Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Limited Edition review

It is usually a bit of difficult to be aware of the spate of Honeycomb tablets that appear to be stoning up left, right and center — you realize, now that Ice Cream Sandwich have been officially promised — but what’s not easy to miss is an 86mm slate. Checking in at a sliver of a pinch thinner than the illustrious iPad 2, Samsung’s rethought-out, redesigned and certainly-not-renamed Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the primary Android tablet to this point that seriously goes toe-to-toe with Apple in both specifications and design. Granted, the buyer models aren’t slated to ship out until June 8th, but considering that Google handed us one last week during its annual I/O conference , we figured we’d spend right here weekend wisely. You recognize, photographing, benchmarking and testing this thing to the hilt. (Of note, the unit tested here was the Limited Edition model, with out TouchWiz, 3G and a microSD card slot, but is otherwise just like shipping units other than the design at the rear.)

The Tab 10.1 — to not be confused with the older, since-relabeled 0 Tab 10.1v 0 — weighs just 1.31 pounds (marginally besting the iPad 2′s 1.33 pound chassis), and if looks could kill, few people would’ve made it out of Moscone West with all organs functional. But as you well know, style only gets you within the door — it is the guts, the software, and the wedding of all of it that makes or breaks the tablet experience. Hop on past the jump to determine why we expect Samsung truly delivered at the promise of a Google-powered tablet, and why you need to all seriously consider socking away funds as early June approaches.

Hardware and design

Zoinks! Jumpin’ Jehosaphat! Go on and pick your exclamation of choice — as long as it entails shock, awe, and pure jubilation, it’ll fit the bill here. We’ll just come right out and say it: the final chassis of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is on par with that of the iPad 2, and from a handling standpoint, outclasses Apple’s offering. Make no mistake, this marks the primary time that we’ve been capable of say that (without reservation) about any non-iOS tablet, and Samsung deserves an entire 7 heaping of laud 7 for doing what no person else appears in a position to.

Let us explain. The 0.33-inch thick slate is a hair thinner than the most recent edition of the iPad, and while that’s all fine, well and good, it is the other aspects that really push it ahead. Samsung uses a touch larger 10.1-inch display (when compared with the iPad 2′s 9.7-inch IPS panel), yet manages to craft a slimmer / taller product that really weighs under its primary rival. The Tab 10.1 still comes out feeling astoundingly rigid, and whilst you could chalk it as much as being an individual preference, we’re keen on the aspect ratio here. It’s just easier to deal with with a single hand, and the additional real estate proves even nicer after you have a gander on the 1280 x 800 screen resolution.

Our 32GB WiFi model sports an understated motif, and it’s an appreciated step back from the gaudy accents which have flanked some of those other tablets. Front panel is smothered in gloss, with the LCD flanked by a deep black bezel that — unfortunately — serves no other purpose than to present your fingers a gap to rest. Call us crazy, but we’d love if those touch-sensitive edges at the 8 BlackBerry PlayBook 8 were adorning this guy, too. The tip bezel is dotted with a 2 megapixel camera, while the perimeters are surrounded by a matte silver finish. Flipping it at the rear, you will get an 8 megapixel camera (able to shooting 720p video), an LED flash and a three.5mm headphone jack. The head left edge is home to a pronounced power / sleep button and a volume rocker, while the left and right edges are freed from oddities outside of a small speaker grille on either side. The rear edge houses a microphone hole in addition to Samsung’s own dock connector input.

We’re hearing that the 9 3G version 9 may have a microSD card slot in addition to a SIM slot, and naturally, the rear can be a much more subtle black in preference to the vanilla Android army populating our review unit. Unlike the 0 G-Slate 0 , the Tab 10.1 remains a piece too wide to essentially wrap your hands around (Shaq notwithstanding), but it’s balanced enough to deal with in a single hand and sort with the alternative.

The plastic back at the Tab 10.1 is the only design aspect that’s somewhat less premium than at the iPad 2, but when that is what shaved the burden, we guess we won’t kvetch too loudly. Still, our backplate remained in tact throughout a gauntlet of TSA inspections, and we’ve no concerns whatsoever in regards to the build quality there.

Internals
While the pixel density lags just a little behind the G-Slate, the 1280 x 800 resolution mates well with the ten.1-inch panel. It’s glossy, sure, but what Honeycomb tablet isn’t? Despite the shine, here’s almost definitely one of many nicer mobile displays that we have seen, with colors popping and viewing angles impressing all eight of our friends who gathered around to observe an admittedly bizarre Star Wars – Harry Potter mashup clip. You can be hard-pressed to locate anyone unsatisfied with the display, to be honest, and that is the reason just the beginning.

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is only one of the group in terms of processing power; NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 silicon is powering things, with a dual-core 1GHz clock speed keeping things at the up and up. It’s worth noting that our Limited Edition unit has 32GB of internal storage capacity… and that’s the reason it. There is not any microSD card slot, and we’re anticipating that every one WiFi-only models will ship as such. Sammy’s yet to elucidate, obviously, but those requiring how to add additional storage should probably keep an eye fixed out for the Tab 10.1 3G.

Samsung’s media connector is chock filled with possibilities. The package ships with an easy USB adapter, but there’s always the probabilities of enabling video out, audio out, etc. through optional dongles at some point. As for connectivity? Our unit was equipped with Bluetooth 2.1 and 802.11b/g/n WiFi radios, and we’re still playing a wait-and-see game in terms of 3G.

Performance and battery life
The 1GHz CPU found here can be ever-so-slightly dated in comparison to the velocity demons found within superphones just like the 1 Galaxy S II 1 , nevertheless it still runs circles around most everything within Android 3.0. a chilly boot took under 20 seconds, and once the lock screen popped up, we were into the camera application and shooting 720p video in under three seconds. Anyone with a mid-range Android phone will attest to the presumed impossibility of that feat, but we swear it happened. Thrice.

The capacitive touchpanel was abundantly responsive, with both swiping and pinch-to-zoom actions being recognized immediately and accurately. So far as tablet touch experiences go, the Tab 10.1 delivers one that’s world class. We struggled find how one can slow this guy down, and despite a whole day of multitasking, swiping through applications felt as brisk because it did after a fresh reboot.

Trying to find hard numbers? We’ve ‘em. We tested the Tab 10.1 using the normal Quadrant benchmark that was extensively utilized in our G-Slate and Xoom review, and using a standard of six runs, we landed at 1,970. That’s a piece greater than our in-house Xoom (1,801) and G-Slate (1,879), but somewhat under the Iconia Tab A500 (2,228).

It’s worth noting, however, that the Tab 10.1 did indeed soar beyond the two,300 mark a time or two, leading us to believe that these guys are all performing right round the same, not less than from a genuine-world, noticeability standpoint.

After we sat all the way down to our video loop test, with WiFi on and display brightness at about 65 percent, we scored slightly below ten hours. That’s second only to the iPad 2, and by merely half an hour. Jack that brightness down slightly, and also you could probably squeeze 11 hours out.

	Battery Life
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1	9:55
T-Mobile G-Slate	8:18
Apple iPad 2	10:26
Apple iPad	9:33
Motorola Xoom	8:20
Archos 101	7:20
RIM BlackBerry PlayBook	7:01
Samsung Galaxy Tab	6:09
Dell Streak 7	3:26

While inbuilt speakers — particularly on tablets — are rarely ever worth writing home about, we needed to give these guys a shot. The Tab 10.1 has a single speaker on both the left and right edges, and while they were greater than sufficient for emitting the ordinary array of bleeps and bloops essential to alert folks what is going on, they’re hardly headphone replacements. Using ‘em to emit audio for a voice-driven movie is more sensible than using ‘em for audio, but there is a reason Samsung tosses a collection of earbuds in with the package — they’re the most popular approach to listening.

Software
We mentioned earlier that we had a tricky time getting this guy to stutter, and we’re giving a minimum of some credit to the stock v3.0.1 build of Android that’s thrown on here. Not that we have got anything against TouchWiz UX, per se, but we’ve always been big fans of Google’s untainted Android experience. If you’ll recall, we heard back at CTIA that Sammy could be yanking TouchWiz “in select regions” — we’ve a tough time believing that america is included there, but as a minimum on our LE model, there’s very few instances where Samsung’s fingerprints are shown at the software.

Outside of the traditional applications, we found a duplicate of QuickOffice HD, Amazon MP3, Amazon Kindle for Android, Movie Studio, Music Hub (slightly pointless given the introduction of Music Beta), Pulse (a feed reader / news gatherer with a slightly impressive design layout) and Samsung Apps.

While here’s most certainly cleared by Google for Android Market access, Samsung Apps is another venue for fetching programs to be used at the Tab 10.1. It’s highly probable that it’s simply unpopulated because of us having this tablet a pretty good month before its general release, but either way, calling what we saw here “underwhelming” is incredibly the understatement.

Beyond that, it is the same Honeycomb we’ve grown to grasp and appreciate, a minimum of for several more weeks. Android 3.1 is already making itself comfortable on Motorola’s Xoom, and we’re told that this actual slate should see an analogous update “within the coming weeks.” In case you are wondering what sort of niceties that’ll bring, we’d invite you to look at our 3 video hands-on here 3 .

The stock keyboard, as we’ve mentioned before, within reason spartan. We’d recommend swapping in 4 SwiftKey 4 once humanly possible, but overall, Honeycomb’s basic typing tools are still superior to these present in Froyo and Gingerbread. Obviously, the dedicated Gmail app is little short of outstanding, and it remains one of the crucial major reasons for heavy Gmail users to stay with Android over another tablet OS.

Camera

As with the G-Slate, the camera performance at the Galaxy Tab 10.1 leaves slightly to be desired, but in accordance with what we saw, we’d say it is a slight improvement. Colors didn’t wash out as easily, and indoor performance is predictably marred by unhealthy levels of noise. The built-in flash aids in that to an extent, but let’s not kid ourselves — you are not going to be happy with any of the photos you’re taking at the Tab 10.1, you’ll just be somewhat pleased that you simply captured a moment you might have otherwise missed. Look at the gallery below — we’d say the effects are on-par with a lower-level point-and-shoot camera, but actually snapping shots with a huge tablet isn’t nearly as easy.

The 720p movie mode is markedly better, as proven inside the video embedded above. Despite having reasonably nice results here, shooting video (or even still images) on a tablet still appears like a fool’s game. We were constantly stared at while trying to capture this footage as discretely as possible, and felt as though we were doing something inherently wrong the whole while. Maybe we’re just overly worried about our image — but maybe, just maybe, you should not be using a ten.1-inch slate to take photographs and shoot video.

Wrap-up
We all know, we all know — it’s beginning to sound like a broken record around here, but would we actually be making progress if it didn’t? Without qualification, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the simplest Honeycomb tablet up to now, and this time, it’s by a rustic mile. There’s simply not another Android 3.0 tablet out there today that fits the Tab 10.1′s style, placing it a lap just before the opposite, more cumbersome Tegra 2-powered alternatives.

It’s quick, nimble, and straightforward to hang, and it’s both thinner and lighter than the heralded iPad 2. There is not any question that we prefer the handling of the Tab 10.1 over Apple’s alternative, and with the improvements coming with Android 3.1 (and in time, Ice Cream Sandwich), it will be mighty hard to miss this device come 1 June 8th 1 . The 16GB WiFi model will hit for $499 — exactly in keeping with the iPad — while the 32GB variant will demand $100 more (we’re still awaiting word on 3G prices).

There’s just no wrong way to assert it: the iPad 2 finally has a genuine competitor. If Samsung could somehow undercut Apple by even $25 here, the option will be obvious, but it should have a whale of a time convincing the loads that a Samsung device is superior to at least one Designed in California when prices are equal. That said, we’d still recommend the Tab 10.1 over the iPad 2 for heavy Gmail users and all-around fans of Android. And hey, at the very least this thing can reap the benefits of 2 Music Beta 2 , when you are into it.

Psst… Since it is a developer unit, not available for puchase, we chose to not give this a score.

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This post is tagged: consumer models, left right and center, limited edition, microsd card slot, shipping units