Samsung Galaxy Tab Preview

Introduction:

Ever since Apple introduced and launched its iPad (a revolutionary and magical device that can even get girls interested in you), we've seen quite a few other manufacturers, including LG, RIM, Motorola, Acer and HP, announce their plans (or let them slip) to enter this newly-formed tablet business. Hm, wait a sec, someone's suspiciously missing from the list. Oh, of course! It's Samsung, which has already confirmed its Android 2.2-powered Galaxy Tab tablet for a Q3 launch. And it is exactly the Tab that will be the focus of this preview. We are just as impatient as you are, so let us not waste time in introductory blabbing and get right to the point.

Design:

The Samsung Galaxy Tab is more compact than the Apple iPad (we'll be often comparing the Galaxy Tab to the iPad, as we consider it the standard for the moment). This is due to the fact that the Galaxy Tab is housing a 7-inch screen, as opposed to the iPad's near 10 inches. While we are not really into losing screen real estate, we can go with it here, as it makes the tablet somewhat more "pocketable". Anyway, the device feels pretty solid in the hands, thanks partly to its significant weight. Its back and sides are made of light gray-colored plastic, which at one point almost led us to believe it is actually aluminum. Holding the Samsung Galaxy Tab with only one hand, while reading something, for example, will quickly tire your wrist and you'd want to hold it with two hands or place it on a surface/dock. Unfortunately, we still don't know if a dock would be present in the box.




The 7” screen is using LCD TFT tech, and not Samsung's vaunted Super AMOLED. As a whole, we like the image quality very much – viewing angles are decent, colors are still quite good and the resolution is high enough at 600x1024 pixels. The screen is of course capacitive and features multi-touch. Another good thing is that it is viewable under bright sunlight, though not in its full beauty. By the looks of it, 7 inches are still quite good for a tablet, though you might find yourselves switching to horizontal mode when viewing the web quite often.


Above the display you'd like to know that there are a 1.3MP video chat camera and light sensor, while at the bottom portion of the front you get four capacitive buttons: Menu, Home, Back, Search, which may sometimes annoy you due to accidental presses. On the top is a 3.5mm jack, on the right you'll find the power/lock key, volume rocker, microSD and SIM card slots, while on the bottom are the speakers and proprietary charging port, which reminds of Apple's proprietary port (it is actually a 30-pin connector). The back owns a 3MP autofocus camera with an LED flash.



So let's recap here, at the end of the design part of our Samsung Galaxy Tab preview. The Galaxy Tab is a smaller tablet than the iPad, although it is pretty close to Apple's product in terms of appearance. It has a smaller, 7-inch screen, which has a wider aspect ratio and pretty good image quality on the whole. While not feeling as high-end as the Apple iPad, the Samsung Galaxy Tab still hides some tricks up its sleeve, by packing a 3MP camera, as well as front-facing one for video chats.

Interface and Functionality:

The Samsung Galaxy Tab will ship with Android 2.2 Froyo. Our unit came with just that Android build and featured its important goodies such as Flash Player 10.1 support.

Our Galaxy Tab prototype also lacked any kind of homescreen personalization, but it appears the final version will benefit from Samsung's own TouchWiz 3.0 UI. So, let us get started - the home screen is divided into several pages, on which to deploy your widgetry (boy, do we need to patent this word!). While there's absolutely nothing new here for us smartphone lovers, it is still quite interesting to look at Android as a tablet-powering mobile operating system. So far we can say that Google's OS is a-okay for managing such a device – after all it is conceived as a touch-driven system, though we have some concerns about the additional software that's available for the platform. Sure, there are some 70,000 apps in Android Market now, but you know... most of these are unusable (and unneeded) on a smartphone, let alone a tablet, the functionality of which should be more or less higher than that of a smartphone. Well, you might be able to find a decent word processor, but what about some more advanced productivity apps to let you perform photo/video/audio editing for example? Of course, we do not expect the full-blown Windows experience just yet, but Photoshop Express? Come on, that's just lame! All in all, the same thing applies to the iPad's iOS, although Apple's platform has already positioned itself a lot better.


Tablets are more of a consumer/entertainment-oriented devices you would say, and we totally agree. Alright then. What about gaming on the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy Tab? It's simply a no-go, you know, while iPad owners cannot complain in this respect.

That said, we've got to hand it to Google/Samsung for redesigning the core apps of the platform so that they utilize the larger real estate. Similarly to what Apple did with the Calendar on the iPad, on the Samsung Galaxy Tab you'll have a Calendar app that's more advanced and comfortable to use. In addition, the Contacts app has also been revamped to ease you in making those long phone calls... Um, yeah, the Samsung Galaxy Tab actually features phone functionality! More on that in the “Internet and Connectivity” section.



Email has also been redesigned and when in landscape mode, will present you with a list of your emails on the left, and the contents of the selected one on the right. However, we should tell you that writing on the Galaxy Tab's on-screen QWERTY is not the most comfortable task, no matter if it's in portrait or landscape mode. You will get the hang of it after some time spent with the device, but all in all you might feel more comfortable typing with some messaging phone than with the Tab. That said, we did almost no mistakes when typing, thanks to the decently-sized keys.

Camera:

Taking pictures with the Samsung Galaxy Tab's 3MP autofocus camera is a fun experience. What makes it fun is the large viewfinder, which basically allows you to get a better idea of the image you are going to take. It's the standard Android camera interface with options for scene modes, brightness and contrast, white balance, ISO, effects, saturation and sharpness. Switching to video capturing mode is done with the touch of a single button.

Although we have an unfinished prototype at our hands (which actually has a 3.2MP fixed focus camera!), we couldn't help but take some photos outdoors and indoors, just for a sneak peek at what the Galaxy Tab's shooter is going to offer. By the looks of it, outdoor shots are pretty sharp, with realistic colors and a tendency for overexposure in certain small areas. Indoor samples came out a bit blurry, although still decent when there's enough light. We hope the LED flash in the final product will help in those situations!




Videos can be recorded in 720x480 pixels at 29fps. Unfortunately, it isn't HD, but at least the video we produced is smooth enough and fine-looking, as you can see.



Multimedia:

The preloaded music player is nothing spectacular, as it simply lets you filter your content through tabs. Switching to horizontal mode will make things easier for you. For example, you might have filtered by Albums. This will actually show your albums on the left, while the track list of the selected album will appear on the right. The player displays large album covers (as it should), and you also have a bunch of equalizer presets and effects to enhance your audio. The two speakers at the bottom of the Samsung Galaxy Tab are powerful enough, although they may start crackling once you take things to the maximum.



The Samsung Galaxy Tab is one truly magnificent device to watch videos on! We could flawlessly play MPEG-4, H.264, DivX and Xvid videos at 720p HD resolution and high bitrate, resulting in brilliant image quality and smooth playback (according to the official specs, the device will be able to play full HD 1080p video). Truly amazing experience right out of the box, no issues at all. Moreover, the Galaxy Tab's screen aspect ratio is more suitable for watching movies than the iPad's. As we said, the loudspeaker is pretty loud and does a good job at producing the audio to your movies or music videos or whatever.

Internet and Connectivity:

The Samsung Galaxy Tab is categorized by Samsung as a “Portable Smart Web Book”, somewhat stressing the fact that this is a device mainly for web browsing. For the purpose, you have the Android WebKit browser, which is one of the most advanced mobile browsers right now. Zooming can be done in three ways: a) double-tap; b) pinch-to-zoom; or c) on-screen zoom keys. We mainly preferred to use the pinch-to-zoom function, as double-tap is not always accurate, while using the on-screen keys can be slow.


Since it is using Froyo, the Samsung Galaxy Tab features full Flash Player 10.1 support and this certainly widens the range of content that you can view on the device. It may not be this way in the future, but for now Flash is still a heavily-utilized platform on the web, so it's definitely a big advantage for the Galaxy Tab to have it. Sure, most Flash elements are slowing the general performance of the browser down and sometimes in a big way, but then again, there are some pages that you'd never be able to load without Flash. Moreover, we are pretty satisfied with how non-YouTube videos are playing – most of them aren't perfectly smooth, but are still quite viewable.


The Samsung Galaxy Tab's browser supports text shrinking so that it matches the width of your view, making it easier for you to read. This is definitely a handy feature, as it saves you the need to scroll horizontally to read each line of text, and instead allows you to only scroll vertically. It doesn't do it automatically as you zoom though. Once you have applied your preferred level of zoom, you'll have to double-tab on the text for it to reorder.

All in all, surfing the web on the Samsung Galaxy Tab is an incredibly fun experience. Not only can you see almost all of the Internet's beauty, but the device also has fine resolution, which almost removes the need to zoom, once you are in landscape mode. Finally, we are glad that Samsung isn't using the PenTile-based AMOLED screen technology, because this would have made the text harder to read.

In contrast to the Apple iPad, the Samsung Galaxy Tab is coming with Wi-Fi + 3G support right from the start. In addition, it also features a GPS module, plus the ability to place and receive normal voice calls over a mobile network – something the iPad lacks. Once again, good added value here.

Performance:

As we said, the Samsung Galaxy Tab can do voice (and video) calls over a mobile network, which is a great thing, of course (after all, phones rock). It works without a hitch, but of course, you'll have to hear your callers through the loudspeaker (having an earpiece would have been weird, no doubt). So you'll either have to put up with it, or get yourself a decent handsfree.

Expectations:

Overall, we have pretty high hopes for the Samsung Galaxy Tab. It is no doubt a wonderful device, which, along with the Apple iPad and the other tablets soon to come out, redefines the meaning of the mobile computer. It's simply way more portable and intuitive to use. Of course, we don't question the fact that you can still do a lot more on a normal laptop, but netbook days sure seem to be coming to an end now. It all depends on how quickly developers will write capable software for mobile platforms such as Android and iOS.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab seems to position itself on the forefront of the new tablet market, with only the iPad to compete with it as of now. Both tablets are pretty much neck and neck right now, with the iPad having the advantages of being first, a bigger screen, as well as more and better software, while the Galaxy Tab offers you the full-blown web with its Flash Player 10.1 support, built-in camera and phone functionality. Only time will tell how things will develop, while we witness the launch of Samsung's Galaxy Tab in the middle of September. For now, the Samsung Galaxy Tab sure does look like a promising tablet for those users who need a more pocketable device. In the final analysis, we expect it to be quite successful as it features all that is needed and more, while the Apple iPad has already proven that there's a market for tablets, and it's hungry.

Samsung Galaxy Tab Video Preview: