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Review: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

November 14th, 2011

First, I want to say thank Samsung for giving me the chance to use and test the tab for a week.

All I can say is that, Apple… the Samsung Galaxy tab 10.1 is a major contender and Samsung, you earned your top spot.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 runs the Honeycomb android system, comes a little lighter and almost a hair thinner than the iPad 2. This is for starters! It is around half a kilo, which makes it easy to carry and use (even for a person with one hand like myself), The device feels “right” unlike many other tablets and phones I tried to carry around with one hand. What also makes it special is that Honeycomb comes in version 3.1 which has a few new additions such as the ability to resize widgets and scroll through open apps in the pop-up thumbnails.

The camera is also great, 3MP for the rear camera (3 times better than the iPad 2) and a 2MP front-facing camera. The battery is also challenging, when I first received the device it was almost dead, I charged it for 9 hours and the battery lasted for 9 hours, which is not bad at all. I also managed to test games such as Angry Birds and the ran smoothly, also Flash support was good as well. Bluebooth works great too.

I decided to update the device (found new software) and suddenly had Samsung’s TouchWiz software overlay which is designed to add some more features to Android by building on the foundations that Google laid down where a small arrow appears in the middle of the task bar at the bottom of the screen, when you press it, the Task Manager appears where you can open & close apps, also with this update widgets stay up on the screen at all times, even when you open other apps.

In the box Samsung includes a charger, USB cable and earbuds (box is sealed with BCI’s warranty here in Amman, Jordan)

Things to notice:

• Looking at the tab, it was easy to find the power and volume controls. The tab also has a headphone jack and a PIN connector for the USB cable. However, there are no buttons on the side or any buttons everywhere (you kind of get used to the button if you’re an Apple user), one thing I noticed about the screen is that it has an incredibly bright and clear screen, too. It’s brighter and clearer than Motorola’s Xoom, almost the same brightness as the iPad 2. I tried to watch a couple of series I’ve downloaded from the internet, and the speakers are good, you can place the tab and watch it across your desk, clear sound.

• There is a Samsung app store on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (but the apps mostly repeat what you will find in the Android Market) where apps are optimized for Android 3.0 and for the tab, selection is not brilliant, but is improving all the time. One good thing here is that if your device is just plain incompatible with a certain app, it won’t let you install it. You will find a few new additions in the ‘specially designed for Honeycomb- app selection, though: a Twitter client called TweetComb, a few new games including Pinball HD, the new Google Music app that adds cloud storage for your audio files and a few extra newsreader and news aggregator apps. There is an HD version of Angry Birds also, a good flight tracking app, an RSS aggregator called Pulse and a Dropbox client. This is apart from the standard Google apps for Gmail, calendars and some funky additions such as Google Body (search for body parts), Google Sky Map and Google Earth.

• Samsung also has an app called the Social Hub for the Galaxy Tab that lets you view feeds from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Finally I can say that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the best Android tablet yet in just about every way. You can find the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Amman for 650 JD (16GB model) at BCI & major electronics stores such as SmartBuy, Blinx, E-Mart and Leaders Center.