Samsung Galaxy Tab

FULL REVIEW

Six months ago, Apple revived the previously dead-in-the-water Tablet PC category singlehandedly with the iPad. Since then, everybody and their uncle have been trying to make a tablet to steal some of that glory. We’ve seen over a dozen different tablets launch, or be talked about since then, and the one thing that has remained consistent with most of these tablets is their OS of choice,Android. From India’s $50 Tablet, to the absolute cutting edge Notion Ink Adam, which is still considered vaporware by many, we’ve been waiting for many Android tablets, but none are as hotly anticipated as the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and there’s a good reason for that.

It is the first Android tablet that comes from a “Big Name” manufacturer that is available worldwide, has pretty much the same processing power as the iPad, and support for full 3G.  Let’s see if it manages to live up to the hype, and be a credible competitor to the iPad.

THE PACKAGE

Open the box, and you’ll find the Galaxy Tab, and a few other goodies you’ll really appreciate. A Leather Case, a Bluetooth Headset, a pair of in-ear headphones and obviously, the standard charger and USB cable. That’s certainly more than the bare bones packaging of the iPad, where you get nothing more than the charger and a USB Cable, not even the white headphones Apple is known for.

THE AESTHETICS

When you hold the Galaxy Tab in your hands, the first thing you’ll notice is how light it is. Light is good, the iPad is quite heavy for something that needs to be in your hands all the time. The Galaxy Tab, on the other hand won’t strain your arms even after hours of holding it up while watching a movie, or playing games.
It’s a nice looking device too. All black in front, and all white at the back, except for that little camera and LED flash on top. Very smooth, and very easy to hold in your hands, it is, in our opinion a more mobile device than the iPad.  Obviously, the Galaxy Tab is a lot smaller than the iPad. A 7 inch, 1024x600 Super LCD Screen is only marginally lower in terms of resolution than the iPad (which is a 1024x768), but significantly smaller in size which looks sharper, and has better colours.
Does the smaller form factor have its downsides?  In some cases, yes. The web browsing experience is not even remotely comparable to the iPad. Though page load speeds are similar with Adobe Flash turned off, you will need to do quite a lot of pinching and zooming and scrolling to be able to see the webpages as well as you do on the iPad, partly due to the reduced vertical screen resolution, and partly due to the unoptimized web browser. On the flipside, the screen works very well for watching videos, and playing games.

THE FEATURES

Features wise, the Galaxy Tab is certainly an iPad beater. It is a full-fledged mobile phone; you can make phone calls (use the bundled Bluetooth headset, as holding a 7 inch tablet to your face looks odd or send SMS/MMS messages, unlike the iPad, which uses its 3G connection only for data. Not only that, you can also share your 3G Data with other devices via the Wi-Fi Hotspot feature.
It also has a pretty decent 3.2 megapixel camera at the back, and a 1.3 megapixel camera at the front for video conferencing (which you can use with the countless video chat apps available on the Android Market). It has more RAM than the iPad (512MB), and can play 1080p Videos (iPad only does 720p), and can be connected via an HDMI Cable to PDMI cable converter to your TV (iPad only supports VGA).
The best part is, unlike the iPad, it supports pretty much all the popular video formats out of the box, no conversion required, and you can even expand the 16GB built-in storage with MicroSD cards.  It also includes A-GPS, so you can use navigation apps and Google maps, with real GPS support, which the basic WiFi iPad can’t do.

THE OS & APPS

Galaxy Tab runs Android 2.2 (Froyo) operating system (should get an update to Android 2.3 as well), overlayed with Samsung’s TouchWiz UI. Since it runs non-standard resolution (most android phones have 800x480px displays), you will notice a few visual compatibility issues here and there, unless applications have been specifically optimized for the device’s higher resolution.
To test this out, we downloaded a fair few games and apps from the Android Market. One of the most popular downloads, Angry Birds, was optimized for the Galaxy Tab, taking full advantage of its high resolution screen. On the other hand, a few 3D racing games and benchmarks that we tried only ran in compatibility mode, leaving black bands on the sides of the screen beyond that 800x480 resolution they run on. As for apps, most apps seemed to scale well to the larger resolution, and display more data on the screen, adding to the usability.
It is early days, and you can be sure as time goes by, and the Galaxy Tab sees wider adoption (which it will, as it is available all over the world, and on almost every single network in the US), there will be more and more apps optimized to make good use of its resolution.
Samsung promised us that there will be a navigation app built-in to the Galaxy Tab with MapMyIndia’s maps data (the best offline navigation maps set in India, also available on Motorola’s Milestone handsets), but we couldn’t find the same loaded on our Galaxy Tab. An enquiry with the Samsung team revealed we were using a pre-launch packaging, and the final bundle includes the MapMyIndia app.

BATTERY LIFE

This one is quite a bone of contention for Android Devices. The core reason for poor battery life on Android devices has been applications running in the background (Twitter apps, updating in background, RSS Feeds etc ) continuing to use resources like CPU, 3G Data etc. Samsung has added a high quality task manager to the home screen, which alerts you if any background app is consuming too much power, and kill that app.
Still, the device doesn’t offer close to the great battery performance the iPad is known for. We got no more than 5.5 hours of video playback (iPad gets 6.5 hours), or about 7 hours of general purpose usage with the screen on full brightness. Make the brightness lower if you’re in dimly lit surroundings, and you could eke out another hour or so out of the device.

                                    

CONCLUSION

The Galaxy Tab is a credible competitor to the iPad. Sure, there are a few rough edges here and there, and the quality of apps available for it on the market is still lower than the standards set by the iPad, these issues are bound to be sorted over time, and in the various software updates it is sure to get, and there are more than a few good features and traits which make it stand on its own. Though we still think the MRP of the product at Rs. 38,000 is still a bit on the high side, it’s the only tablet we’d recommend buying today, as the iPad still isn’t even officially available in India.

Pros:

Lightweight, more mobile than the iPad
Supports Wi-Fi Tethering
Can play 1080p Videos
Plenty of goodies in the package
Supports popular video formats out of the box

Cons:

The price tag is a bit on the high side
Runs a non-standard resolution, has a few visual compatibility issues with Froyo apps
Lower battery life than the iPad