Tablets are just great for gaming. Everything that modern cellphones bring to games — touch screens, tilt sensitivity and of course constant Internet access — the tablets do better. The screens are finer and larger and the games are more immersive. And you can use a tablet in ways and places that rarely work for even the smallest netbooks.
I have two laptops: a big powerful HP and a teeny battery-efficient Asus. But because of the ways the screens and controls are configured, I would never play a game on the subway, in a bar or as a car passenger on either of them. With a tablet it’s no problem.
I’ve even found myself playing tablet games at home instead of firing up a big console or PC game. It’s just so easy to relax on the couch and start tapping away. In terms of the play itself, I found that because a tablet’s screen is larger than a phone’s and because you tend to use tablets for longer periods at a stretch, the games can become more involved and more strategic and have longer-term ambitions.
In terms of basic usability, the three tablets I tried — the Apple (AAPL) iPad 2, Motorola Xoom (which uses Google’s (GOOG) Android system), and the BlackBerry PlayBook — are even more similar to one another than the phones. Each has only a few buttons for basics like power and volume. Everything else is controlled on the touch screen. The iPad 2 is the thinnest but also has the largest footprint of the bunch while the Xoom and PlayBook are a touch thicker. The PlayBook is the smallest of the three, but that is not necessarily a bad thing because it is the only one with a reasonable chance of fitting into a large jacket pocket.
(A quick breakdown of prices and networks: The least expensive iPad 2 costs $499 and is Wi-Fi only; the top version, configured for either AT&T or Verizon, costs $829. For the Xoom, the Wi-Fi-only version costs $599; on Verizon, the Xoom costs $599.99 with a two-year contract and $799.99 with no contract. The Wi-Fi-only PlayBook ranges from $499 to $699; a cellular version of the PlayBook is expected to be released in conjunction with Sprint later this year.)
Yet as with the phones, when it comes to tablets Apple is king. I’d even go so far as to say that the iPad 2 is my favorite new game machine (narrowly eclipsing the Nintendo 3DS, which is aimed at a much younger audience). The huge worldwide community of developers who cut their teeth on iPhones is starting to take full advantage of the possibilities of the iPad 2 format, producing an array of top-notch games.
That said, if I knew I had to deal with the Web and email all day instead of play games, I would choose the Android tablet over the iPad every time. As with the phones, the Android’s Web browser and Gmail integration is superior to the iPad’s. And make no mistake: There are some excellent games on the Android tablet, just nowhere close to as many as on the iPad. As on the phones, the big question is how that gap closes or widens over the next few years.
And then we have the quite oddly named PlayBook. Only a very rare person would buy the PlayBook specifically to play games. At the moment the device is Wi-Fi only, but the big draw is that it can sync automatically with a BlackBerry phone for the all-important email and contacts functions. So if you need a BlackBerry for work, the PlayBook is a very attractive complement.
