Everybody wishes the iPad 2 had a higher-resolution display like the iPhone 4, but Apple didn’t even have to go there yet.

All Apple did was put the iPad on a treadmill. The tablet shed some weight and gained some speed to become the iPad 2, and it’s incredible what a difference that makes. It feels like a brand-new product.

Most important of all is the iPad 2’s thinness. The iPad 2 is 0.34 inches thick, about 33 percent thinner than its predecessor. Now, reaching your fingers across the screen to swipe and tap is far easier than it was on the chunkier iPad 1.

People who enjoy reading will love the thinner body: Cradling an iPad 2 in your hands for an hour doesn’t feel that cumbersome. You’ll also be surprised how often you’ll be using the tablet with one hand. Even though it’s only a few ounces lighter than the older iPad (1.3 pounds versus 1.5 pounds), the changes to the tablet’s weight and ergonomics feel substantial.

The iPad 2 is only slightly thicker than a pencil.

Imagine how significant thinness and weight are for people who are considering tablets for use in a professional field that requires a lot of moving around, such as doctors who could use the iPad to replace a stack of X-rays, architects relying on an iPad as an interactive display for blueprints, or students using the iPad as an all-in-one textbook, note-taker and daily planner. The thinner and lighter a tablet gets, the more useful it becomes for various types of customers.

As a standalone device, the iPad 2’s soft keys still aren’t ideal for typing compared to a physical keyboard. However, this problem seems to be eroding over time, as the skinnier profile already makes it easier to hold the device with one hand while pecking away on keys with the other.

Also, Apple’s Smart Cover protective accessory (sold separately for $40 to $70) is a cover that folds to create an angle to prop up the device so you can type on it more comfortably. The built-in magnets, which cling to the side of the iPad, are very cool and make the cover extremely easy to take off or put on. Personally, I prefer using most gadgets bareback, but the Smart Cover is the only cover I’d consider keeping with the iPad 2 since it’s so easy to take off.

The other most important change is speed. Apple claims the new A5 processor in the iPad 2 offers double the performance of the original iPad. Indeed, apps and websites load more quickly, and 3-D games look more detailed; the entire iOS experience is just buttery smooth.

Web performance has largely improved, thanks to iOS 4.3, the latest software update shipping with the iPad 2, which includes an improved JavaScript-rendering engine for Safari. The iPad 2 took 2,180 milliseconds to complete a SunSpider benchmark test, whereas the iPad 1 took 3,353 milliseconds. Running the earlier iOS 4.2, the iPad 1 took over 8,100 milliseconds to complete the same test. That means JavaScript-heavy websites (such as Gmail) should run significantly faster.

Surprisingly, despite the major speed boost, the iPad 2 retains a 10-hour battery life, the same as the slower, first-gen iPad.

You can’t deny Dell some hard-fought gee-whiz cred with the new Inspiron Duo.

In a world of commoditized portables, it is nothing if not a unique product. Show it off to your friends; it looks like a netbook, and you pop open the laptop-like clamshell and wait for the bored expression to appear. Then comes the sucker punch: you rotate the screen horizontally within its frame and snap the laptop back shut. Ta-da, it’s a freakin’ tablet, bro! People are duly impressed. It’s a neat trick and, at the very least, a clever feat of engineering.

But what is the Dell Inspiron Duo? Cut through the mystery and you will find — sorry to burst your bubble — a Windows netbook with a rotating touchscreen.

And that begs the question, what is it good for?

Well, we’re still working on that one.

This is the problem with dual-function gadgets in general: They rarely do either of the things they’re designed for very well. As a netbook, the Duo is at least passable. While it’s heavier than other 10-inch netbooks by up to half a pound, it’s well designed and looks good, and the 1366 x 768 screen’s brightness is about average for the category. But performance is unfortunately poor all around (a 1.5-GHz Atom doesn’t get you very far), and the two measly USB ports could stand an upgrade.

As a tablet, the Duo fares considerably worse. Here, its three pounds of heft are way too much for extended use, and the clamshell design adds an uncomfortable thickness to the device that makes it hard to hold. The screen also suffers from the same poor viewing-angle problems that sunk the Streak 7. If you’re not holding it dead on, the screen is virtually illegible.

Of course, the biggest problem here really isn’t Dell’s fault, it’s that Windows just doesn’t work very well for touchscreen devices, especially not on a small scale like this. Use the Duo in tablet mode for more than three minutes and your skin starts to crawl. You want to get something done quickly. You try to hit Control-C. Soon you find you’re reaching over and over for a keyboard that isn’t there. Except, of course, it is. Thank God for that.

WIRED 320GB hard drive is bigger than my laptop’s. Flipping system works well, feels sturdy. Dell Stage custom launcher app loads automatically in tablet mode, makes Windows a bit more useful as a slate. Duo Audio Station ($100 more) adds much-improved audio and a vertical docking system.

TIRED Tediously slow all around; get used to a lot of waiting. Screen is hideous. Too heavy for regular, table-free use.

Photos courtesy of Dell

As Sly Stone said, the nicer the nice, the higher the price.

The question is, is the more expensive Xoom nicer than the comparable iPad?

The experience is markedly different, that’s for sure. Anyone familiar with Apple’s market-leading tablet — and the Xoom invites the comparison — will face a few moments of disorientation when picking up the Xoom for the first time. A few details are unsettling to iPad users, such as the location of the power button (on the rear of the device), the lack of front-facing command buttons, and the unfamiliar location of the volume rocker.

Those details will be irrelevant to non-Apple users, of course, but even dedicated Android fans will find that the Xoom’s version of the OS, Android 3.0 Honeycomb, takes a bit of getting used to.

Some things don’t work the same as they do on older versions of Android. For instance, instead of holding down the (virtual) Home button to see a list of running apps, there’s now a separate icon for displaying a vertical menu of apps. To see the full list of installed apps, you press a separate Apps button in the upper right of the screen.

And while the lack of front hardware buttons gives the device a cleaner look, it does mean that virtual buttons clutter up the display and rob you of screen space in most applications. It’s a trade-off.

But once you’ve oriented yourself to Honeycomb’s and Xoom’s idiosyncracies, what emerges is a tablet that’s very well-suited to reading and to video.

The Xoom has a 10.1-inch screen (measuring 8.5 inches by 5.25 inches), and it’s as bright and sharp as any other high-end tablet. We did notice a slightly discolored band running down the edge of the screen on one side, but since we can’t compare it to other Xooms yet, we don’t know if this is a problem with our review unit or a more general manufacturing defect.

The 1280 x 800 screen is pretty close to a standard widescreen aspect ratio, so videos can fill the whole screen with minimal clipping.

The Xoom is a little bit shorter than the iPad in landscape mode, but that means that when you flip the Xoom to portrait mode, the screen is skinnier and taller. This is actually perfect for reading books, scrolling down web pages, or catching up on Instapaper. It’s comfortable to hold the Xoom with one hand while you swipe with the other, and — because the vertical page is so tall — there’s less swiping than on smaller screens.

The rubbery back panel has enough grip that you don’t really need to clamp onto the thing while you’re reading. If you feel fatigued by holding your iPad one-handed for long periods of time as we do, you’ll appreciate this.

In short, it’s an excellent, basic media consumption device — as long as your media don’t rely on stellar audio. If you’re planning on zoning out with a movie or a few videos, we’d recommend keeping a decent pair of headphones on hand.

The big problem with the sound? The speakers are on the back of the tablet. They sound fine if you turn the tablet around to face the speakers toward you, but if you’re holding the Xoom so you can see its screen, the sound is projecting away from your head. Everything sounds muffled: Movie dialogue is harder to understand, and music just sounds dead and lifeless.

There’s an optional dock with speakers built in, but when you plop the Xoom into the dock to watch a movie, the dock speakers sit behind the tablet, too. So it’s the same problem all over again, just a little louder.

Make no mistake: Dell will not be sitting out the Tablet Wars the way it did during the Struggle Against Smartphones. No, Dell is fighting, and by that I mean it is intent on pouring money into what is obviously a hole of futility.

Its latest volley in the skirmish is the Dell Streak 7, an overgrown version of the 5-inch tablet it kinda-sorta released last year. And in most ways the Streak 7 is a typical Dell affair: foolishly overdesigned in an attempt to stand out, and coming up short all around.

The size (7 inches diagonal) and operating system (dusty old Android 2.2) pit the Streak 7 squarely against the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Sadly, that is a battle that the Streak loses on virtually every front. Are looks important to you? The weird slopes and baffling button placement of the Streak 7 make it less comfortable to hold and far less pretty than the Tab. Or perhaps you’d like a something with a really nice display? The Streak 7 is an utter disaster on this front. It’s bad enough that the 800 x 480 display looks visibly chunky, but the viewing angle is so poor that moving your head even a few degrees from dead center creates a screen-door effect so bad that it borders on nauseating. It’s not just the worst tablet display I’ve ever seen, it’s the worst display of any kind I’ve seen since the dawn of the LCD screen.

Other drawbacks are palpable but pale next to the screen debacle: The Streak 7 can’t charge at all via USB — not even trickle charge. It needs wall power, and it gets incredibly hot to the touch after a few hours of use. Well, after an hour of use: We thought we were in for an easy “Tired” when we read reports that the Streak 7 could only muster five hours of battery life vs. seven or more for its competition. We were aghast when it turned out that the tablet crapped out after a mere two hours (and three minutes!) of video watching on the device (tested with radios on).

There is but one bright spot with the Streak 7, and that is performance: Equipped with the hype-fueled Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, the tablet absolutely rips at web page rendering, app loading, running Flash, and just about everything else. If we could actually make out the display, and the battery alert wasn’t constantly threatening to shut the thing down, it’d be totally awesome.

WIRED: Fast. Cheap.

TIRED: Mattel Football had a better screen. Dismal battery life. Crashed twice — once going dark for an hour — in the first day of testing.

Photos: Jonathan Snyder/Wired