Samsung Galaxy Tab Review: A Pocketable Train Wreck [Video]

It is it. The Galaxy Tab is the first Android tablet meant for humans. But is it actually fit for humans?

Put simply, the Galaxy Tab is the first post-iPad tablet that matters, because it’s the first tablet that’s looking to be legitimate competition. It aims to wreck quite a few ground. Powered by iOS’s biggest rival, the Tab essentially kicks off the following generation of tablets. And, at the scale of a paperback, it’s one of the most first to noticeably test how well a seven-inch tablet really works . There’s a good deal riding on this thing.

Here’s the item about tablets: Size is everything. Size is the complete point. It’s what makes browsing, reading, creating and sharing better on a tablet than on a phone, even supposing they’re both running an analogous software.

If you are taking iPhone apps and simply scale them up for the iPad, most of them don’t feel right. When you take Android apps and scale them up for the Tab, the vast majority of them-Twitter, Facebook, Angry Birds-work perfectly. (With the exception of once they don’t, like The Weather Channel.) That’s because the Galaxy Tab is small enough that apps simply blown up a bit of still fundamentally work. That means, conversely, that there’s almost no additional benefit to using the Tab over a phone. It’s not sufficiently big. Web browsing doesn’t have greater fidelity. I don’t get more out of Twitter. A magazine app can be cramped.

Videos do look better than they do on a phone, but a much bigger tablet could be even better.

There is not any approach to not feel like a total dorkface while typing on this thing. In portrait, it’s like tapping on an immense, nerdy phone. In landscape, it’s just dumb. You still ought to thumb type, only you’re stretching out further, and text entry swallows up your entire screen. Swype could be dandy on a phone, but on a seven-inch screen it doesn’t work so well-you need to travel a whole lot further to sketch out words. In other words, you get the worst of a phone’s input problems-amplified.

In the places where Samsung tries to make the Tab feel more like a tablet than an enormous phone, it’s not afraid to borrow liberally from what Apple’s done on the iPad. The music app (a gigantic improvement over the same old Android player) bears an uncanny resemblance to the iPad’s iPod app, while the faux-realness of the Calendar, Contacts and Memo apps feel like Chinatown knockoffs of Cupertino software.

The Tab seems like a grab bag of neglect, good intentions and poor execution. Example: Samsung’s built-in task manager, with one-touch kill switches to liberate gobs of RAM, is plenty effective at facing apps running within the background. But why does it need to be there inside the first place. Do you have to really be actively managing background apps?

Feels dense, and sturdy (if surprisingly thick)-probably the suitable constructed Samsung mobile device ever. Screen is pretty killer. The pixel density-1024×600 pixels packed into a 7-inch display-makes everything from reading to watching video seriously pleasant. (Put otherwise: Reading Kindle books feels better than on the iPad.) The viewing angles are vast like the BP oil spill. The colors are nice and saturated-as a minimum if you turn off the ” power saving mode,” which douses the screen with a sickly yellow hue. Battery life is carefully phenomenal: Four hours of continuous, heavy usage over 3G-Google Talk, browsing, YouTube-only knocked it right down to 40 percent. Building controls for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS into the Android notification shade makes it convenient to turn stuff off to stretch the battery further.

This thing is only a multitude. It’s like a tablet drunkenly connected with a phone, and then took the fetus swimming in a Superfund cleanup site. The browser is miserable, no less than when Flash is enabled. It goes catatonic, scrolling is laggy, and it could actually get laughably bad. When better browsing is half the explanation to head for a larger screen, that’s insanity. Not only does it use a stupid proprietary charging/syncing cable, it won’t charge if you plug it into a laptop. Neither of the cameras are anything to jot down home about. Costing $699 off-contract is embarrassing when the iPad is $499.

Typically, the point of a compromise is to assemble the suitable of either side. The Tab is like a compromise’s evil twin, merging the worst of a tablet and the worst of a phone. It has all the input problems of a tablet, with almost none of the consumption benefits. With more apps geared to its tweener size, it is usually much better, however it’s not clear they’re coming anytime soon, if ever. The Tab is a clumsy first attempt at any such tablet-watch for someone else to do it better.

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This post is tagged: dorkface, fidelity, LandScape, Samsung, weather channel