iPad or Nexus 7: Which Tablet is Tougher?
SquareTrade's "Drop Day" crew puts Apple's iPad and Google's Nexus 7 to the toughness test, dropping and dunking the tablets to see which is the better survivor.
Nobody is going to mistake the or for a Panasonic Toughbook, but it's nice to know if your next tablet can survive a typical fall or a dunk in the water. Of course, you probably don't want to test this out yourself, so the team at extended warranty service provider SquareTrade has done it for you.
The SquareTrade crew got its hands on Apple's and Google's latest tablets and put them through some simple toughness tests (see video below). The firm reports that nine out 10 warranty claims for tablets are the results of drops and spill, so that's what they focused on in their testing.
PCMag can't verify SquareTrade's results, but the upshot is that Google's Nexus 7 appears to be lot tougher than Apple's new iPad.
In SquareTrade's drop testing, the iPad tended to land on a corner and that resulted in cracked glass on a couple of occasions. The Nexus 7 fared better in this test, possibly because of a different weight distribution that caused it to mostly land flat rather than on a corner. And the Asus-built, Google-branded tablet is a 7-incher as compared to the nearly 10-inch iPad—less glass surface area is probably going to result in less cracking, all else being equal.
There's a human element in SquareTrade's testing, of course. With a sample size of drops as small as the couple of tests SquareTrade show us in the video, we probably shouldn't rule out the possibility that the two testers were dropping their respective tablets in different ways.
The dunk tests appear to be less subject to interpretation. Graphically, both tablets survived a dunk in a bathtub very nicely, with scrolling, tilting, touch, and video playback all working for the Nexus 7 and iPad after their dousings. However, the iPad lost all sound after getting wet, whereas the Nexus 7's audio did just fine.
The lesson, of course, is to get a case for your tablet regardless of the brand.
For more "Drop Day" toughness tests from SquareTrade, check out the Samsung Galaxy S III vs. the iPhone 4S, the new iPad vs. the iPad 2, and the iPad 2 vs. the Motorola Xoom vs. the Samsung Galaxy Tab.