Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Review: The Sleekest Honeycomb Tablet
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 13, 2011 5:07 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Samsung
- Tegra 2
- Galaxy tab 10.1
- Android 3.1
- Mobile
- NVIDIA
Final Words
The new 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab is probably the sleekest looking Honeycomb tablet on the market today. The form factor is really wonderful and given how quickly Samsung introduced it after Apple unveiled the iPad 2, the company really deserves credit for responding to competitive pressure in record time. It's not just a great form factor however. The 10.1 has an incredible screen, competitive features and doesn't really sacrifice in terms of performance or battery life. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is your run of the mill Honeycomb tablet, just better.
A part of me really feels like delivering all of the resolution, performance and overall goodness of the Galaxy Tab in a smaller 8.9-inch form factor is the ticket to ultimate success. The iPad is too big for me to carry around with me as much as I'd like, as is the Galaxy Tab 10.1. However tablets like the PlayBook are too small to really deliver the tablet experience I'm looking for when I'm at home. Keeping the resolution fixed at 1280 x 800 but dropping the screen size by a little over an inch may be enough to really hit the sweet spot.
Ultimately I believe we'll shop for tablets similarly to how we shop for notebooks (or they may end up being one and the same): by screen size. If this form factor really does take off however, we'll have many more decisions to make than just what screen size is best (perhaps we'll start seeing multiple SoCs offered for various performance targets instead of one smartphone SoC playing double duty as a tablet chip as well).
Unfortunately with most Honeycomb tablets today we find ourselves in a difficult position when it comes to making any recommendations. NVIDIA's Kal-El target was originally August, I've heard more recently that the date has slipped to around September. Regardless of the specific month, there's a high likelihood that within the next four months you'll be able to get a much more powerful Android tablet for the same amount of money you'd spend today. With that in mind, I can't in good conscience recommend spending any amount of money on a tablet today if you can wait another two quarters. Remember Kal-El won't really change single threaded performance, but it will improve GPU performance and address the video decoding limitations of Tegra 2 today.
If you have to buy an Android tablet today I'd say the top two choices on my list are the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The former is an easy choice because of its price and flexibility vis-a-vis the transformer dock. If you want something more portable however, the Galaxy Tab is a much more comfortable device to use. Here's how I think the comparison boils down:
If you're a developer that just needs to have something running Honeycomb to work on today, buy the Eee Pad. It's cheaper and you get the same functionality as you would from the more expensive Galaxy Tab.
If you're sold on Honeycomb and want a tablet running the OS today but don't care about the ability to type on a normal keyboard, get the Galaxy Tab. The Eee Pad dock is a nice feature but it's also another $150 over its base price. If you're not going to use that feature and don't care about the cost savings, then the Galaxy Tab is clearly the better tablet.
Finally if cost is a concern (keeping in mind that you'll likely regret your purchase in another ~4 months), get the Eee Pad. You'll put yourself out less cash up front and hopefully have less to recoup later.
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (top) vs. ASUS Eee Pad Transformer (bottom)
However, as I mentioned earlier, my overall recommendation is to wait if you can. Smartphones and tablets are operating on a faster-than-Moore's Law curve. As a result you'll see huge performance improvements every 12 months and devastatingly painful upgrade cycles. Given that tablets aren't carrier subsidized, the longer you can wait, the better off you'll be.
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Rick83 - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
At least slowly those prices are coming down. I was ridiculous when these things where introduced at laptop-prices instead of netbook-prices.With IPS screens, they're slowly coming into a reasonable price point.
I'm waiting for the next Archos announcement though, especially because I am looking to replace a pocketable/portable tablet and not one of these living room ornaments.
solipsism - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
"The Galaxy Tab 10.1 measures just 8.6mm thick, [0.2mm] thinner than the iPad 2."robco - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
I still can't really find a use for a tablet at this point, but this one looks nice. My primary concern would be if the app gap has narrowed since the Xoom was released. Also it doesn't appear that any other manufacturer's have had Apple's success in decoupling the 3G/4G versions from service contracts (without paying a lot more). It also appears that there's lots of optimization to be done. My other concern would be regarding Samsung's history when it comes to OS updates. I would hope owners won't be waiting too long to receive them.Still it's good to see competition for the iPad shaping up. I think Honeycomb makes better use of available screen real estate than iOS does. The different hardware options are nice. But I'm more old school I guess. I would still rather have a netbook or MBA. I like having a real keyboard and touchpad.
JasonInofuentes - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
By all accounts, frustratingly, while the number of Honeycomb apps is climbing, there's a quality gap that's more important than the quantity gap. Android staples (TweetDeck, notably) is not Honeycomb optimized and to great detriment. Watching I/O this year they made it clear that the tools are their to create great apps for the platform but developers have a challenge though in developing for two Android platforms (Gingerbread and Honeycomb), maintaining and updating those releases, and still preparing to bring their Honeycomb app to the Ice Cream Sandwich framework when it's released. I would love to hear from developers why there wasn't this sort of growing pains when Apple extended iOS to the tablet form factor. What made it so easy to turn the phone app to the tablet app? What isn't there in the Android platform?@tnofuentes
Conner_36 - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
I would guess it has to do with the SDK Apple has. While I have not actually coded an iOS app yet, playing around in Xcode made it seem like a simple check box was pretty much the difference between an iphone or ipad app.All you need to do is mess around Interface Builder for a few minutes and everything you had for the iphone can be retooled for the ipad (provided that you used Apple APIs and don't have too many custom views).
Apple has been building and rebuilding their tools and APIs for 30 years where as Google just started.
Does that make sense to anyone?
vision33r - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
Your comparing a company(Apple) with decades of software experience to an advertising search company. Guess who makes better software?Android wasn't even grown in house and had to be bought by Google and then for Honeycomb, Google had to introduce their own C oriented language to get away from the nasty Java apps.
Whoever thought that Java apps on a phone was a good idea back then definitely was not forward thinking and this is the reason why Android apps suck so much vs iOS apps.
Google has a lot to copy from Apple. They copied the same touch interface and general multitouch UI, they got to copy Apple's music player, and even borrowed Apple's Webkit to make Chrome.
When you look at all this then you realize that Android is a copy and hack job while other OSes like WebOS, iOS, and even WP7 performs better.
Penti - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
You do realize that it's Nokia that made the first Webkit browser for mobile platforms right? Before Apple announced and open sourced the Webkit engine they worked porting KHTML/WebCore and KJS/JavaScriptCore to S60. So just weeks after Apple open sourced it they had a Webkit-build out. WebCore and JavaScriptCore was never closed, as they where based on GPL projects, and Google uses their own Javascript-engine in Android. Not Nitro or JavaScriptCore. Webkit truly is a collaborative effort, not some magic gift from Apple developers. For that matter the underpinnings in OS X and iOS is Mach/BSD from Carnegie Mellon University and Berkeley, much of the environment and stuff that made it successful also comes from it's NeXT days such as the heritage of the Cocoa environment, Obj-C and fat binaries which NeXT ran on four platforms in 1993. GCC was the compiler back in 1989 too.Go and troll somewhere else.
Jamestownsend - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Actually, Android's javascript engine is based on apple's work on webkit. No one cares about what Nokia did...and indeed, android is the vista of mobile platforms without the large app support. Video wallpapers, widgets, etc...and a huge resource hog...it isn't trolling to state the facts...Penti - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
Actually V8 was JIT before Nitro/JSC JIT branch and JIT from the start and developed the same time based on their own design and architecture. Based on Smalltalk and PCRE. So I don't know what your smoking. Not only that, it's simply not built entirely on JavaScriptCore or Apples sources since it's BSD. They do indeed have their own assembler, compiler, garbage collector and therefor their own Javascript JIT engine.Apple does contribute but not from some black hole and they do build on Open Source and other peoples work, just as they should, but you can't credit one company for it all.
You might not care, but it's thanks to Nokia, others and them cooperating in the project you can have a decent Safaribrowser to begin with. It wouldn't been optimized for embedded/mobile platforms otherwise. Ensuring it to Apple that it can be done well. Mozilla (Gecko) on the other hand has done a lot worse on the ARM-platform. Android has had native apps for a long while, since 1.5 publically and it's not because of Dalvik or the Android/Apache Harmoney class libs they had many of their performance problems. There is nothing magical on the C side that has happened with 3.0+. It is trolling when you troll about your incorrect or made up facts.
koss - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
Hey Anand, why are all the dimensions of the three devices (Samsung, Moto and Asus) in mm and the Ipad is in inches? I mean it's not very difficult to convert, but its a pain - open another tab, etc, etc. Would you be kind enough to convert everything in the graph in the same units, regardless inches or cm? Thanks.PS: Keep it up - one of my fav. sites ;)