Overveiw and Design
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab device might not have been the best kept secret in the world, but its arrival at IFA still saw a lot of excitement and clamour to try out the new tablet.
The dinky device, which has a 7-inch screen and weighs in at only 380g, is meant to be the portable and pocketable answer to the heft of the iPad, and certainly feels that way when you first play with it.
Running Android 2.2, the Galaxy Tab is certainly a cutting-edge device when it comes to the specs – svelte chassis aside, it’s also packing a 1024×600 WSVGA screen, making it much higher resolution than Apple’s iPad.
It sits nicely in the hand, with one-handed operation easy thanks to the seven-inch screen, and the rear of the Galaxy Tab (which comes in black and white) is smooth plastic but easy to grip.
There’s a 3.5mm headphone port, for media and handsfree kit connection, with a 30-pin plug on the bottom rather than a microUSB adaptor.
Samsung says the reason for the 30-pin is two-fold: firstly, the 4000mAh battery wouldn’t be charged fast enough on a standard microUSB, and the data transfer to get HD movies onto the screen would be too slow.
You can slot a SIM card into the side of the screen, and also expand the storage with a microSD card (up to 32GB) with easy to open covers.
The front of the device – well, it looks like an iPad. There’s no other way of saying it when you see that thick black bezel around the side, but the size of the screen helps make it seem like a very different device.
There are four touch sensitive buttons on the front, for menu, home, back and search, and these are easy to press and provide some nice tactile feedback.
However, a 3MP camera is a little under-powered in our opinion – admittedly the iPad doesn’t even have a camera, but we’d have thought a 5MP option with flash would have been an obvious choice.
Samsung Galaxy Tab: Interface
The interface is basically Android with a little tweaking, as Samsung looks to make the UI as simple to use as possible. The home screen is a widget-fillable fest, letting you put whatever you want on there, and the options are very similar to those provided by the Galaxy S (ie not very many).
A quick look into the menu opens up a pleasant translucent menu, sitting on the top of your wallpaper, and scrolling through it is very easily in both landscape and portrait mode.
Ebook reader
One of the main selling points of the Samsung Galaxy Tab is the fact it’s the same size as a paperback, and as such is good for consuming books.
The ebook reader function is pretty good – the size is fine and the ability to switch the text size and colour is nice. However, the options are a little lightweight, and you can’t go bigger on text than the picture we’ve got.
Samsung Galaxy Tab: Internet
The internet, arguably the most important function on the Samsung Galaxy Tab, thankfully is a decent experience, thanks mostly to the top-notch WebKit browser from Android.
Firstly, the speed is impressive (although we only tested it over Wi-Fi) and web pages loaded as fast as they might on a HTC Desire or iPhone 4.
There was a little lag in processing some pages, and sometimes they’d reload from time to time, but on the whole the internet experience was solid.
Elements like Flash and HTML5 support are a real bonus, with text reflow allowing you to get in as close as you like to the text. However, like in the early iterations of the Samsung Galaxy S firmware, you need to zoom in (using multi-touch of the onscreen buttons) and then double tap the screen to make the text re-jig itself.
Email and messaging
Email is a similarly nice experience, with a dual approach on offer to see who has sent you a message over the interwebs.
You can see your inbox in a simple list view, or flip the Android tablet on its side to see both the inbox and the message in a dual screen view.
Messaging is supplemented by the popular Swype system, which allows you to slide your finger around the screen tracing out words. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, so there’s also the option to tap letters in in both portrait and landscape modes.
The large screen is a good size for text input, but those with smaller hands might struggle to accurately hit the right letter each time.
Samsung Galaxy Tab: Music and media
What is odd is the media experience on the Samsung Galaxy Tab isn’t as mind blowing as we’d thought it would be.
Music is a pretty average experience if we’re honest – yes, there are the normal number of options such as shuffle, repeat, equaliser and so on, but the interface looks a little boring, despite the large album artwork.
Admittedly we didn’t get the chance to listen to a number of tracks through high-end headphones, but the fact there was no music widget in the pull-down notifications bar grated.
There is a music portal on offer from Samsung, but oddly it’s a little expensive, with tracks costing £1.29 at a go, which seems a little much when you can suck them down from the web for less than 80p.
The UI is nice though, and if you’re yearning for a certain track and can’t find it on YouTube and Spotify, then this is a good way to get your fix.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab’s Super AMOLED screen is one of the best we’ve seen on a portable device, and the Super TFT LCD on offer with the Galaxy Tab doesn’t seem as impressive.
Even with brightness turned right up, the high-res screen still only looked… OK. It’s the match of Apple’s iPad, no doubt, but we had hoped it would look so good we would beg to lose our vision as nothing would ever beat the visage put in front of us.
Samsung Galaxy Tab: Maps, mags and game
Mapping is a nice touch though, and the seven-inch screen feels like the perfect size for wandering around an unknown town looking for a shop.
Google Maps Navigation is a quick and easy system to use and that experience is replicated on the Samsung Galaxy Tab, offering some quick directions in double-quick time.
Newspapers and magazines
The final two features we ran our eye over were the magazine and paper viewers and the nascent games for the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
The newspaper viewer is an interesting one – it didn’t like being held in landscape mode, as the paper didn’t fill the page properly, although in portrait things looked a lot more professional.
One nice feature is the ability to tap on any story and see it presented on the screen in its own right – making viewing a newspaper in the way you want much easier.
Samsung claims the Galaxy Tab will “play an important role in the digitisation of printed material” and if newspaper subscriptions all look this good on the Tab then we can see why.
The magazine viewer crashed on us a couple of times though, so we can’t tell you whether it’s as good as the newspaper version – we’ll put this down to early firmware rather than an inherent problem with the OS, but it’s a little disconcerting.
Gaming
Gaming on the Samsung Galaxy Pad is the equal of the iPad though, offering a nice size for holding in two hands and playing a game or three.
We checked out Need For Speed: Shift, and it was much better than we expected. The accelerometer is accurate, the screen bright and visible, and while it was a little easy (or we’re just really good at it) the promise for better Android games is obvious.
Samsung Galaxy Tab: Verdict
Overall, we were very impressed with the Samsung Galaxy Tab – its size and chassis certainly make it stand out from the crowd.
We’ve used devices like the Archos 7 Internet Tablet before, but this is so much quicker and more powerful (not to mention more pocket-friendly) and just seems to make the tablet conundrum make sense.
We liked
The pocket-friendly shape is a real boon – you can pull this out to impress a girl in a bar and she won’t even know you had it in your jacket pocket. She might not care one bit, but hey, at least the lines in your clothes are safe.
The speed of operation was, on the whole, quick and efficient, and the times it got a little bogged down seem more to do with early firmware than a real problem.
The screen is the right size for things like playing games, reading books and browsing the internet, and the email and messaging options are plentiful and easy to use as well.
We disliked
The Samsung Galaxy Tab crashed on us a couple of times, which is always worrying, but par for the course on pre-production devices.
The screen didn’t blow us away either – it shows how good Samsung is in the display market that we consider it not being amazing as a negative, but we didn’t get the wow factor of the Samsung Galaxy S.
The music player is similarly average – we need to investigate the sonic ability of it, but overall we think the interface could be a little bit better.
Verdict
Put it this way – if Apple had made this, there would be Jobs-fans crying in the streets, as it’s a pretty darn neat device.
Android still needs to go some way to shake the nerdy reputation that comes from being the darling of the geek community, but things like the Samsung Galaxy Tab should show that it’s come a long way since the T-Mobile G1.
One problem we can see, especially in the UK, is the fact that users can’t have the same number on two SIM cards (our European brethren are allowed such a treat).
This means two contracts rather than one unified number, and that’s going to grate a bit, as well as raise the price. However, Apple’s managed it with the iPad 3G, so perhaps Samsung can repeat the trick.
But pound for pound, it out does the iPad at every turn (other than the larger screen size) and adds in a few treats like video and voice calling, a camera and Flash video playback.
The screen size, hand-friendliness and simple ease of operation make this a potentially awesome gadget – now we just need to find out the price to see if it’s going to be really popular, so stay tuned for our full Samsung Galaxy Tab review.
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