Apple and its line of iPads have long been cornering the market — and the same can be said for the iPad Mini 3 which has managed to sell well despite the demand for tablets cooling worldwide. Here is how the premium aluminum bodied iPad Mini 3 compares to the budget-priced Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0.

Design

There is little similarity between both of these tablets. The iPad Mini 3 comes with a unibody aluminum chassis and a familiar home button just below the display that incorporates a finger print reader. Compared to this, the Galaxy Tab A 8.0 looks much cheaper as it has a plastic body with a matte finish and only has one speaker, which, in truth, does not provide a good audio experience. As for colors, the device from Apple comes in space gray, gold and silver while its competitor, which also has three color options, offer blue, white and titanium.

Display

The displays on the two devices are equal in terms of size but the iPad Mini 3 has a much sharper version. The iPad Mini 3 has an IPS LCD screen measuring 7.9 inches with a resolution of 1536 x 2048 pixels and a density of 324 pixels per inch, while the Galaxy Tab A 8.0 has a TFT screen measuring 8.0 inches with a resolution of 768 x 1024 pixels and a density of 160 pixels per inch.

Specs

When it comes to hardware, both devices are quite evenly matched. The iPad Mini 3 comes with an Apple A7 chipset, a Cyclone CPU with two cores clocked at 1.3 GHz and a PowerVR G6430 GPU. The tablet from Samsung has a Snapdragon CPU with four cores clocked at 1.2 GHz.

Memory

There is no memory slot on the iPad Mini 3 which means external storage cannot be added. As for the Galaxy Tab A 8.0, its slot allows for the addition of up to 128 GB. Comparing their RAM, the iPad Mini 3 has 1 GB while the Galaxy Tab A 8.0 with 16 GB of onboard storage has 1.5 GB; its 32 GB model has 2 GB.

Price

The price of the Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0 sells from $199 on Amazon to $230 on other sites while the 16 GB iPad Mini 3 costs $400.