A Tale of Two Tablets: ASUS MeMO Pad Smart 10 and VivoTab Smart Compared

There are some interesting things happening in the tablet world. Perhaps the biggest development of all is that Apple's iPad family is finally starting to yield market share to the competition, and that's primarily due to the increasing number of affordable Android slates being pumped out by name brand manufactures. At first, pedestrian price tags were only attached to Android tablets in the 7-inch range, but more recently we've started seeing large slates come down in cost. One of the more intriguing options is the Asus MeMO Pad Smart 10, a 10.1-inch slate that streets for as little as $280, or about half the price of a regular sized iPad. Given that it's one of the least expensive 10.1-inch Android tablets on the market, we told Asus we had to have one to evaluate, and they obliged.

What's also interesting in the land of tablets is the emergence of Microsoft's touch-friendly Windows 8/RT software. Microsoft made a concerted effort to build a unified platform that's just as capable on mobile devices (if not more so) than it is on the desktop, and that's given rise to a new generation of Windows hardware, including tablets and hybrids. In addition to the MeMO Pad mentioned above, Asus sent us its VivoTab Smart, another 10.1-inch tablet, only it's built on a x86 foundation and is running a full version of Windows 8 -- gnarly...