Samsung Galaxy tab

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The story of the Galaxy Tab has been quite a saga, to say the least. In fact, it was actually back in Maythat we first heard rumblings of Samsung’s plans to unleash a 7-inch Android tablet much like its Galaxy S phones, but it was only after months of painful teasing — including a cruel look at just its packagingonthe Engadget Show— that Sammy finally unveiled the Galaxy Tab to the world at IFA. The Tab certainly packed the specs — a 1GHz processor, full Flash support thanks to Android 2.2, dual cameras, support for up to 32GB of storage and WiFi / 3G connectivity — to put other Android tablets to shame, and ourinitial hands-on with it only had us yearning for more. Without pricing and availability, however, the story was at a cliffhanger. Of course, those details trickled out over the next few months, and here in the US, Samsung finally announced that all four major US carriers would be getting Tabs to call their own.Verizon then finally took the lead in announcing pricing, and revealed that its Tab would hit contract-free for $600 – Sprint followed with the same no-contract pricing along with a $400 two-year contract option.

Indeed, it’s been quite a long journey, but even after all of that, some of the major questions are still left unanswered. Does the Tab provide a more complete and polished experience than all the other Android tablets out there? How are Samsung’s specially tailored apps? And ultimately, has a tablet finally hit the market that can rival Apple’s iPad? We think it’s about time we answer those questions and finally open what might be the most important chapter of the Galaxy Tab story — the official Engadget review. We knew you’d agree, so join us after the break.

 

It’s getting increasingly hard for manufacturers to differentiate the look of these all-screen gadgets, but Samsung’s done a commendable job distinguishing the Tab from the others with its contrasting front and back surfaces. The back of the rounded-off device is coated in white shiny plastic (whether it will remain ghost white over time remains to be seen), while the front consists of a familiar flush black bezel and glass screen. (Note: we were sent the Sprint version of the Tab and there may be slight aesthetic differences amongst the carrier versions.) The screen and bezel do appear less glossy than the iPad — you’ll still want to keep the Windex (or Brasso gadget polish) and chamois close by, though. Speaking of clean, that’s exactly how we’d describe the rest of the design — there are four touch buttons on the front side, a headphone jack on the top edge and a volume rocker, microSD card slot and power button on the right edge. However, we don’t see why Samsung couldn’t have made room for a micro-USB port — you have to charge it and sideload content using Samsung’s proprietary charging cable.

To be honest, our real appreciation for the device’s design comes more in terms of its form factor. Unsurprisingly, 7-inch tablets are much better for one-handed use than larger-screened ones (i.e. the 9.7-inch iPad or 11.6-inch ExoPC), and the 7.4 x 4.7-inch Galaxy Tab is no different. Steve Jobs may not think the size is optimal, but we loved being able to wrap our smaller hand around the 0.83-pound / 0.47-inch thick Tab when reading a book or hold it like a phone and use our thumbs to type on the on-screen keyboard. Sure, it’s not as light or thin as the 0.53-pound / 0.33-inch Kindle or 0.48-pound / 0.4-inch Dell Streak, but it’s still light enough to hold up in bed without fearing that you’ll drop it on your face.

The overall build of the device is top-notch, and though it may appear to some like an enlarged Captivateor Fascinate, it feels more solid than those plasticy phones. We’re not saying it’s a rugged device by any standard — although it does have a Corning Gorilla Glass screen — but it does feel incredibly durable, and we didn’t worry too much when it mistakenly fell off the couch. By the way, the Tab’s smooth back causes it to slide off things every so often — so we’d suggest keeping this little guy in a case or nabbing a stand for it. We do wish the Tab had a built-in kickstand like the Evo 4G and Archos 7. Think about it, Samsung

 

Samsung apps

 

On the other hand, that doesn’t mean there aren’t core parts of the OS that require tweaks to take advantage of the added screen real estate, and unlike the many others making Android tablets, Samsung has done more than just throw on the stock applications. Below is a rundown of the core apps Samsung has developed specifically for the Tab.

EMail — The core of the email app looks like those on the Galaxy S phones, but when you flip the display into landscape mode you get a Microsoft Outlook-like pane that displays your Inbox on the left and the messages on the right. We preferred managing and responding to mail in this app over the Gmail app, which is just the smartphone version.

Calendar — The calendar app is equally as attractive. In landscape mode you can adjust it so your calendar takes up the entire screen or with a similar two pane view that shows a listing of upcoming events.

Messaging, Contacts – These are pretty self-explanatory. Even though the Tab isn’t technically a phone since all the US carriers have restricted its calling ability, you can use the messaging app to send SMS or MMS messages or e-mails to other contacts. Like the others, you’ve got a two pane view in landscape mode — you can look at your contacts on the left side and message from the right.

Media Hub – This one has started to pop up on some Galaxy S phones as well, but the Tab is perhaps the best suited to take advantage of Samsung’s new movie and TV store / player. At this point there’s over 1,000 videos from MTV, Universal and Paramount, and while there is a decent selection of current titles — we downloaded the Jersey Shore episode of South Park for $1.99 — you’ll come up empty when you start searching for older flicks. Nope, E.T nor Terminator, just to name a few, aren’t available. Of course, everything here is DRM-protected so we had zero luck trying to drag it to our desktop. However, you will be able to log into your Media Hub account on up to five other Samsung devices to watch any previously purchased content. Media Hub isn’t a bad over-the-air alternative, but at this point we’d recommend buying content through Amazon’s Unbox and sideloading it for use on multiple devices.

Note: Samsung also has a Readers Hub app, which contains access to Kobo’s e-book store and other reading content, but Sprint’s decided not to preload it.

 

The Tab also comes preloaded with a handful of third-party applications, including Facebook, Amazon’s Kindle, and Qik. (There’s a “Free Games” shortcut on the main screen which is nothing but a link to Gameloft’s site. Uh, not cool, Samsung.) All of those scaled the 7-inch display quite well — there weren’t any formatting issues or pixelation — however, that experience really depends on the app at the moment. For instance, Angry Birds looked beautiful on the larger screen. Seriously, it looks so incredibly awesome on the larger display that we spent the last four days replaying the game! Apps like Pandora, Facebook, Twitter, TweetDeck, YouTube also scale well, but other apps like USA Today, Engadget, Raging Thunder 2 Lite, and Speed Test don’t. The latter apps are still usable, but you’ve got to deal with an incredibly large border of blank screen around them.

Samsung claims that any app that abides by Google’s coding and design standards should work just fine, but even the apps that do scale obviously weren’t built or optimized for tablets, so the experience really is like having a larger smartphone. We don’t need to tell you how many of these companies could build better tablet apps if given the right SDKs — we’ve seen them all do it with the iPad. Of course, the iPad was in a better situation at its launch: Apple had rolled out development tools for creating larger screened apps and a few of them we already available in the iPad app store, but Google has provided no such direction yet. We’ve heard that engineers at the Googleplex are in fact working on optimizing apps for tablets with the Honeycomb release and possibly rolling out a separate section of the Market, but until that happens it really comes down to trial and error and living with smartphone-sized designed software on a larger display.

 

For the most part, the browsing experience on the Tab is rock solid — pages loaded quickly over WiFi and scrolling / zooming on most pages was snappy. When loading a few sites — like this very technology site — we did notice the scrolling to be a bit jittery and not as smooth as on the iPad. However, we do like that there’s the ability to change the brightness within the browser. But, obviously, the Tab differs from that other tablet with its full Flash support. So, is it everything you’ve been waiting for? Thanks to its 1GHz processor, the experience isn’t as slow as we’ve seen on other Android 2.2 devices, but we can’t really say we took advantage of the feature all that much — in fact we decided to disable it eventually to speed up browsing.

Scaled-up smartphone apps and Flash compatibility alone don’t create a well-rounded tablet platform — it’s going to take native apps for the Tab to be truly competitive.

While it’s nice to be able to load videos within sites and not have to battle that blue lego block, we were repeatedly given the “this video is not optimized for mobile” message when we hit play. Overall, videos played just fine, but Flash definitely slowed down the rest of the browsing experience. What about other Flash heavy sites? Well, as you can see above, Hulu is a dead end — we got the same error message even when we logged into our Hulu plus account in the browser.(Hulu, please release a Plus app for Android ASAP!) On that same vein, we had no issues loading a Flash game site like Canabalt, but because it was built for mouse and keyboard environments we couldn’t figure out how to jump and avoid death by bricks. What does it all mean? The Tab’s Flash capability is a nice fallback, but if you’ve been thinking it’s the killer tablet app you should think again. Not to sound like Steve Jobs or anything, but scaled-up smartphone apps and Flash compatibility alone don’t create a well-rounded tablet platform — it’s going to take native apps for the Tab to be truly competitive.