My 24 Hours with a Samsung Galaxy Tab

I was recently offered the use of a Samsung Galaxy Tab for 24 Hours, in return for penning my thoughts on the device, so here goes.

I guess I should start by saying I am a technical person so if this seems very geeky thats why. Also I especially wanted to review it with a view to my working environment, so tried out a few Enterprise applications so see what my experience was like.

First lets start with the look and feel. The Samsung Tab is the older 7" model it has a black finish on the front which conceals a forward looking 1.3MP camera.

Yes it is a lot like an ipad, the weight is good and overall finish feels polished.

The back contains a 3.2 MP Camera, which is a little poor in low light conditions, but seems fine during the day.

After resetting the device to get an out of box experience I promptly entered the MTN APN and was off surfing in no time. I also enabled wireless which worked very seamlessly as all Android devices seem to do.

The speed is good, although the orientation sensor can be a little slow to pick up the change from portrait to landscape, but the screen is responsive. I would however say it feels a little inaccurate compared to an ipad.

The onscreen keyboard works well and am glad to see the awful X9 predictive text is set off by default. I really hate this feature on android as it seems very unintuitive compared to other predictive keyboards (Nokia).

I found Chrome to be much the same as it's desktop counterpart and rendered websites well. I also tried Opera and Firefox which have Android versions, and overall think it's the best of the three.

I tested it with Gmail, Zimbra and OpenERP to assess how usable it was for work. Gmail worked well and the interface was clean, and fast.

Zimbra was not detected as a mobile device and I had to set that manually, but once done was much the same as my phone but with more real estate which made it very easy to use. I how ever was unable to download attachments, in Chrome and had to switch to Firefox. I guess this might be a bug in my Zimbra version which is a little old.

OpenERP 6 worked well, although the menus where a little small to press with your figure by default, a stylus would have helped and you can zoom in but this kind of makes the interface clunky. Again more of a criticism of the application than the Tablet.

There is no OpenOffice document reader under Android that I could find which I thought was a massive negative. I use LibreOffice entirely and this would make is useless to review and edit documents for me.

ThinkOffice app is included which has Microsoft Office compatibility, but I guess with the release of Google Docs for Android that might be the preferred choice.

Voice searching is both accurate and kind of fun, but maybe more use if your hands are otherwise occupied.
I enjoyed using All-share to both stream movies and music to and from the device, the screen is good and copes with full screen HD video well, but the default speakers and small and a little tinny, plus on landscape orientation are on one side which is not good for movies.

The Mobile AP feature worked well and allowed several devices to share the 3G link over Wi-Fi. Although not for long when you have only 300MB.

The build in GPS device also worked well and Google maps was accurate to 70meters.

The device was fitted with a 300MB data sim, but not voice so I could not test that function.

I enjoyed having device immensely but a) think I'd prefer it's bigger brother the 10.1 and b) can't afford the 1.3mill price tag. So I'll be waiting a little while before I run out and buy it, as it would mainly be an entertainment device to watch youtube videos/surf on the sofa with.