Hey Charles,

Reading this is a little funny because I noticed almost the exact same thing in my tablet experiments!

I've done some looking around. I've found the iPad wins hands down. Apple has always been a visual experience company that cares about that stuff.

Many months back, I examined the Motorola Xoom in the store, comparing to the iPad 2 that was sitting there; it wasn't even close. It wasn't a true image display quality comparison because, unlike the iPad, they didn't even bother to have a true 'display mode' for the Xoom, and there were no high-quality images loaded, just (incredibly crappy) pix taken with its camera. Another part of the problem was that the Xoom's display was so glossy and so easily covered with fingerprints that it interfered with the viewing experience. I also found the image-to-image transition to be far more fluid and natural on the iPad. Last but not least, the entire graphical user interface on that version of Android (3.1 I think) was just very disappointing... it seemed like they just 'put it out', whereas Apple did a study on the subject and engineered theirs. I've never felt that Google sees value in the presentation layer, incidentally.

They do have a new version of Android coming out, I believe .. Ice Cream Sandwich? .. but I'm not sure whether it's for the tablet or for the phones. Anyway, it may help with the fluidity.

I also own an HP Touchpad tablet. I like the webOS operation system, but there are several issues with it's presentation abilities:

- It is 18-bit verses the iPad's 24-bit, meaning that it fundamentally will probably not look as good.
- It also stutters when transitioning between images, handling the first few OK but later choking. Was able to partially fix this by turning off logging, but it's still nowhere near as fluid as my friend's iPad 1 (note the "1")
- Most importantly, or sadly, the Touchpad auto expands the image to fill the screen... so if you have an image < 1024 wide (like an 800 pixel wide image), it will auto expand it, diminishing the quality. This is a fatal flaw IMO when it comes to displaying images
- Some pictures are sharp, whereas others simply do not and will not look sharp. It doesn't matter if the resolution is large or if I resharpen them and reload them: there's something going on here with the display
- Even text doesn't look super sharp on the Touchpad. This affects the viewing experience on images too, of course

The iPad doesn't seem to have ANY of these issues. It is therefore a much better tablet for a photographer to display his work than the HP Touchpad.

Btw, I've found that if I display my images in the Touchpad's file mgmt application that they look sharper. Odd.

With Android, how much is related to the hardware verses the Operating System, or even the application? Don't know.

Have you tried the Samsung Galaxy and the new Sony S? They may indeed be better.

G