Conclusion
The Nook has a retail price of $249, the Galaxy Tab, $349. That $100 difference buys a decent amount - a faster processor, a more compact frame, better battery life, and real support. With the Galaxy Tab, you’re very much buying a finished product, whereas with the Nook, you’re buying a device that you can hack to oblivion. There will always be little bugs with CM7 or any other custom ROM you might decide to use for the Nook, but you have the flexibility and the freedom to do whatever you want the system. Overclocked kernels, custom skins and launchers, updating the ROM to the latest nightly build, anything you could possibly dream of. You can do most of that with the Samsung as well, but the Galaxy Tab does provide a more polished and more finished feeling UX out of the box.
And honestly, the Galaxy is the better tablet here. It’s more powerful than the Nook, it’s more polished than the Nook, and it has more features than the Nook. The downsides? It doesn’t have as good a screen and it’s 40% more expensive. The extra money gets you a lot of the features that are expected in a tablet device these days, but here’s the way I see it.
At $249, the Nook Color is $20 more expensive than an 8GB iPod touch. At $349, the Galaxy Tab WiFi is $50 less expensive than a 16GB ASUS Eee Pad Transformer. Put in terms like that, the Nook Color looks like a pretty good deal, and the Galaxy Tab really doesn’t. As tablets running phone-centric versions of Android, the Nook Color and the Galaxy Tab are pretty similar. The hardware and UI details might be a little bit different, but the core usage model is the same. The Tegra 2-Honeycomb combination changes that in a massive way. That $50 difference between the Galaxy Tab and the Transformer basically represents the jump from a netbook to a MacBook Pro or similarly specced PC. It’s much more powerful on a hardware level, it has a larger, higher resolution IPS display, and it’s running Honeycomb. I’m picking on the ASUS specifically because it’s the least expensive Honeycomb tablet on the market, but any Android 3.0/3.1-based tablet represents a significant step up from the 7” tablets, whether it be the Xoom, Transformer, Acer Iconia (review forthcoming), or one of the larger 8.9”/10.1” Galaxy Tabs. It’s a different world when you get to Honeycomb, and the 7" Galaxy Tab just doesn’t have the hardware or software to compete with them.
Neither does the Nook Color (until a working Honeycomb ROM is released), but the point is, it doesn’t really have to. If you’re looking for a cheap tablet around the $250 mark, it doesn’t have much in the way of real competition. The Galaxy Tab is a better tablet than the Nook, but it isn’t nearly as hacker-friendly and once you get to the $350-400 price range, there’s a lot more options to think about.
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MossySF - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link
The specs for Archos 70 say:• High resolution screen, WVGA 800 x 480 pixels, 7'' TFT LCD, 16 million colors
• Capacitive multitouch screen
Yes on the resolution. No on resistive.
medi01 - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
" Overclocked kernels, custom skins and launchers, updating the ROM to the latest nightly build, anything you could possibly dream of. That's something you just won't get with the Samsung..."Samsung Galaxy Tab was rootable even back in 2010.
ironmb - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
I will never understand this new fad of tablets.. to each is own i guess.mi1stormilst - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
Bought one for my wife, rooted in about 15 minutes she uses it for reading and gaming and surfing. Not everything works perfectly, but the battery life is more than decent and it is very much a usable product. We read from both the Kindle App and the B&N App with no trouble. I got it during the Ebay B&N sale for $199 enough said :-)IdBuRnS - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
My wife uses my rooted CN all the time for playing Angry Birds. loldukepeter - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
It seems like the WiFi-only Galaxy Tab packs OMAP3* as well, not Hummingbird.this was reported here: http://www.thegalaxytabforum.com/index.php?/topic/...
can anybody confirm?
DanNeely - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
Did you read the article before posting this? It does so.Stanil - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
In the original it said Hummingburd and PowerVR 540, they changed it post factum :) Thx for the specs, I wasn't sure if the castrated version was only for Europe.dukepeter - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
yes, i read the article, and i remember clearly it said Hummingbird and PowerVR SGX540.But yes, they have changed it now. i wish i had been wrong =|
VivekGowri - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
Yeah sorry, I had changed it on my document file but apparently not the actual article engine before posting - sorry guys, that was a big time proof-reading error by me.It felt very bait-and-switch to me, I never noticed it was SGX 530/OMAP3 until I ran the gaming tests and went o_O. I don't mind too much about downgrading the Bluetooth, but the SoC downgrade is pretty terrible.