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Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
When it released the original Galaxy Tab last year, Samsung became one of the first mainstream hardware vendors to deliver an Android tablet. With its new Galaxy Tab 10.1, Samsung kept the Galaxy Tab name and branding, but the new device has little else in common with its predecessor. Don't let the "10.1" fool you—this is all new.
The Tab 10.1 is built atop Honeycomb, Google's tablet-optimized version of the Android operating system. Samsung ships the device with Android 3.1, a Honeycomb point update that addresses some of the technical weaknesses of the original Honeycomb release. And unlike the Motorola Xoom and other Android tablets that we have tested, the Tab 10.1 feels more like a finished product—it's still incomplete at launch, but it's not a half-baked tech demo.
In this review, we'll focus on the Tab 10.1 hardware, the OS improvements in Android 3.1, and how Samsung's shiny new tablet compares to its chief rivals. (Earlier this year, we took an in-depth look at Honeycomb in our Xoom review, so we won't reiterate all of the details about the software platform here. You can skim the Xoom review if you want a closer look at what Honeycomb offers and how it differs from the Android phone experience.)
Hardware
Under the hood, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 looks quite similar to the Xoom. An NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC with a dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPU powers the tablet, and it has 1GB of RAM and either 16GB or 32GB of internal storage. The 10.1-inch TFT CD display renders at 1280x800. The Tab 10.1 also has two cameras, a front-facing 2.0MP camera for video chat and a 3.0MP rear camera with an LED flash.
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click to enlarge
The tablet scored 1,428 on the Quadrant benchmark, which put it just behind the Xoom in terms of raw performance.
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Quadrant benchmark - Click to enlarge
The non-removable 7000 mAh battery is rated for 9 hours of use, and we got just under that during our tests with mixed usage scenarios (the new Tab lasts about an hour longer than the Xoom). Connectivity options include WiFi, BlueTooth, and A-GPS.
The Tab 10.1 also comes in several variants. Vodafone offers a 3G-enabled Tab 10.1 model and Verizon plans to launch one with LTE connectivity later this year. Samsung has previously released a separate hardware build called the 10.1v, which was very briefly sold by Vodafone in a handful of regions. The 10.1v had slightly different dimensions and a better 8MP rear-facing camera.
Then there's the Tab 10.1 developer edition, which has a custom robot design on the back plate. The dev version came with Android 3.0 instead of 3.1 and its bootloader was already OEM unlocked. Samsung gave one of the special edition developer units to every Google I/O attendee.
I received a developer unit at Google I/O, but this article is based on a review unit we received from Samsung and reflects the standard 10.1 model available to consumers. Our review unit is WiFi-only and has 32GB of storage.
Ports and buttons
The Tab 10.1 has a slim power button and a volume rocker embedded next to each other in the edge of the device's frame. When the tablet is held in landscape orientation, these buttons are on the top left. The Tab's power button is much easier to find than the oddly positioned one on the Xoom. We didn't have any issues accidentally hitting the buttons during use. Because Honeycomb incorporates the relevant features into the software interface, the Tab 10.1 doesn't have or need physical buttons for the standard Android home, search, back, or menu functions.
A regular headphone jack, positioned slightly off-center, is integrated into the same edge as the power and volume buttons. The tablet has a pair of speakers, one on each of the tablet's short edges. The dual speakers are a nice touch, because it means that you get full left and right stereo audio when you hold the device in landscape orientation to watch a movie.
Unlike the Xoom, the Tab 10.1 doesn't have a microSD slot for expandable storage. As some readers might recall, the Xoom's microSD slot was not functional at launch and had to be enabled later with an update. It's possible that Samsung opted to avoid that mess by omitting the feature entirely.
The Tab 10.1 comes with a proprietary 30-pin connector that can be used for charging the device or connecting it to a computer. Samsung also includes a USB power adapter for charging and a set of black earbuds. As we've come to expect from Samsung, the quality of the earbuds is somewhat higher than those normally provided with Android devices from other vendors.
There are a number of first-party Tab 10.1 accessories that are not included, but are available separately from Samsung's website. These currently include a multimedia dock and a keyboard dock. An HDMI adapter, which allows the tablet to output video to a television, doesn't appear to be available yet.
Design
The Tab 10.1 is impressively slim and light. It's about 0.2mm thinner than the iPad 2 and weighs 35 grams less. This arguably makes it the sveltest mainstream tablet available to consumers.
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The Galaxy Tab 10.1 (left) next to an iPad 2
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The Galaxy Tab 10.1 (bottom) is slightly thinner than the iPad 2
The general build quality is high, though the plastic back plate feels a bit cheap. The Xoom's understated black design and rubberized finish are more elegant, but the Tab 10.1 has much better dimensions than the Xoom.
One of our complaints with the Xoom's design was the odd tapered profile which made the device awkward to hold in portrait orientation. The Tab 10.1 fortunately doesn't have the same annoying tapering—it's uniformly slim all the way down. Although the widescreen ratio still makes the Tab 10.1 a bit unwieldly in portrait orientation, the device's consistent shape and extremely light weight largely address the comfort problems.
But what really counts is the code running inside.
Software
The Tab 10.1 ships with Android 3.1, the recent Honeycomb update. Samsung is developing its own stack of applications and user interface customizations to differentiate its tablets from competing products—they are collectively referred to as TouchWiz, the same name that Samsung uses to describe its custom Android phone shell.
We typically devote considerable space in Android product reviews to discussing vendor-specific customizations, but we can't this time. The TouchWiz layer for the Tab 10.1 simply wasn't ready at launch. Samsung chose to ship the first units with stock Android and will deploy the software customizations later in an over-the-air update.
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The Galaxy Tab 10.1 home screen
This move is part of troubling trend emerging in the consumer electronics market—hardware companies finish products only after they are released and increasingly treat early adopters like beta testers. The problem isn't confined to Android tablet vendors; when I reviewed the BlackBerry Playbook, for example, RIM was pushing out frequent software updates to fix technical issues during the entire time that I was writing about the product.
This makes it extremely difficult to evaluate products shipped in such incomplete form. We currently have no way of knowing how Samsung's software customizations will impact the Tab 10.1's performance, reliability, or battery life when TouchWiz eventually gets rolled out to consumers.
Android 3.1
Honeycomb, Google's tablet platform, had a poor start when it launched in February on Motorola's disappointing Xoom tablet. The platform did a fine job of translating the Android experience to a tablet form factor, but it suffered from poor stability and other technical problems. Honeycomb was clearly incomplete at launch and was largely unfit for regular consumers in the form that it was delivered on the Xoom.
Despite the basic problems, we still saw a great deal of potential in the platform's tablet-centric design. We remarked in our Xoom review that maturation and bugfixing could eventually make Google's tablet operating system a serious contender.
The single biggest problem with Honeycomb at launch was the platform-wide instability. Many applications, including Google's own first-party software, crashed repeatedly during use. The number of force-closes that we encountered while testing the Xoom made it look like the software was pushed out the door without enough testing.
Stability has fortunately gotten a boost in Android 3.1. Application crashes still cropped up during our week of testing the Tab 10.1, but these were well within tolerable boundaries. The software is finally stable enough for comfortable day-to-day use, and this is frankly the level of quality that should have been in place for the Xoom at launch.
In addition to bugfixes and stability improvements, Android 3.1 also brings some welcome feature enhancements and more polish for the user interface. Animated transitions and interaction with the home screen and launcher—which were already quite good in 3.0—feel smoother and more responsive in 3.1.
Google is paying more attention to detail as it refines the core of the Honeycomb experience. Certain interactions, like dragging an icon from the launcher to a home screen, feel more natural due to a very slight reduction in latency. These kinds of positive improvements seem trivial in isolation, but collectively they have a noticeable impact on the user experience. Not that Honeycomb is perfected yet; things like the severity of the transition from one home screen to the next, where the new one snaps into place, remain a bit jarring.
On our Android phones, we tend to replace the stock home screen with LauncherPro, a nice third-party alternative that offers a great feature set and superior flexibility. One of our favorite features in LauncherPro is the built-in support for resizing widgets. It's such an obviously useful feature that we suspected Google might add it to the stock launcher. It finally did so in 3.1, spurred by the need for greater display flexiblibility on Honeycomb's larger home screen.
Android 3.1 doesn't let you arbitrarily resize any widget like you can with LauncherPro, however. The feature is designed for larger scrolling widgets, such as the calendar schedule widget and the browser bookmark widget. Despite the limitations, this is a nice improvement. Widget resizing makes it easier to organize the home screen—it no longer feels like I'm trying to solve a geometry puzzle when I reconfigure the home screens to make the best use of available space.
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Resizing the bookmarks widget on the Tab 10.1 home screen
In addition to the user interface tweaks, the e-mail application got a number of minor improvements, including more flexibility for configuring IMAP folder prefixes and better support for handling replies and forwarding of formatted messages. IMAP support is still extremely poor, however, something that hasn't been remedied in the 3.1 update. Users who need reliable IMAP or Exchange mail support still need to use third-party alternatives such as TouchDown and K-9. TouchDown has a multi-column user layout for devices with large screens, but it doesn't use native Honeycomb interface elements.
Android's more flexible multitasking capabilities are a major selling point of the platform compared to iOS. As we described in our review of the Xoom, Google put a dedicated task switching button—one that displays application thumbnails—in the Honeycomb notification panel in order to make the feature more accessible to regular end users.
The task switching interface got another nice improvement in 3.1. The application list is now scrollable, which means that users can go back much further in their application history. The thumbnails also seem cleaner.
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The new multitasking interface looks like the old one, but it scrolls!
One of the coolest features in Android 3.1 is the addition of USB host mode support, which will allow users to plug USB peripherals into Android tablets. Unfortunately, the lack of a conventional USB port prevented us from testing this feature on the Tab 10.1, something worth keeping in mind if this feature is important to you.
Google Music
When we reviewed the Xoom, we were quite impressed with the slick new native music player that Google introduced in Android 3.0. It makes use of the device's advanced graphics capabilities to deliver a great visual presentation of your music albums. Much like Android's image gallery, its modern aesthetic sets it significantly above the rest of the platform.
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Honeycomb's shiny music player
Our only major complaint with the music experience on the Xoom was the difficulty of getting media onto the device in the first place. Fortunately, Google's new music locker service addresses this complaint wonderfully. Google Music works beautifully in Android 3.1 on the Tab 10.1.
I uploaded some of my favorite albums to Google Music last month when I reviewed the service. The albums automatically showed up in the music player on the Tab 10.1 without requiring any special configuration.
The Google account credentials that I supplied to the device during the initial setup process were all that it needed. The Google Music cloud service is a first-class part of the Android tablet experience, operating just as seamlessly as calendar and contact synchronization.
I was able to play my songs right away, streaming them directly from Google's servers. When I selected "Available offline" from an album's context menu, the tablet downloaded the tracks for local playback. The whole experience was far more convenient than having to plug the device into a computer and copy the music over by hand.
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Pinning an album for offline playback in the music player
The Google Music service is currently in closed beta, but Google seems to be providing invitations to many Honeycomb device owners. For users who can get into the service, it's a great feature for the Tab 10.1.