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.
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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.