Let’s talk about the iPad, the Steam Deck, and my new addition – the Lenovo Legion Go.
2024 came and went, and for me, the only thing of interest left to be announced is the iPad mini 7. According to numerous claims from leakers – it is just days away now.
I want to talk with you about mobile gaming for a bit, but also – mobile productivity, and what a good tablet is to me. If you ask somebody else what a good tablet is to them, chances are they’ll name a specific Samsung Galaxy Tab, or an iPad.
That’s great and all, but as hinted above, for me a tablet should be capable of „real gaming“ (not mobile gaming) and „real productivity“, not iPadOS or Android productivity.
I’ve attempted both for years, and apologies to the Android fans, but the iPad has been consistently better for my needs; for actual productivity. It’s not my tablet of choice anymore, though. Let me explain…
What’s good and bad about the iPad, in terms of productivity and gaming
iPad Air (Image credit – PhoneArena)
Even the cheapest modern iPad is technically powerful enough for the kind of productivity I want out of it, and iPads have a lot of great, well-optimized and fairly-priced productivity apps to get you going.
If you’re an artist, you’ll buy the Apple Pencil and use the Procreate app. If you edit videos, like I often do, you’ll get the LumaFusion app, which I consider nearly flawless for that. No stuttering, nothing to break your workflow, it just works.
But then I’ll have to do something in a web browser. And, turns out, I need the „real“ desktop PC web browsing experience, and I just can’t get it on an iPad or an Android tablet.
The default iPad web browser – Safari – actually tries to give you a true desktop experience, it has a bookmarks bar, it loads websites in their desktop format by default, but it’s still a mobile browser – a lot of more niche websites, such as admin panels and banking sites don’t load properly.
Even if they do, certain web elements won’t work; such as buttons that are supposed to open a page or a popup window, but just do nothing when you click them, which in many cases completely breaks the site’s functionality. Some websites even outright tell you to use a desktop web browser such as Chrome. Not the mobile Chrome, not the mobile Safari – the desktop browser Chrome.
