A Deep-Dive Look At Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1

MojoKid writes "Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 was announced way back in February this year just prior to Apple's iPad 2 launch. Shortly after, a Samsung VP noted the company was re-evaluating their Galaxy Tab line in the wake of Apple's strong iPad 2 showing in early March. Since then, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 has begun shipping and early reports show the Android 3.1 driven device to be slightly thinner than the iPad 2, lighter and with NVIDIA's 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor under the hood, every bit as capable. With recent Honeycomb entrants in the 10-inch Android tablet market, like the Asus Transformer, Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, the iPad 2 finally has solid competition in terms of both hardware and OS performance."

I have one of these

[PCM2]

I have a Galaxy Tab 10.1 and I've also used a Xoom. Both are pretty comparable in terms of performance, which means not flawless (video occasionally appears to stutter a little bit) but acceptable. I like the thinness and light weight of the Galaxy Tab. My main beefs with it are:

1. The onscreen keyboard kind of sucks, like most Android keyboards I've seen. It's slow, and I shouldn't have to toggle in and out of punctuation mode just to type an apostrophe.
2. The touchscreen resolution doesn't seem very good. In Facebook, for example, next to the logo, there are three icons: A person, a cartoon speech bubble, and a globe. Mostly you'll want to click the globe to see your friends' latest updates. Clicking the globe on the Galaxy Tab is a chore and a half. It wants to select the speech bubble, every time.
3. The built-in browser still renders pages strangely. It seems to want to reformat Web pages to fit the screen even when that option is not selected. And there are various other rendering quirks -- Slashboxes don't show up at all, for example, and the options in the top tab of Slashdot are scattered all over the place.
4. The screen aspect ration is widescreen. That's great if you plan to use it to watch Shrek 2 from bed, but for everything else it sort of sucks. In landscape mode, the onscreen keyboard takes up half the screen real estate, making it hard to see what you're doing. In portrait mode, the screen is excessively long and narrow. The iPad uses a more traditional screen ratio that makes it more versatile.
5. I'm just not so sure what's so great about this kind of device. A netbook is much easier to operate, is more versatile, and is almost as light. I can't see myself sitting on the bus with my Galaxy Tab like an asshole, so it's mostly going to stay at my apartment, where it just feels like a slower, harder to navigate version of the devices I already have.

Re:Well

[iluvcapra]

The $429 16GB Galaxy Tab you're looking at [bestbuy.com] is not the 10.1, but the small-screen kind. The price of a 16GB Galaxy Tab 10.1 with no 3/4G is $499, identical to the iPad 2 [apple.com].

Re:What about the Eee Pad?

[Graymalkin]

None of the movies I've ripped with Handbrake work on my iPad? Shit I guess the HDMI adapter I just bought doesn't work either! Why didn't you tell me I couldn't do those things before I bought it?

Wait, you're full of shit and I can do all that with my iPad. Does the iPad also take 20 minutes to copy a 17MB file?

Re:What about the Eee Pad?

[samkass]

HDMI... cables, how quaint. I stream video wirelessly to the TV via the $99 Apple TV (which also has the best Netflix UI of any device out there) from the iPad2. If you don't want to stream wirelessly, though, I suppose you COULD buy the HDMI cable for the iPad2. I also have a ton of stuff downloaded off the TiVo as well as movies ripped from Handbrake. I'm not sure why you think the iPad can't do this stuff... it does it better than anything else around.

Re:Dear Companies making tablets,

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Dear technogeek,

We want products that work first. Unfortunately this means locking down. We also outnumber you by a wide margin.

Sorry

-everyone else

Re:What about the Eee Pad?

[brunes69]

Er.. so? I can stream from my Asus TF-101 to any DLNA device under the sun, not simply an Apple TV. I can stream DIRECT TO MY TV, which is a Samsung flatscreen that has DLNA support.

But really this has nothing at all to do with the parent since you can't compare plugging in an HDMI cable to streaming to some external device? It is not even remotely the same thing. (Also, the iPad does not even have an HDMI port, you have to BUY an ugly and cumbersome external dongle).

Re:Well

[thegarbz]

It's okay for phones but on larger devices it's not so good.

As a matter of interest have you used Honeycomb? I tried it for the first time yesterday in an electronics store. It is so incredibly far removed from the Android on my phone that about the only thing I recognized on it was the Market App. It provided a very different experience entirely. So much as to say I wouldn't ever want Honeycomb running on a device the size of a phone.