ARCELONA — The expected deluge of tablets has started with Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, a big-screen version of the seven-inch Galaxy Tab which has sold about two million units. The Tab 10.1 — named somewhat awkwardly for its screen size — is the first hot ticket at the Mobile World Congress 2011 in Barcelona, and we went hands-on.
The most important part of this tablet is the operating system. It’s running Android 3.0 Honeycomb, the first version of Android designed for tablets. Honeycomb turns out to be pretty sweet, and as far away from Apple’s iOS as you could imagine. In fact, its closer to something like Windows XP in terms of the look and feel, albeit with a very responsive, finger-friendly touch interface.
Honeycomb’s home screen presents you with a computer desktop, complete with messy icons, widgets and even a clock. Swiping and tapping work as well as you’d expect if you have ever used an iPad (it’s good), but confusion will cloud your pretty little head for a moment due to the lack of any hardware buttons (you get semi-permanent navigation buttons in the bottom-left of the screen). Honeycomb is clearly very different from iOS, and those who want a tablet version of a desktop OS will be very happy with it. I think it’s pretty ugly.
And the Tab 10.1 itself? A mixture of cheap and great. The screen is gorgeous, and the extra resolution over the iPad (1280 x 800 pixels versus the iPad’s 1024 x 768) makes movies pop. The screen can do 1080p, but that’s just a marketing check-box. At this size, it makes little difference.
Thanks to the racket on the show-floor, I have no idea how good the speakers sound, but they do stereo, which is a step up from the iPad.
From the front, then, the Tab 10.1 is easily the equal of the iPad. Then things start to go wrong. It’s very clear that a $500 tablet is impossible for anyone but Apple to build without cutting corners. The Tab not only has a plastic back, but the metal-looking bezel is in fact silvered plastic, and looks as tacky as the dime-store toy-tablets that will surely flood stores soon. This does make the Tab 10.1 light (600g vs. 730g for the 3G iPad), but it also makes it feel cheap. And while overall the Tab 10.1 is thinner than the iPad (10.9mm vs. 13.4mm), the iPad feels thinner thanks to its tapered edges.
The camera is interesting for one reason: It proves that a ten-inch tablet with a camera isn’t a stupid idea. The large screen makes it easy to compose (although the camera app has a lot of chrome around it, so you don’t get full-screen shooting, but this may be fixable with a preference). But the 8MP camera itself is junk, and takes photos almost as bad as those taken by my piece-of-crap Samsung Beyoncé cellphone. Samsung certainly cut corners here, too.
Overall, it’s a decent enough effort, and offers a vanilla version of Honeycomb to play around with.
The trouble is that both hardware and software are rough around the edges. Honeycomb feels like Linux on the desktop before Ubuntu came along, and the Tab 10.1 itself feels like somebody made a toy plastic iPad. The screen stands alone as being quite excellent, but it’s not enough to save the rest.
