Review: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Up for review is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 WiFi. Thanks to Samsung for sending this out for review. The first think we are going to check out about this is the spec sheet, This Tablet is considered the go to Android tablet on the market for its performance and design, Staying lightweight and slim and having a decent battery life.

The specs do look pretty impressive, But do they hold up. The device has a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, Which most Android tablets are using today. It packs alot of connections depending on what version you get, You have WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz, Which is great for people with dual band routers. Bluetooth 3.0 and if you get the 3G version you have HSPA +21Mbps download aswell. It also supports Edge/GPRS connections whenever 3g is not available. The screen size comes in at 10.1″ which is a typical tablet size screen and as a resolution of 1280 x 800. The back of the device it has a 3 Megpixel camera with Led flash and on the front a 2 megapixel camera for video chat. The device doesn’t have a MicroSD slot which is a big negative but it does come in three different sizes, Which are 16GB/32GB/64GB, So you should be covered either way.

Initial Impressions

The first thing i immediately  noticed was how light and slim the tablet was, I mean it’s insane how light this thing is and still packs a Nvidia Tegra 2 and 7000mAh battery with the weight coming in at 565g this is the lightest tablet out there. It’s overall design is pretty straight forward, With two connections altogether, One is the proprietary USB cable and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It also has a stereo speakers located on the left and right side of the device, Which is a great location because it means sound isn’t blocked when you place the device down on a table. The back is all white with part silver for the camera and led flash and has Samsung written in the middle, Which you can see from the picture below.

Android 3.1
The Device comes with Android 3.0 loaded, But there is an update to 3.1, Samsung have also included there touchWiz UX UI, Which is used among there Android Devices like the Galaxy S2 in a similar way, But it’s called TouchWiz 4.0 there.

The UI is pretty straight forward and very similar to normal android UI. You have access to a few decent widgets, Like weather, Digital clock and the stuff like that, It’s pretty basic, But Android is very customizable and that’s where downloading widgets comes from.

The app list, Is the same as any android device and is a side scrolling type navigation. The list is sorted alphabetically. You have the ability to uninstall apps directly from the app list.

Performance
The famous Nvidia Tegra 2 Dual core 1GHz processor is one of the fastest processors on the market for tablets. Let’s see how well the device preforms over all with this cpu. I used AnTuTu for the benchmarking tests. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is one of many tablets that use this processor but let’s see if they have managed to tweak it  somewhat when mixed with there own hardware

The results aren’t the highest for tablets, But they are far from the lowest, in fact, They are pretty damn good, The tablet has an overall performance score of 4918, This is shown across the entire device, I have been using it for a few days now. The performance has been and the responsiveness is amazing, I haven’t experienced any issues with lag or the performance drop with use overtime, Which tends to happen with tablets.

Gameplay

I downloaded 9mm which is a new third person game for Android devices, The game ran perfectly on the device and was actually quite fun to play, I could never really get into gaming on a tablet, But this actually worked well and was great to play.

As you can see the game looks pretty good on the tablet, Graphically it’s one of the nicest looking games you can get and it’s quite long aswell. The fact that it runs perfectly on the device means you shouldn’t have any issues running any game currently on the market.

Battery

The device sports a 7000mAh battery which is pretty huge for such a slim device, The device lasted about 7 hours watching the same video over and over again, With WiFi on. The results will very depending on brightness of the screen, It was set to 55% on this device during tests.

The great thing about this device is that in standby it uses next to nothing when it comes to power, I left it on standby with 58% battery for 6 hours and when i came back, It still had 55% battery left, So you can easily leave this thing on, But to be honest, The boot time is only 30 seconds, So turning it off and back on isn’t an issue.

Camera

The back facing camera is a 3 mega pixel camera with led flash, While it wouldn’t me my first choice for wanting to take a picture, It’s not the worst camera i have seen on a tablet. I was expecting a little bit of a better camera on this tablet, It’s fine for quick photos if you must use it, But i suggest bringing along a digital camera and/or phone with a better camera. Check out the pictures below to see the quality for yourself.

I couldn’t get the focus on it to work correctly due to the wind, This was one of the best pictures of a tree. The colour is actually a lot better than I expected and it does show some great detail for a 3 megapixel camera.

The focus worked perfectly, This was actually a quick photo, The yellow on the sign came out pretty well, There is no HDR ability so that is why the lighting in the back is very bright. Although there are apps that can add that ability.

I tried taken a pictures of a flock of birds as they flew past, The quality isn’t have bad, keeping in mind this is a tablet and probably isn’t going to be used for professional photography.

You can immediately see this photo is overly bright, Not sure how that happened, The settings like all other photos were kept on auto. If the photo was a little bit darker it would have been much better.

This is actually a fairly decent picture, The suns was just starting to set and you can see the sky looks blue-ish but mainly white due to the sunset, The quality turned out okay.

This picture was taken in a pitch black room with nothing but the led flash, Now while it was close up, The colour of the photo turned out extremely well and the detail is very good.

Same as before, The picture was in a dark room, The led flash was the only light source, The sweets do look pretty good here.

Camera(Video)
 The tablet can record at 7020p@30fps, I recorded more of the less same videos of a train going by, Mainly to show the motion ability of the camera with moving objects and to show the quality.

Now it was starting to get darker by the minute but still fairly bright out, The still comes out a little dark, The colours aren’t the best, But the fps were extremelty good and there wasn’t much blending or tearing with the movement of either the train or the tablet itself.

Conclusion

After using the tablet for awhile now, It has had many updates to improve performance and hopefully gets Android 4.0.Although there are some there aren’t many negatives about this tablet, It’s extremely light, Very slim, Preforms perfectly and it’s responsiveness is extremely smooth. The battery life isn’t the best out there, But for the weight/thickness/performance you get from this tablet, It’s hard to fault it, The 7 hours i got with a video looping and Wifi on means you can be constantly using it on and off all day without the need to charge it.

The camera quality could be better, But to be honest this is a tablet and you won’t be bringing this with you for the camera, It did preform much better than expected, I wasn’t expecting much, The front facing camera is what i can see being used more, and the quality of that is perfect for video calls.

To put it simple, I can point out the pros and cons

Pros

• Not too expensive for its performance
• Extremely lightweight
• Very slim(The slimmest dual core tablet)
• Battery life is fairly decent
• Performance is brilliant

That’s really it, If you are looking for a great tablet that not only preforms great but remains sleek and lightweight and has a decent battery, Then this is the tablet for you, To be honest there aren’t that many tablets that can pull that off and still remain affordable. This tablet is really easy to carry around and still packs the full much of Android HoneyComb with a Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is easily great geek tech.