Introduction
Tablets are basking in well-deserved attention and manufacturers know they need to try hard and make their devices distinct and memorable. Truly unique gadgets are hard to come by these days - especially in Honeycomb land. Which is perhaps part of the reason why iPad is still the one to beat. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 3G is in for a challenge, and up for it.
Shortly after launch the Galaxy Tab 10.1 was blessed with a custom user experience, called Touch Wiz UX, which literally puts more color into Honeycomb, offers a good selection of customizable widgets and most importantly tries to ease your way into Android for tablets.
Yet this tablet’s main advantage remains that it’s the most portable 10” slate to hit the market. It's thinner even than iPad 2 and good 42 grams lighter than Apple's frontrunner, while still promising to match its battery performance. And that's no mean feat since tablets are going hard after netbooks, so they need to back their portability with battery longevity.
The Galaxy Tab 10.1 has a dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, a bright 10.1" PLS TFT display of WXGA resolution, a premium set of connectivity options and plenty of storage space. Check out the full list of things going for (and against) the Galaxy Tab 10.1 3G below.
Key features
- 10.1" 16M-color PLS TFT capacitive touchscreen of WXGA (1280 x 800 pixels) resolution
- Very lightweight at just 565 g
- Thinnest slate to date at just 8.6 mm
- Gorilla Glass display
- Tegra 2 chipset: Dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor; 1GB of RAM; ULP GeForce GPU
- Android 3.1 Honeycomb with TouchWiz UX UI
- Optional quad-band GPRS/EDGE and tri-band 3G with HSDPA 21 Mbps connectivity
- 16/32/64 GBGB of built-in memory
- 3.2 MP autofocus camera, 2048x1536 pixels, LED flash, geotagging
- 2.0 MP front-facing camera; video calls
- 720p HD video recording @ 30 fps
- Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi Direct, dual-band, Wi-Fi hotspot
- Proprietary 30-pin connector port for charging
- Stereo Bluetooth v3.0
- HDMI TV-out (adapter required), USB host (adapter required)
- Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
- Flash 10.3 support
- GPS with A-GPS support; digital compass
- DivX/XviD support (fullHD), MP4 support up to HD
- Accelerometer and proximity sensor; three-axis Gyroscope sensor
- Polaris office document editor comes preinstalled
- 7000 mAh Li-Po rechargeable battery
Main disadvantages
- Non-replaceable battery
- No microSD card support
- No standard USB port
- No Android Honeycomb 3.2 yet
- No GSM voice capabilities despite the available SIM slot
The screen quality, the added TouchWiz UX functionality, the good battery and excellent media make it a must-see. The whole package looks like the right mix of style and substance, but we just won't rush to a verdict. The Galaxy Tab had a promising start in our preview. With all the finishing touches in place, it's ready to give its best. Head on past the break to see what the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is made of.
Design and construction
The tablet is impressively slim and deliberately underdesigned. A certain litigant-happy competitor did vehemently disagree on the latter but to no avail. In tablets, design is minimalist bordering on non-existent. They all look alike. It's not the XOOM, the Flyer, or the Playbook that were in trouble though and we can see a point there. Yes, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 looks like the iPad2. In a good way or a bad way? You decide. Certainly not in an illegal way.What's ultimately important though is that the Galaxy Tab looks good, and being slim is a big part of that.
We do like premium materials like steel, aluminum and the likes but choosing plastic instead saves a whole lot of weight. This is one of the most important things when considering the purchase of a slate - you wouldn't want your hands to go numb when hodling it. The larger 10.1 Galaxy Tab is a good 35 grams below the 600 mark. Its nearest competitor, the Apple iPad 2, is 42 grams heavier.
We have to admit, though that the iPad 2 does have a minor edge in terms of overall feel. The Galaxy Tab strikes back with its easier handling due to its taller and slimmer body.
Display
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is built around a 10.1” PLS LCD screen with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. The image quality and viewing angles make it one of the best screens to find on a slate.We do like the smaller Galaxy Tab 8.9 screen better, but that's down to the higher pixel density. We were pleasantly surprised to find that both tablets are readily usable outdoors, even if colors do get a bit washed out.
| Display test | 50% brightness | 100% brightness | ||||
| Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | |||
| Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 | 0.31 | 257 | 826 | 0.55 | 502 | 915 |
| LG Optimus Pad | 0.19 | 170 | 889 | 0.57 | 458 | 811 |
| Apple iPad 2 | 0.18 | 167 | 925 | 0.55 | 429 | 775 |
| Apple iPad | 0.18 | 178 | 834 | 0.53 | 410 | 776 |
Controls
The front of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 has no hardware controls whatsoever – with the Honeycomb OS based solely on touch controls, the slate just doesn’t need them. All you get is the front-facing camera, embedded in the bezel.The two short sides of the slate (left and right when you hold it in its default landscape orientation) have nothing but a speaker each. The placement of the stereo speakers on the opposing sides seems the better solution than what we saw on the Galaxy Tab 8.9, where they were right next to each other. The journey ends at the back of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, which features the 3.15 megapixel camera lens and its LED flash. The flash will probably make better use as a torch than provide serious shooting assistance. Then again, nobody buys a tablet for its imaging capabilities. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 3G is powered by a 7000 mAh Li-Po battery, which Samsung say should keep it going for 9 hours straight. We can't complain about the battery life the tablet gave us in our test.Used occasionally on normal daily tasks, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 can easily last 3 days. On a fully charged battery, we surfed the web for a couple of hours via Wi-Fi, played a few games, watched videos and installed apps, all the while testing the tablet for our review and the charge dropped below 50% in the evening.
We guess you can easily get a full day out of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 no matter how hard you push it, which is not bad at all.
Let's briefly look at the accessories available for the Galaxy Tab 10.1. The keyboard dock is pretty convenient packing a lot of hardware shortcuts and allowing comfortable two hand typing. It would have been even better if there was an additional battery inside it to power you on, but no such luck. There's a great carrying case you can get for your newly-bought Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (or 8.9). It does add to its weight and thickness, mind you, but sure looks nice.
Welcome TouchWiz makeover
The Galaxy Tab 10.1 shipped unskinned initially, but Samsung managed to push its TouchWiz UI to its through an update a couple of months into its live. This means that you'd be getting a few home-backed enhancements in addition to the regular Honeycomb 3.1 stuff. We actually found those to be quite helpful, but you shouldn't expect any changes that run as deep as on the Galaxy S smartphones. These are more of minor touches that should help the Galaxy Tab 10.1 stand out in the Honeycomb crowd.
Here is a video of the user interface in action.
Applications
There are a few apps provided by Samsung for the Galaxy Tab 10.1 worth mentioning - eBook, Memo, My files, Pen memo and Photo editor.
The eBook reader comes with one book for free - The Marvelous Land of Oz. naturally you can add books stores, buy books from them and they will appear on your virtual shelves.
The eBook reader is quite capable - it allows you to highlight or underline text, change the font size and page color, search the book and put bookmarks. There is even text-to-speech feature with settings for speed and pitch.
The Memo is pretty simple notes application with interesting interface - you get your notes as sticky note on a wooden board.
My Files is a familiar app - it's the Samsung powerful file manager.Pen memo does almost the same as the memos, but in addition to the text it allows you to draw pictures and offers some extra option as colors, background, etc.
Finally, the Photo Editor offers some basic picture edition tools - selections, rotate, resize, crop, color effects and adjustments, etc.
The Social hub combines you email accounts with social networking (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) shows all incoming messages as one list and your social feeds as another. You also get handy shortcuts to reply, mark as favorite and so on.
Thanks to the two-column interface you can easily switch between your accounts, messages and feeds if you don't need all the stuff in one place.
The Music Hub lets you browse music online (with search tools, charts, lists of new releases and so on). You can preview songs (30 seconds each) and buy tracks or whole albums. It is also granted with eye-catching interface.GPS with Google Maps Navigation
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 comes with a GPS receiver, which got a satellite lock in under two minutes with A-GPS turned off. A-GPS can speed this up quite a bit, but requires Internet access. We gotta say, we didn’t experience any issues with the GPS performance.
With a screen as large (or larger) than most dedicated SatNav units, with excellent sunlight legibility and plenty of storage, any money spent towards satellite navigation should go to buying a good app rather than a separate SatNav unit.
The Galaxy Tab 10.1 comes with Google Maps and Navigation. Voice-guided navigation has become a viable solution since the v5.0 update. Vector maps are smaller and way easier on your data plan and with the Navigation itself becoming available in more and more countries 3rd party SatNav apps are facing extinction.
Quite naturally, the app also supports the Street View mode. If it’s available in the area you're interested in, you can enjoy a 360-degree view of the surroundings. When the digital compass is turned on it feels like making a virtual tour of the location!If Google Maps Navigation doesn’t do it for you, you can grab an alternative app from the Android Market – there are both free and paid ones.Android market
The additional applications are the heart of every modern mobile platform. The more and the higher-quality they are the better the market prospects of their OS. For the Galaxy Tab 10.1 this is a two-sided tale.
You get a customized Android market interface that lets you browse and search the hundreds of thousands of apps there quicker than ever before. The productivity is probably the best there is on the market and gaming is second only to the App store.
On the other hand, the large portion of those is still not exactly tablet-friendly. Some just don't have WXGA versions and stretch their WVGA ones (which isn't too bad, but certainly isn't ideal) and some are simply performing terribly.We were quite surprised to find that apps that run fine on single-core WVGA handsets and that we would’ve assumed to be a walk in the park for the Galaxy Tab 10.1 would stutter quite heavily. Luckily we do notice a major improvement, compared to the early days so things are obviously moving in the right direction.
And it's hardly any wonder - the Android slates now account for a third of all tablet sales out there, so coders have every reason to show their commitment. Plus with cooler and cooler Honeycomb slates coming up (not to mention the improvement in the platform itself), things are bound to improve even further. And quite rapidly, if Android's smartphone history is anything to go by.
Samsung's own store called SamsungApps is also on board. There you can get a lot of free apps for your tablet.Final words
It's not easy being an Android tablet these days. The iPad is the supreme ruler of the market, leaving but a small part of it to the huge number of competitors. So even if the Galaxy Tab 10.1 manages to successfully tackle a few dozens of devices running the same platform plus a few exotic competitors, the best it can hope for is go at the number two spot.
But that's not necessarily bad - Rome wasn't built in a day and Samsung is certainly under no illusion that it will manage to knock Apple of its tablet perch with a single device. Apple took a gamble with slates, it worked and now they have the advantage in a rapidly expanding market, while the competition is playing catch up.
Now we are not saying Apple cannot be beaten at its own game - most recent smartphone history suggests otherwise. We are just saying that some serious preparation is required if such a thing is to happen. Convincing customers that you can beat the iPad hardware or software isn't enough - you need to convince them that you can match or outdo the Apple user experience.
And from where we stand after we completed the review the Galaxy Tab 10.1 can be a pretty strong argument for both Samsung and Android. And it's not just the really good PLS TFT display with Gorilla Glass, the powerful Tegra 2 chipset or the excellent connectivity (though those all score points for it). It's more the case of the Honeycomb 3.1-running slate being the most complete offering we've seen from the Android camp to date.
The Samsung-made TouchWiz UI takes the already great Honeycomb functionality another level up, while the 3.1 Android update brings an overdue performance boost. Meanwhile app numbers are growing by the day and as we know apps are the heart of every tablet ecosystem. And if the ones you need haven't come out in tablet flavor just yet the excellent video player will still make your Galaxy Tab 10.1 great fun.
So that's the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 summarized - it’s a nice tablet that no one would mind having around. What's even more we doubt anyone will regret spending €500 (for the Wi-Fi only version) €600 (Wi-Fi + 3G) on it. If you aren't quite convinced though, you might want to try some of its alternatives.
The recently released LG Optimus Pad costs a good deal more than the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and has no fancy TouchWiz UI to brag about, but comes with one of a kind feature - stereoscopic 3D video recording (it also does 1080p videos in 2D). If you are really into this thing, then the Optimus Pad might be your only option.
LG Optimus Pad
The first Android Honeycomb tablet - Motorola XOOM - has significantly dropped price and got a series of updates, which turned a beta-feeling device into a decent deal. You'd still be getting Android 3.1 experience (minus the TouchWiz extras) for €100 less, so it's definitely worth checking out. Of course you won't be getting the marvelously slim waistline or the 565g weight of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 with the XOOM, but on the upside, you'll be receiving cheap memory expansion through the microSD card slot.
Motorola XOOM
The EeePad Transformer by Asus has a few tricks in its bag too. It brings a 10.1” LED-backlit IPS LCD display with scratch protection, a memory card slot, Waveshare UI and, most important of all, the optional keyboard dock that turns it into a droid netbook. Not to mention that it also comes at a lower price.
ASUS EeePad Transformer
Finally, if you have nothing against the Apple way of things and you are ready to sacrifice a few feats (Flash playback and, proper file management and multi-tasking spring to mind) for bigger and better variety of apps and smoother performance then you can get the 16GB Apple iPad 2 3G on exactly the same price as the Galaxy Tab 10.1.
Apple iPad 2 3G
As you can see the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 can stand its ground against just about every one of its competitors quite well. Plus it certainly is fun to use and that's a quality valued above everything else in this class.
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