I remember when i first decided that i wanted a tablet. I started visiting the stores and browsing the tablets but my eyes weren't set on the iPad because i knew that there were plenty of tablets on the market and not just Apple's.
After enough research and many trips to several stores, i decided i was going to get either a Asus Transformer or a Samsung. Why not an iPad you may ask, well i didn't feel comfortable paying a fortune for a tablet with limited space, i wanted the ability to add an SD card in the future and for me a tablet without SD capabilities was a deal-breaker.
In the end i got an Asus transformer TF300T because it was the best choice when it came to value for money, plus it had Nvidia's Tegra. For me, a companies profile says a lot and both Asus and Nvidia make great products for the PC so i said "Why not". Well, i must admit that Tegra isn't quite as strong as i thought and i figured that the hard way.
Some points
When companies want to sell products, they will often mask the product in glorious marketing and the victims to this are always the consumers. Don't get me wrong, although the Tegra chip is really powerful, it wont have the performance of an iPad's chip because of the way its meant to operate on an Android tablet. When i ran several games on my tablet, it often lagged and i really wondered why but after researching i found out that due to fragmentation, the majority of games are tuned for Gingerbread, since its installed in the majority of devices, instead of Jelly Bean.
What does that mean?
Well, that means that your gaming experience won't be as it was meant to be, something like having a great Graphics card but a low end cpu, it will throttle your computers performance down and make you lose fps . In the same way that an Android device can't be as smooth as an iPad, because the software operates on a different level.
How different is Android to iOS
Well it all has to do with hardware acceleration which exists in both iOS and Android. Hardware acceleration, in plain English is when the device uses the GPU instead of the CPU alone to render the User-interface. You know how everyone, before Jelly Bean's release, said that the iPad was smoother than the Android, well it was true because the processes that handle the rendering on iOS have real-time priority on and when it detects a touch, it focuses on that unlike that of Androids which only has normal priority assigned to the rendering processes.
So no gaming on android?
I played Modern Combat 4, which i won in a Nvision competition, and it kind of lagged in some places, and although i wasn't expecting "60fps", i sure as hell wasn't expecting that much lag and discomfort on my Tegra 3. I also tried out The Avengers Initiative and i requested for a full refund after a brief 10 minute play where i figured that i just spent money on a game that lags on my device, which is more than capable of running its mediocre graphics. Games that are truly optimized for Tegra may operate better than the others but until Android figures out the problem, which is on their behalf and does a whole-lot of tweaking,we can only sit and play casual games that don't involve too many graphics like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja.
A good advice is to ignore the claims of companies and do the research for yourself by viewing videos on the game in action and asking others for their opinion on the game. Benchmarks may work magic in the PC industry but in the land of tablets, their scores don't worth much.
