Which Tablet Is Best for You?

You'll go to your tablet's home screen again and again, so it's critical for the screen to look good and work efficiently. wholesale electronics suppliers

The elegantly simple BlackBerry Tablet OS home screen smoothly transitions as you swipe among open apps in the navigator pane that appears in the upper two-thirds of the screen. RIM has built gesture navigation into the bezel, so a simple swipe up reveals context-sensitive menus, while a swipe down reveals the full app screen. The navigator screen and gesture-swipe combo makes moving among open, multitasking apps particularly intuitive. BlackBerry's home screen also deserves props for allowing one-tap access to Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, battery, and general-settings info. The BlackBerry's notifications are subtle: Messages appear in the upper-right corner to tell you that the battery is running low, for instance.

Android 3.0's home screens (you get six of them) are very different from the BlackBerry offering, but perfect for people who want detailed control over how their tools are organized and presented. The new home-screen design is cleaner than that of previous Android versions, and it makes moving app icons and widgets across the six screens easy. Widgets are a compelling addition to Android, too: Google and app developers can use them to put regularly refreshed wholesale Android Tablets information--such as your calendar, your most recent e-mail messages, or the latest weather--directly on your screen. Tap the widget, and you'll proceed directly to the related app itself. These shortcuts are finger friendly, but the frequently winking updates could become more clutter than convenience.

The three core Android 3.0 navigation buttons (back, home, and recently accessed apps) appear at the lower left of the screen, while the status bar is situated at the lower right. Both sets of buttons are built into the display, and will rotate accordingly as you turn the tablet from horizontal to vertical.

Oddly, the back button doesn't behave as you might expect: Nowhere does Android note that using the back button exits an app entirely, but that's the action it performs. The button for recently accessed apps, often erroneously referred to as the multitasking button, brings up thumbnails of the five apps you've used most recently; but even though this is intended as a shortcut, it can make your finger travel more, not less, to return to an app.

I especially like the redesigned notifications, which you reveal with the tap of a finger. The Android status bar is where you'll see notifications pop up, and where you'll get easier access to oft-used settings such as airplane mode and Wi-Fi.

The Apple iOS home screen is way behind the competition in many respects. It's staid and consistent, but not at all dynamic. The bottom area has room for a maximum of six docked apps, while the rest of your apps spread across one of the multiple (up to 11) home screens. App icons are static, and unlike Android 3.0, iOS doesn't allow for widgets. iOS has no set location for notifications, either; instead, it passes along alerts in intrusive pop-up boxes. Organizing apps on different screens or into folders is tiresome, whether you're trying to do so on the iPad itself or in the iTunes desktop software. And unlike other mobile OSs, iOS buries oft-used settings under the layers of the settings menu; you'll find no shortcut here.