If you are looking to buy a 10-inch beautiful, strong and reliable tablet nowadays, your choice is one of the toughest one possible. With such successful and balanced products as the iPad 2, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, the Acer Iconia Tab A500 or the Toshiba Thrive, the mission of choosing the best all-around slate is almost impossible if you don't have some clear things in mind, a checklist and a lot of cold blood and objectivity.
Having all these aboard( or at least a checklist and all the objectivity you can expect from a technology enthusiast), we are going to balance in the following the strong points and the weak points of one of the important 10-inch players on the tablet market today, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.
The Pros :
Far from being a perfect or flawless piece of technology equipment, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 has its fair share of aces up its sleeve, impressing in a few areas and even being the best of the best when it comes to certain aspects. These are therefore the strong points of the Galaxy Tab 10.1, in our humble opinion:
The nice, elegant design. As objective and as cold-blooded as we could possibly be, we can't ignore a Tablet screen drop test: what happens when you're not careful tablet's looks. And when it comes to looks, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 could win a beauty contest without any doubt. The tablet is extremely solid built while being light, slim and sleek. The materials from which it is built are probably not the best, but feel comfortable and breathe elegance from every square inch. The silver finish, along with the black chassis, make up for a classic looking, very elegant overall aspect.
Whether you will use it in landscape or in portrait mode, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 will mesmerize you with its elegant and sleek design.
The product dimensions and the weight. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is probably the thinnest, lightest and sleekest 10-inch tablet on the market. It weighs only 565 grams, 36 grams less than the iPad 2 and 130 grams less than the Asus Transformer, and measures 8.6 mm in depth, which is slightly less than the iPad 2 and consistently less than the Transformer.The stunning display. The 10.1-inch IPS capacitive touchscreen with a 1280800 pixels resolution offers clear and crisp images, great viewing angles and very good brightness.
The Samsung panel is even brighter than the iPad 2's screen, which says quite a lot, and the use of the unique Super Plane Line Switching technology makes the Galaxy Tab 10.1 feature probably the sharpest touchscreen on the market.High performance level.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 features a dual-core Tegra 2 processor and a 1 GB of RAM memory, basically the same configuration you can find on pretty much any Honeycomb-based tablet today. However, that is no t to say the Galaxy Tab is not strong or fast, because it in fact is about as strong as a slate can get nowadays.The operating system and software. While the Samsung slate does not run on the latest Android 3.2 version of the popular OS, the Android 3.1, along with the recent TouchWiz UX update, does its job at one of the highest levels possible. The available applications are numerous and run extremely smooth and overall there isn't much you can object from this point of view.
The display featured on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is probably the brightest on the tablet marketThe battery life. According to the Anandtech test, the battery on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 lasted under nine hours when the tablet was used for web browsing and other day-to-day tasks. While this is pretty standard autonomy, the battery impressed when talking about 720p video playback. In this case, it lasted nine hours and a half, which is better than the Asus Eee Pad Transformer's battery, while still pretty far from iPad 2's battery.
The Cons
Six pretty strong pros for the latest addition to the Galaxy Tab line of high-tech slates and you probably got the impression by now that this is a state of the art tablet. Well, at the risk of disappointing you, we found out quite a few reasons for not buying the Galaxy Tab 10.1.
While it is already almost a custom for tablets to feature poor cameras, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 fails to live up to even a decent standard. Even if the 1.3 MP front-facing camera is pretty reasonable when compared to devices sported on other 10-inch tablets, the 3 MP rear-facing camera is terrible when compared to the 5 MP devices featured on the Toshiba Thrive or the Acer Iconia Tab A500. Therefore, you should expect blurry photos and low-quality videos from the Galaxy Tab 10.1.The number of ports.
The Samsung 10-inch tablet lacks HDMI, as well as a microSD card and USB ports. While the absence of a microSD card can be forgiven, considering that the tablet comes with 16 or 32 GB of internal storage space, there is no excuse for the lack of USB and HDMI ports in our opinion.While it is the thinnes 10-inch tablet on the market, it lacks some pretty esential ports and featuresConnectivity options.
While the iPad 2 and the Motorola Xoom already offer 3G versions, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is only compatible with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (3G version will follow soon though). Furthermore, the wireless performance is not the greatest, according to the guys at Anandtech, which rate the Xoom and the Eee Pad Transformer as the best 10-inch tablets from this point of view. Nevertheless, it has to be said that there have been rumors for quite some while that Samsung is preparing a 3G update for the Galaxy Tab 10.1. When, or if, will it be released remains to be seen.
The pricing.
The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is quite expensive, being currently available at Amazon for 499.99 dollars( the 16 GB version) and 599.99 bucks( the 32 GB version). In comparison, the Eee Pad Transformer, whose strong and weak points we recently reviewed, sells for a good 100 dollars less. Also, the Acer Iconia Tab A500, while not as reliable as the Galaxy Tab 10.1, is significantly cheaper, being available for sale at about 450 dollars.Competition.
When talking about the main opponents of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 on the tablet market today, the iPad 2, the Eee Pad Transformer, as well as the Toshiba Thrive or the Iconia Tab A500 would be the ones to primarily take into consideration.
As we have seen so far, the tablet we are reviewing today is better when it comes to the design, the weight and the dimensions than everybody else, is less competitive when it comes to pricing and pretty much the same in terms of performance offered.
Along with the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the strongest opponent for Apple's iPad 2We have also noticed that the battery life is pretty good, but that the number of ports and the connectivity options are areas in which the Galaxy Tab loses leverage in comparison with its opponents.
The display is on the other hand another strong point of Samsung's tablet when comparing it to other 10-inch tablets, while the operating system, the software and the applications are better than most of its competitors, but less reliable when it comes to the iPad 2.
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