Choosing the ‘best’ tablet has always been something of a fraught affair. With a plethora of hardware and software choices available to the end user, finding the right device often becomes rather more difficult than it ought to be.
This is only compounded by bold marketing claims from the likes of Apple, who claim that devices such as the iPad Air 2 can offer as much power as a personal computer. To this end, UK consumer rights group ‘Which?‘ has gathered the most prominent devices in the market at the moment and put them to the test.
As might be expected, the results are disparate. Based on the popular benchmark program GeekBench, the i5 version of the Surface Pro 3 came out on top during the test, achieving a score of 5069. This was followed by the iPad Air 2 with 4046, and the Google Nexus 9 with 3537.
And perhaps most surprisingly, it was the Apple iPad Mini 3 that came bottom of the list of ten, beaten even by the Tesco Hudl 2, a cheap budget tablet manufactured by the UK retail giant.
Of course, things are not quite as simple as they first appear, and there are many difference between the various devices that a benchmark test cannot clear, not least the fact that the Surface Pro 3 could also as easily have been entered against laptop computers. Benchmarks are also notorious for failing to reflect real world usage, and have been marred by reports in recent years that the likes of Samsung has been optimizing its devices to excel in such tests.
Regardless, that the iPad Mini 3 has scored so low is quite a surprise, proving that optimizations aren’t everything when it comes to ensuring fluid performance (and perhaps an incentive to keep the hyperbole somewhat in check.)
Do these results surprise you? Let us know in the comments below.
