Filed under: Computing, internet | Tags: android, samsung galaxy tab 10.1, tablet, underwhelming
Earlier this year my sister was given a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 by her employer as a result of winning a competition in sales performance at work, her employer was all set to sell the device here in Australia, then of course Apple in Australia sued to prevent its sale, and this went on for many months until recently in December that was overturned and Samsung was again allowed to begin selling the device. As my sister and I live on opposite sides of the country I only just got to see the tablet on Christmas day, and I have to say as an iPad 2 user I was not a fan.
My father was also with me, he has Samsung’s Galaxy S2 mobile phone, also an Android device, and he was excited to see what the device was like, he got playing with it first and was getting confused straight await, this from someone who was already an Android user and used to how things work on his own device. To me that doesn’t bode well if existing Android users get confused, what if non-Android users come to purchase this device, what is their experience likely to be. So, I got on and had a play.
The familiar animated backgrounds were there, Ainslie had the aquarium animated background running, I have to say it was rather pleasing to look at, and it adapted to whether you ran it in portrait or landscape mode, although it would be a nice tough if the fishes swam to adjust to the change of orientation, but that’s just a nicety not a necessity as happened to be the case. Launching of apps was the usual tough the icon and it launched, and closing was a matter of touching the little home icon on the corner of the screen, strangely no button. I found after using dad’s phone that it was very weird not having the familiar settings, home and back buttons in the bezel area to use, they were instead on the screen area. I launched the web browser to browse the web, the first thing I noticed here was the terrible scrolling here, it was awfully jerky here, something I came to notice in every application when dragging content, clearly the device must have been underpowered in either/both its cpu/gpu.
Another thing I found highly confusing was how I was to remove inactive programs from memory, on dad’s phone this is easily found, and they were easily removed, on the tablet I couldn’t easily find this and gave up. Settings on the device were found by holding my finger down over a clear area of the screen until a new window appeared, I have to assume that this is documented for users and in the box when they buy it as it is just not obvious to the uninitiated user, I much prefer the phone’s settings button, far nicer method. The user interface of the Tab 10.1 is just crap, the pseudo 3D interface that Android provides is a pathetic joke, I’ve never truly understood this need to have a 3D environment, but if you’re going to offer one, offer a decent attempt, not this.
I have to say I will be amazed if this device sells terribly well in its current form. I don’t know anything about how Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) release modifies things for tablets, and how it might affect this device, but it can but improve things from where they stand right now, the experience really is sub-par when compared to what I am used to on my iPad 2.
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