Battle of the Budget Tablets - Nook Color vs. Galaxy Tab
by Vivek Gowri on May 25, 2011 12:52 AM ESTRound 1 - Performance
Performance-wise, the Galaxy Tab does pretty well. The Hummingbird SoC used by the previous Galaxy Tabs has always been faster than OMAP 3, even the 1GHz 3630, so the WiFi version is slower than its 3G brethen. Both tablets have OMAP 3 and Cortex A8s, but the 1GHz implementation in the Galaxy Tab is faster than the Nook's 800MHz core, pretty much the whole way down the line.
Interestingly, we couldn’t get some of our tests running on the Nook - there was no way to get a score for Kwaak3 without reassigning hardware keys (you need to use the search key to bring up the FPS counter at the end of the test run), and Neocore just flat-out would not run. But basically, there’s about a 10-20% difference in CPU performance that is mostly put down entirely to the clock speed difference. The Nook has a higher BrowserMark score because of the stock Android 2.3 browser, and a very good Sunspider score because of the JavaScript improvements in Gingerbread, but overall, it’s outmatched.
We see about the same margin of victory for the Galaxy Tab over the Nook Color in the gaming benchmarks as well, even with the same SGX 530 graphics processor. However, we can see SGX 530 trailing SGX 540 by a long way here, which is a bit disappointing. SGX 540 is more powerful than SGX 530 by a factor of two, and Samsung's switching of SoC here feels like they cut some corners in getting the WiFi edition out the door as cheaply as possible.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
89 Comments
View All Comments
mrnuxi - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
Just checked and it's no longer available. Too bad, woulda bought one.Hrel - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
I do not understand how you can have an article, particularly one targeted at budget tablets, and not include Archos. Seriously! WTF! Archos, you guys need to check them out cause apparently you've never even heard of them. They really are the ONLY viable choice for tablets from 3-10inches.VivekGowri - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
Still waiting on a review unit, but based on my experience, I wasn't impressed by what I saw from them. I did like the 101, especially for the price, but the 70 wasn't very good. I'm not sold, I need to see more features and better screens from them before they can seriously contend in the Android tablet game.MobiusStrip - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
GPS. Any list of tablet specs should indicate whether it has GPS.notty22 - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
For 350.00 you can get the Ipad (1) refurbished. Thats with new battery, shell. Just bought 1 for the living room coffee table. Holds up well to the 500 dollar Ipad 2 in most respects.http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals...
sme855 - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
hi friendsplz tell me the cheapest price at which i could buy a genuine and sealed galaxy tab 7" 3G
without contract
plz help me
i will really appreciate.
plz reply at:
sme855@gmail.com
oreo81 - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
What about the Dell Streak 7? I know the screen is 800x480, but it has Tegra 2. And it's under 300$ on amazon and newegg(no taxes), so its really only about 30 bucks more than the nook. I really wish the local BB had one so I could check it out, as I just picked up a nook the other day and am contemplating taking it back. Any thoughts?VivekGowri - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
Its fast, but man I really hated the screen when I played with it. I didn't realize that it was so cheap for WiFi only; T-Mobile is still selling the 3G one at $449...Honestly, I'd give up a lot of that power for a WSVGA resolution - I liked the Galaxy Tab (3G) a lot more than the Streak 7 when I had them side-by-side at the Nvidia CES booth.swaaye - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
I've been using a NC for about 2 months now and have some comments about it.First of all, right now, it is a neat tablet to get because it's cheap and so you get a taste of tablets for a low price. However, this market is changing every day and I expect the NC to lose this value in not too long.
-the headphone jack has low audio quality. Noise and distortion.
-raw buggy software and it may always be that way. It's even slightly unstable because they are trying to make custom kernels and it's difficult with the kernel and driver source available.
-Android 2.x is not great. The internal browser is terrible with its memory management issues that cause hitching and its complete lack of GPU acceleration. Opera Mobile is fast but somewhat annoying in its features and UI design.
-DSP is not HD capable and there are no HD codecs available for it so I expect it will never do HD video. Even when overclocked the CPU isn't fast enough to play 720p H.264/VC-1 on its own. It's battery slaughter without the DSP anyway.
-the internal flash memory is very slow, about like a class 2 SD card. Boots slow, app install slow, web browser caching impacted slightly as well.
Personally I'm looking forward to some new 7" tablets with Honeycomb or another OS, and Cortex A9 or better. But the Nook Color is as I said an interesting first look if you haven't played with a tablet.
mushu - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
If you're using the 2.3.62 kernel with CM7, make sure you have the latest bootloader (comes with the latest nightly) and give either moboplayer or vitalplayer neon a try for playing your videos :)