to one hundred and thirty three thousand for the Tab 7.7. And finally on Sunspider, the
iPad mini posted a time of fourteen ninety eight milliseconds compared to the Tab 7.7
eleven seventy four milliseconds. Speaking of browsing, the tab 7.7 shows a
little bit more information in portrait mode, but the iPad Mini covers a lot more of a webpage
in landscape.
So the tab 7.7 is actually superior in most of the tests, and it's pretty old as far
as tablets go having been released almost a year ago.
Unfortunately in Australia, the Tab 7.7 never got past Android 3.2, and upgrades have been
sporadic around the world. However, I have flashed a custom ROM based on Cyanogen Mod
10 and it works extremely well, providing all the features of Jelly Bean OS. The iPad
Mini on the other hand, came out with iOS 6 on the day of launch and will continue to
get updates as part of Apple's global delivery.
I won't repeat the content and app comparison between iOS and Android but there are issues
facing tablet-specific apps for Android, which probably stifled the 7.7 back when it was
launched. But the fact is this - from a design and hardware perspective, the 7.7 led the
way for Android tablets back then, and as we just showed, it can still go toe to toe
today and in many cases surpass Apple's latest product when it comes to benchmarking.
So that's our comparison of the iPad mini versus the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7. If you
want to see The Review Room's iPad mini benchmark comparison with the Nexus 7, click
over here. If you want to see the Review Room's iPad versus Nexus 7 general comparison, click
over here.
We'd love to hear your comments below and remember to share and like this video if you
found it useful.
Great to see you again, and you know what? You haven't changed a bit.
Until next time!