iPad or Tab....

The medical apps you find will largely be iOS, at least for a long time. Most practices and many hospitals use iPads and iOS devices now in order to replace reams of paperwork. Many colleges and medical degrees have even started including iPads in their tuition as they discovered it was actually cheaper to do than support the printing of all the medical documents and journals that students required for their studies. In Medicine, it's the safest way to go.

Facetime is somewhat like skype, the advantage is the technology is built into every iOS device, so it's a simple matter of knowing your friend's iTunes account name (eg. "JohnSmith@Me.com") and you can be connected with them. Skype is OK too, as is Google Voice, but trying to make IP calls with them I've found less than simple to do. I always seem to encounter some issue or another. You can also still download these on iOS, so if you want to videocall a friend with an android device, it's still doable.

One thing to note though is that when going iPad your phones won't play as nicely as an iPhone would. iCloud services ensure your photos and your contacts, calendars etc. sync between your iOS products. Android does similar, and I've set this up for clients, but it's not always that convenient to establish, or it ties you in to a specific calendar etc. app that you need to use across all devices. If you don't really need your schedule synced up to your iPad though this isn't really a big issue.

Wireless printing, again is also a lot simpler on the iPad. Most wireless printers "just work" with iPad. With Android, only select brands (mostly HP) support it, and even then you need to install additional software and do some configuring for it to work.

iPad 3 would be worth the extra expense. It has a newer CPU, the higher resolution screen and a much better camera. The iPad 2 camera has no ability to focus, it's frustrating if you ever need to actually take a photo (and in medicine, you more than likely will). The CPU difference I can tell you will mean that it will get software updates in the future that the older iPad 2 will not. Coupled with the new hardware improvements it makkes the 3 more than worth the while.

srsly78 wrote: »

Facetime is utter rubbish, because it only works on apple products. Thus you cannot use it to contact the majority of people. Skype works fine with video chat on many devices (apple or android or other), some older devices are still voice only tho.

Avoid anything that locks you in to that platform.

Again, Facetime's advantage is everyone who owns an Apple product with a front-facing camera, already has the feature enabled and ready for use. And again, you can still install Skype, which works just fine on the iPad.

This isn't about fanboyism, this is a particular OP situation where specific needs are being met.

You can of course go with an Android device, but be prepared that many of the medical professionals you encounter will be interfacing in iOS; that you will need to perform additional setup to do printing (and your list of compatible printers will be narrower); etc.

The android market also "locks" you in, the only difference is there is an unlock, and then you are free to download from wherever you wish. This has some advantages and disadvantages such as you can distribute corporate apps privately without going through the App Store, but you can also encounter malicious software far more frequently this same way. From a development standpoint too there are more compatibility issues that an app developer needs to account for (and I'll use skype as an example: video calls werent supported on a lot of Android devices this same time last year because of software issues. you can read up on their software update notes for more details).

The Apple iOS API meanwhile is simple in that if you can get it working once, it's distributed across the platform quite effortlessly. With android a medical developer might only make an App that works on a few types of android tablet that have particular CPUs, screen sizes, and available RAM in them. To reiterate: the adoption rate in medicine of iOS is far higher than that of android. This should be the first consideration of the purchase. While it is true some enterprise apps might be exclusive to android or exclusive to iOS, in medicine you will encounter iOS exclusivity far more often. Enterprises enjoy the fact that many of the features I discussed (like Airprint) are ready right out of the box, and require no additional tinkering.

srsly78 wrote: »

You may be correct about apples first mover advantage in some areas, but are missing the point. ANYTHING that is "exclusive" should be avoided. Apple only printing? Why in the name of god would anyone use this? Anything exclusive to android should also be avoided.

Airprinting has the major advantage at this point of being widely adopted by most Printer brands on new models (HP having a wide adoption of it); Also, the whole idea behind Airprint is it's a ready-to-go printing function: You connect to a Wifi network, your iOS device sees the printer, and it prints. It's that simple, and it just works. There are no additional drivers to install. The printer itself is preinstalled with the protocols it needs to communicate with an iOS device. Again, this means no additional or extraordinary setup or downloading of additional apps or software is required.

It's not so much that the concept is "exclusive" to Apple (nor should it be) but Google hasn't established it's own standard protocol for this sort of thing yet. Hopefully it will. In the meantime HP printers have a service called ePrinting which is kind of a band-aid for Android printing, but tbf it's marketed very well as a remote printing service, since you don't need to share the same wifi network as your printer to work it.

Torqay wrote: »

A man after me own heart!

It's an abomination.

Android's file management is a lot simpler for sure (still requires an additional app download though). But further to the OP's situation, the iPad 3 still stands out as their best option. I personally just use the Windows Skydrive app for my files and it's available on either platform. Skydrive is kinda sexy because you can read your word documents from it without downloading additional apps. You just need eg. Pages or Docs to Go if you need to perform edits.

Not a big fan of iTunes either. But their match service is actually pretty handy for your music.