After being snubbed in 2013, Apple won the 19th annual Global Mobile Awards' "Best Mobile Tablet" for 2014 with the iPad Air, unseating last year's winners Google and Asus for their joint effort in the Nexus 7.
The iPad Air's award was one of many announced at the GSM Association's Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, Spain this week. While Apple does not have an official presence at the large gathering, many products and services represented at the conference run on the company's various hardware and software platforms.
According to the judges' comments, "The iPad Air packs class-leading performance in an attractive and svelte frame, while its ecosystem has an undisputed advantage in the number of format-optimized apps."
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 Air'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.
Other notable Global Mobile Awards wins for 2014 include HTC's One for Best Smartphone, CityMapper for Best Overall Mobile App and LG for Most Innovative Device Manufacturer.