By now, you have to be acquainted with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. We’ve done countless hands-ons with the super-svelte Honeycomb slate, or even reviewed it … twice ! Now it’s back, again, and this time its packing an LTE radio tuned to the frequencies of a bit company is called Verizon. Outside of some tiny cosmetic changes — the brushed, gray plastic back and the rumored Micro SIM slot up top, nothing else has changed. We will not waste an excessive amount of time rehashing what you understand, but we figured it was worth firing up the most recent version, which officially went on sale day, and putting that 4G antenna to the test. You understand the routine, keep it up keepin’ on after the break.
Obviously, the very first thing we did after we had the Galaxy Tab powered on was launch the browser and head straight for Speedtest.net. Now, we’ve done a number of testing of 2 Verizon’s LTE network 2 before, but this time something was different. The information rates we were seeing didn’t just put most cable modems to shame, they were competitive with our 3 FiOS 3 connection. We ran the rate test 15 times simply to be sure it wasn’t some anomaly, and used a couple of different servers. We averaged 28.25Mbps down and seven.93Mbps up — the 4 Thunderbolt maxed out 4 at 21.77Mbps. We saw accelerates to a positively face-melting 44.44Mbps down and 9.39Mbps up. Even our ping times were reliably low, never topping 75ms and averaging just shy of 67ms.
The relationship feels just as fast as those numbers would indicate too. The browser loaded up full desktop sites, even those weighed down with Flash, very quickly in any respect. Engadget popped up just as quickly as did on our Thinkpad and HD clips from the 5 movies section 5 of the Android market started playing almost instantaneously.
What isn’t clear is why exactly we were seeing such dramatically faster speeds. It’s possible that there’s beefier hardware contained in the Galaxy Tab than inside the LTE phones we have seen up to now. But, it is able to also simply be that there have been no 4G Verizon customers within the area, allowing us to hog those 700Mhz frequencies. Regardless, we came away impressed. We expected the slate would keep pace with its network peers, but we never anticipated it should so decidedly blow them out of the water.
The winners of the 2011 Engadget Awards — Readers’ Choice
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