Apple wins Best Mobile Tablet award at Mobile World Congress without even trying

iPad Air back

Although Apple wasn’t an exhibitor at this year’s Mobile World Congress – currently underway in Barcelona, Spain – its iPad Air has managed to snag the award for the show’s Best Mobile Tablet. The annualĀ Global Mobile Awards andĀ Mobile World Congress are both organized by the same party, the GSM Association.

A panel of judges has determined in their ruling that Apple’s latest full-size iPadĀ packs “class-leading performance in an attractive and svelte frame”, a nice recognition of Jony Ive’s design and the iPad Air’s speedy A7 chip.

More importantly, the judges singled out Apple’s tightly integrated ecosystem as a prime reason why the iPad Air has “an undisputed advantage in the number of format-optimized apps”

In describing the Best Mobile Tablet,Ā Global Mobile Awards wrote:

Precision-engineered to weigh just one pound, iPad Air is 20 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter than the fourth generation iPad, and with a 43 percent narrower bezel the borders of iPad Air are dramatically thinner.

iPad Airā€™s Retina display makes web pages, text, images and video look incredibly sharp and realistic, and the new power-efficient A7 chip allows the battery to be even smaller, helping reduce the overall volume by 24 percent from the previous generation while doubling its performance and maintaining its up to 10-hour battery life.

I love the “precision-engineered” part.

On the phone front, the award for Best Smartphone went to HTC’s One,Ā one of the most advanced smartphones throughout 2013. “Its great design and excellent user interface continue to provide a differentiated user experience, standing out from the competition,” according to the judges.

LG took home the prize for the Most Innovative Device Manufacturer of the Year because the company isĀ “impressive across the board with ground-breaking innovation”.

The Nokia 105 was named the Best Entry-Level or Featurephone and the Lumia 520 is theĀ Best Low-Cost Smartphone. Simogo Handelsbolag’s Device 6 ($2.99 in the App Store) was proclaimed theĀ Best Entertainment App due to its innovative game design with “fantastic synthesis which recognizes the physicality of a mobile device”.

iPad Air Pages iMovie GarageBand

Apple CEO Tim Cook called Android’s tablet experience “crappy” in a recent interview withĀ The Wall Street Journal.

He explained why he thought nothing could touch Apple’s tablet-optimized experiences.

We have over a million apps on iOS. We have over half-million that have been optimized for iPad. That half-million compares to 1,000 for Android tablets. Thatā€™s one of the reasons, although not the only reason, why the experience on Android tablets is so crappy because the app is nothing more than a stretched out smartphone app.

Cook continues to believe thatĀ the tablet business will eventually surpass the PC business and was quick to point out how Apple views that as “an opportunity”.

“Thereā€™s still a lot of PCs being sold and a lot of those users would have a better experience on an iPad than a PC,” he said.

So, how’s that truck of yours?