Apple have dominated the tablet market since they released the iPad back in April 2010.  It’s taken a year for manufacturers (and Google) to be able to produce tablets that can compete on the same field as Apple. Finally now, we have quite a selection to choose from, the Asus Transformer, the Motorola Xoom and my own personal choice, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Those that follow us here on hemorrdroids will know I’m a big fan of the Samsung Galaxy SII, so I was eager to get my hands on the Tab 10.1 and couldn’t even wait for it to be released in the UK.  Over the past half year I’ve owned the original Galaxy Tab and then an Advent Vega, but both of those pale in comparison to the Tab 10.1

Design

Would it surprise you if I was to say I was almost a little dissapointed by how solid the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 feels?  Let me explain a little, cause it’s really a positive…  I love my Galaxy SII, some people say it’s too light and feels cheap.  I love how light it is, almost feeling like a piece of cardboard with a screen on it.  Well, my expectations of the Tab were probably a little unrealistic, hoping for this feeling from the Tablet too.

Instead, what you get is a very solid feeling device.  It’s still very light at 589g compared to the Xoom at 730g and even the iPad 2 at 613grams, and very thin at 10.9mm.  I found it very easy to lay on my bed, hold the SGT 10.1 with one hand and operate it with the other.

Generally it has a rounded feel to it, with minimal hardware buttons, thanks to Honeycombs built in software buttons for home, back, menu and app switching.  What we’re left with is simply power on and a volume rocker.  There is of course a headphone jack as well as the proprietary input on the bottom for charging and data transfer.

On my particular Limited Edition, Google I/O version, the back is white, with tiled images of an Android, with a silver panel along the top portion.  To be honest, I would probably prefer a simple black back to the device, but never mind, it looks neat enough.

Unlike the Advent Vega, the bezel around the screen is particularly thin, meaning the device itself is only 24.6cm wide and 17cm tall, almost an identical size to the Xoom.  On occasion I have come close to pressing things on the screen, while trying to hold the device with one hand, but as you get used to it, the bezel is just fine.

Hardware

One of the most impressive things about the Tab 10.1 is it’s hardware.  Not necessarily the specifications of the contents, the Tab 10.1 is similar to the Xoom and other tablets out there, using the now minimum to be expected, 1ghz dual core CPU.  What’s impressive is the feel of the device.  As has been mentioned, it’s very light and this is what is first noticed, especially by Xoom owners.

The Tab 10.1 is available in 16gb and 32gb versions, but surprisingly there is no memory card slot.  How can this be?  There are phones with 16gb and plenty of room to fit a Micro SD card, why would you not put one into a cutting edge tablet in this day and age?

It would appear the inbuilt memory is shared to the device, so of my 32 gig I have just under 28 gig available.  In settings, looking under ‘Storage’ I can see how this is then used.  I can tap on one of the categories and get a better understanding of where the space is being used.  ’Misc’ for example would mainly seem to be data stored for apps, which can be cleared away from within settings.

Generally all this RAM and CPU power moves things along nicely, although I did find from time to time it would slow up a little.  Apps might take a second or two to open, sometimes the home screen might take a couple of seconds to re-appear after an app is closed, but never really enough that you find it annoying.

Fast typing is a good way to see how your device keeps up and I did find it was possible to out type the Tab 10.1 using Thumb Keyboard.  Again, not enough that it would really cause a problem, but it would seem I could get a word ahead of what was appearing on the screen without too much difficulty.

These slow downs might be more about software optimisation, that might disappear as updates or custom ROM’s become easier to flash.  As I say, they aren’t really anything that concerns me and often pass once the device is in use for a minute or so.

Screen

As I’ve come to expect from Samsung these days, the screen is very impressive. The technical specs are that of a 800 by 1280 TFT capacitive 16 million colour touch screen.

Maybe it’s because I’ve just come from an Advent Vega, which had a pretty appalling screen, but I can’t get over how great things look on this screen.  Colours are sharp and vibrant, watching YouTube video’s is a joy.

Not only does it look great, but it’s responsive and sensitive enough to type on at reasonable speed.

The 1280 pixels wide view means browsing the web is a breeze -

Camera

In some ways I find it kind of odd to even bother with comments on the camera on a Tablet.  I honestly wouldn’t have been that upset if there wasn’t a camera on the Tab 10.1, in the weeks I’ve been using the device, I’ve never needed to use it, but anyway, it might be important to you, so here we go!

The rear facing camera is 3MP with auto focus and an LED flash.  It seems to be quite quick in auto focusing and the overall time of tapping the button to the picture being taken seems very quick.  The end result looks pretty good too -

In the first shot, taken out of the window, I would say it’s struggled to balance the light, over exposing the shot.  The two closer shots show great detail and a sharp image.

More pictures taken with the Tab 10.1 can be seen here, a couple of them show the exposure issues, but the one of next doors garden shows some great colour and much better exposure.

The Tab 10.1 is capable of recording 720p, which I would say is plenty capable for the needs of a tablet.  It’s not like you’ll be taking this to events to record stuff I can’t imagine. I seemed to get quite different results from two different attempts.  The first of the Barcelona city scape looks very good, strong colours and clear sharp picture.

The second, the traditional view from my bedroom window, looks a little washed out, pale and fuzzy in comparison.

Make from this what you will…

The front facing camera seems to be more than enough at 2mp, meaning you would see something like this on your webchat (except perhaps not as handsome)…

Software

As I’m sure you’re aware, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is one of the few tablet to be running Honeycomb.  I managed to update mine to 3.1, but I think the latest official release is still 3.0 while the Xoom is moving on to 3.2.  I’m sure the Tab 10.1 wont be far behind in receiving this update though.

I really like Honeycomb and I can now see why people have said Tablets shouldn’t bother with regular Froyo or Gingerbread.  Honeycomb and it’s tablet friendly apps really do make a difference.  Take a look at the layout of the Gmail app -

The screen real-estate is used to it’s best, nothing wasted.  I almost prefer checking my mail on the tablet to my PC web browser.  Being a big user of labels, I would have liked if they made it a little easier to change these on an e-mail, but that’s the only floor I could really find with it.

Likewise, the Calendar app is very nicely presented.

Using the different calendar views, my preference being the 7 day view, it’s very easy to see what’s going on.  Again, if I had to find something, I would like it to be possible to force one screen view, so the hours were all pushed into my view, rather than scrolling up and down to see the morning and evening.

Perhaps the fanciest looking Google app is the new YouTube app.

The scrolling wall of videos is really quite cool to slide round, back and forth.  When in a particular video’s screen, again the screen space is used well to provide all relevant information.

You can also see in these screen shots, the ‘Back’, ‘Home’ and ‘App switcher’ buttons along the base of the screen.  The app switcher is a useful addition, allowing you to easily move between running apps.

Once it pops up, you can scroll it up and down, seeing what the app is currently showing and simply tap to go to it, from which ever app you’re currently in.

There are other 3rd party apps that are making good use of the screen too.  Here you can see ‘Words With Friends’, ‘Reddita’ and ‘Pulse’ looking very nice on the Tab 10.1.

I found a good example of an app that doesn’t work well on the tablet. This SPB Spanish Cards and as you can see, it makes no effort to fill the large tablet screen.

This is quite an extreme case and I think I only came across two or three apps that looked this bad, most will fill the screen, but just show the same information you would see on a small phone screen.

At the moment, there are rather limited amounts of apps that are tablet friendly, but they seem to be growing by the day.  Android is a long way from challenging the number of tablet apps that Apple has, but within the next few months I think most major apps will have added a tablet version.  Also, the coming of 3.2 will bring an option to zoom apps to fill the screen a little better, making fonts larger and more tablet friendly.

Multimedia & Connectivity

Whilst at a friends Barbecue recently, I was made aware of a short-coming of the SGT 10.1.  He wanted some way of plugging my Tab into his TV… and I didn’t have one.  There’s no HDMI out, there’s no ‘All Share’ app to use DLNA like my Galaxy SII.  For that matter, it doesn’t even have anywhere to plug in a USB drive to watch content from a memory stick, or as previously mentioned, no memory card slot on the tablet.

That being said, content placed on the device through the proprietary cable, or watched on YouTube does look fantastic.  Not only that, but the stereo surround sound sounds better than any other portable device that I’ve heard.  The first time I watched a YouTube video I was confused by how these two tiny slots where making such a full virtual surround sound.

Support for video codecs seems pretty good, as with most Samsung devices.  The only format I had trouble with is mkv files, which is a shame as they are the default file type for HiDef content these days.  I could get them to play using a few different players, but I had no control to skip, forward or backwards.  If you’re watching it, watch it all the way through!

As I’ve mentioned, the speakers are quite impressive, better than any phone you’ll try, but not quite good enough to have the Tab 10.1 sat in the corner playing music while you get on with your day.  Well of course you could, but it lacks the real depth and base you would want.  Whilst on holiday I used it to play internet radio in the morning and it was probably on a level with most peoples radio alarm clocks, if not better.

Benchmarking

For dual core devices, I’ve moved over to SmartBench 2011 for our testing purposes.  This means our comparison list is somewhat shorter than it used to be, but at least the Galaxy Tab 10.1 will be up against just other dual core devices.

Samsung Galaxy SII (2.3.4)  -  3,600
Motorola Xoom (3.2)  -  2,800
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1  (3.1)  -  2,600
HTC Sensation (2.3.3)  -  2,000

It was rather odd, I ran the test around 8 times, seven of these it scored around 2,600 but once it scored up around 3,200!  The average for a 3.1 device is 2250, according to the app. It is a little disappointing that the Xoom has beaten it, but maybe this is a benefit of Android 3.2, time will tell I guess.  Reading around the net, others seem to report these odd spikes in scores, the Xoom sometimes jumping to 3,600+

There are kernels out there that will allow overclocking, which is something  I might look into, in an attempt to remove the occasional slow down I encounter.

Battery

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 has a 6860mAh battery sealed inside.  Even powering a huge screen, you have to think that sounds pretty powerful!  The listed standby time is somewhere in the region of 2 months.  Whilst this is a little unrealistic, for me it lasted very well.

As I type this my Tab is finally down to 13% after 2 days and 18 hours, with a screen on time of over 5 hours.  Considering most people will charge it overnight, even the heaviest of users should find this will easily last them all day.  By turning off WiFi (leaving the device on) while I was asleep or at work, it lasted over 5 days with reasonable use.  Knowing this, you’ve even got a chance of it lasting a week without charging, depending on your use.

Bottom line here, the battery is very good.  As I’ve said before, if a device can last the day, the battery is good enough.  You’d have to be using this thing constantly to manage to flatten the battery in just one day.

Conclusion

Raju’s Thoughts

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is what the Motorola Xoom should have been when it first came out. Throw away that protein shake you just made, the 10.1 is extremally light and slim for a tablet so it isn’t a full blown workout holding it. The insides are pretty much the same as any other Android Honeycomb tablet out there, so nothing to boast about in that area, although I must say, the screen is much better than the Xooms.

There’s a few annoyances like the propietery connectors and lack of a few ports but that’s to be expected from such a s lim device.

Overall, I think the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the best Android tablet out there, but I’m waiting for the Tab 8.9 before I make any purchases, as that size will probably suit my needs better. As for my Xoom, can’t wait to dash it somewhere very soon.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is not the perfect tablet, but it may be as close as we’ve come yet.  It is a little annoying how hard it is to take content from the Tab and display it in any way on something else, but then content looks and sounds so good from it, you can almost forgive that. The design and build is probably the best we’ve seen from an Android device, you almost have to hold it and use it to really understand how great it feels.

The interface isn’t flawless and more Honeycomb apps are required, but in many ways for me the winning point of the Tab 10.1 is it’s made me a believer in tablets.  I’ve owned the original Samsung Galaxy Tab and an Advent Vega and neither of those persuaded me that there is a use for tablets.  The SGT 10.1 has though.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a device everyone needs, but it fills a small gap in my tech world nicely.  Checking e-mails in bed, watching YouTube videos while ironing, reading books on the beach, watching movies on a plane, these are all things I could do with my phone, but the big clear screen of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 makes them so much easier and enjoyable.

The device is so useful, I can imagine if my PC blew up, I would be much less concerned than if I didn’t have the Tab 10.1.  Gaming and perhaps long periods of typing aside, there’s not much the SGT10.1 wouldn’t do that my PC can.  As it is, my PC gets used less and my phone tends to remain on my desk for most of the time I’m at home.

If you’ve decided you need a tablet, or even just want to try one, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the one to try!

More Tab 10.1 reviews.