Tablet wars. Gotta love ‘em.

I found this interesting article from John Gruber at daringfireball.net. He rips into Walt Mossberg’s review of the iPad 2. Specifically, he focuses on the Mossberg’s drawbacks of the iPad 2:

So Mossberg’s second “downside” is that battery life for movie playback — with the brightness set 25 percent higher than Apple’s factory default — exceeds Apple’s stated 10 hours by nine minutes. Apple says you can play video for 10 hours, Mossberg gets 10 hours and nine minutes, and it’s a downside?

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I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a review where a product that exceeds the manufacturer’s stated specs for battery life gets dinged for battery life.

I gotta say I agree with Gruber’s disagreement of Mossberg’s battery life “drawback”. It seems to be really reaching, but then again, a lot of the iPad 2 naysayers are doing the same thing.

The iPad 2 is a real thing that you can go buy in a store tomorrow. What is Mossberg comparing the iPad to? An imaginary tablet, available today, that does have Flash Player and 4G networking, on which neither technology has an adverse effect on battery life? Why not list the lack of a quad-core processor, instead of the iPad 2’s actual dual-cure one, as a drawback, too?

Bingo. I don’t think I could have stated that better myself. I find it puzzling that Mossberg would mention Flash/4G as drawbacks on the iPad 2 and those drawbacks are not even working on the competitors’ tablets Mossberg mentioned. I guess it comes down to pleasing everyone:

Mossberg’s entire review is only 1,500 words; measured by the word, a full third of what he has to say about it are these “drawbacks”. By contrast, his 1,200-word review of the Motorola Xoom — a tablet nearly everyone, including Mossberg, agrees is inferior to the iPad 2 — contains one 62-word paragraph of “downsides”.

Sounds like Mossberg was tired of being called an Apple lover

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• Apple iPhone 3G Review
• macbook pro hath arrived

Post written by Bwana