Nexus 7 Destroys iPad Mini in Drop Test [VIDEO]

The iPad mini hit stores Friday, and the folks at SquareTrade are back with a video of what the tablet does when it hits somewhere else: the pavement.

[More from Mashable: iPad Mini Launch in NYC Gets Late Start [VIDEO]]

The group dropped an iPad mini, Nexus 7, and iPad 3 onto concrete and into water to see how they survive.

Each tablet was dropped from the SquareTrade “drop bot” to ensure that each was dropped the same way.

[More from Mashable: iPad Mini and iPad 4 Teardowns Show They’re Hard to Fix]

When dropped on its corner, the iPad mini survived with minimal damage to just the corner where it came in contact with the pavement. The Nexus 7 screen cracked on the edge of the screen, and the iPad 3 took a serious beating, cracking in a number of places on the screen.

SEE ALSO: iPhone 5 Humiliates Galaxy S III in Drop Test

When dropped directly on the screen, the iPad mini took a pretty hard beating, cracking across the screen in a number of places, so much so that the screen would definitely need to be replaced before you could continue to use the tablet, the same for the iPad 3. The Nexus 7 survived the fall, however, with just a few bumps and bruises.

All that’s well and good, but what happens when you drop your tablet in water? The iPad mini appeared to survive a 10-second dunk with no problem. The iPad 3 survived the dunk, but had a few malfunctions, and the Nexus 7 reset itself and appeared unresponsive after getting wet.

Check out the video above to see the test for yourself. Let us know what you think of the results in the comments.

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This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Video: Virgin's iPad Mag 'Project' Gets Animated, Coming Tuesday

{"s" : "nws","k" : "a00,a50,b00,b60,c10,g00,h00,l10,p20,t10,v00","o" : "","j" : ""} Robert Andrews, On Monday November 29, 2010, 12:26 pm EST

Word reaches us that Virgin’s virgin iPad-only magazine is Christened “Project” and is due to hit the tablet’s iTunes Store at this link with a launch by Richard Branson in New York on Tuesday; price unknown.

A new unit dubbed Virgin Digital Publishing has tapped Anthony Noguera, the former FHM UK editor-in-chief and editorial director of publisher Emap/Bauer’s mens division who left in 2009, to produce the mag.

Note the “magazine”‘s “cover” - the publisher tells us:: “We can’t think of any other mags whose front cover is a video.” In fact, there was at least one such mag in our rundown of nu-wave tablet magazines earlier this year, in which we said that introducing such non-standard features is likely to increase magazine production costs considerably. But then, Project is a totally new launch and will seemingly work this way from the get-go.

News of the mag emerged this summer. Though some onlookers have written about Project in the same breath as News Corp.‘s upcoming The Daily tablet-only mag, the differences are clear - the latter’s a newsy, daily edition; the other’s a mostly-monthly, feature-led title focusing on “design, entertainment, technology, entrepreneurs”. In fact, Project seems to have more in common with GQ or Wired, the tech mag whose own iPad edition turned out less whizz-bang than Adobe’s initial demos, than with a News Corp (NSDQ:NWS - News). newspaper.

Says Virgin Digital Publishing: “Project is what we like to think of as a ‘living magazine’ – evolving and updating throughout the month and taking advantage of the iPad’s capabilities to deliver a really innovative reader experience. Unlike a regular magazine you won’t just read Project once and then forget about it. The idea is that Project will be something that readers treat as a daily destination, offering breaking news, reader polls and blogs. That, and it has all the interactivity, responsiveness and immersion you would expect from the iPad experience.” An accompanying blog is live at projectmag.com, prepopulated with several posts about fashion, internet, movies, games etc.

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iPad Shows Age in Blackberry PlayBook Video

Research in Motion is taking shots at Apple with its new Blackberry PlayBook video, in which it shows how the PlayBook's web browser embarrasses the iPad's in speed tests.

The demonstrator loads several Websites side-by-side on the PlayBook and the iPad, with cache and cookies cleared. Websites UEFA.com and CBS.com are both rendered several seconds faster on the PlayBook than on the iPad. The demonstrator also points out how the Blackberry PlayBook can load Adobe Flash content.

In another example, the iPad and Playbook take the Acid3 web standards test. Although both tablets score 100 points, the iPad is left with a rendering artifact, which supposedly translates to lower fidelity on real-world Websites. A final test shows the tablets running JavaScript and HTML5 animations on the Pocket Full of Canvas website. The PlayBook runs the animation smoothly, while the iPad looks like it's running the animation at about two frames per second.

As plenty of YouTube commenters have noted, the video is a pretty cheap shot. It compares a six-month-old product with a device that won't be available until early next year. Given Apple's tendency to refresh iOS products on a yearly basis, there's a fairly good chance that a faster iPad will launch around the same time as RIM's PlayBook.

I, personally, would have liked to see more of the PlayBook browser in action: does it scroll smoothly through web pages the way the iPad does? Does it share the iPad's annoying tendency to only render part of a page at a time? Initial load times and animations only tell part of the story.

What RIM's video does demonstrate is that the Blackberry Playbook still looks promising. Even if it doesn't blow the next iPad out of the water, it'll hold its own--at least when it comes to loading Web pages.

And, for better or worse, it'll run Flash.

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iOS 4.2 for iPad in 10 minutes [video] | TiPb

Apple is set to release the long — long! — awaited iOS 4.2 for iPad any day now and the video above has everything you need to know about it in just 10 minutes. We’re talking AirPrint, AirPlay, multitasking, folders, Game Center, unified inbox and threaded email, Find in Safari page, and much, much, more.

So hit play for the highlights and when you’re ready for more head on over to our complete iOS 4.2 for iPad walkthrough and we’ll take you step by step through all the changes — what’s new and what’s improved.

(We’ve also got iOS 4.2 for iPhone in 5 minutes, and a look at iOS 4.2 on iPhone 3G performance, so check those out as well.)

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