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View Full Version : Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 -- it is awesome



fuse
07-03-2011, 07:32 PM
Yesterday I bought the samsung galaxy tab 10.1, ( http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/08/samsung-galaxy-tab-10-1-review/ ) on a bit of an impulse. I really like it so far, and think I'm going to keep it. First of all, I would like to express that I think Apple really knocked it out of the park in making the 10 inch slate tablet form factor pretty much the effective gold standard for consuming media with an ultra-portable device.

The known lack of dedicated apps for honeycomb at this time is not too devastating, for me. I go to alot of forums, and the version of tapatalk I have on the tab works beautifully. This was a main reason I wanted to try a tablet. I don't know if its honeycomb specific or not. General browsing is pretty awesome as well, it seems. I use dolphin HD on my phone (HTC evo) as I find the stock android (2.1-2.3) browser to be rather lacking. This is not the case on the Tab. Android 3.1 seems to have really turned this around.

I was also pleasantly surprised that I did not have to rebuy tapatalk or any of the other paid apps I had already bought for my phone. I did not know it worked like that.

Remote controlling my media PC is much nicer on the tablet vs. my phone. Though I don't really see myself using this all that much.

It plays standard definition video that I have torrented like a champ, and I don't even have to convert it through handbrake much of the time. Just copy it to the tablet in windows, done. This blew my fucking mind. For some reason I do have to covert 720p and above to get it to play. I suspect it doesn't like the container most HD torrents come in these days. In playing HD content (that I converted w/ handbrake) it is very close to 100%. Video will rarely start to skip for 4 or 5 seconds (with audio playing normally) about every 20 minutes or so. In an episode I watched that was an hour long, I think it did this about 3 times. Though annoying when it happens, this is acceptable to me. Perhaps I can tweak things in handbrake to further minimize this. We shall see.

Later I am going to load some music PDFs and put it on a music stand and practice, as I have seen a couple of my colleagues do with ipads.

The stock samsung keyboard is awful, the stock android keyboard is somewhat better. I wrote this whole thing with it, in portrait mode. I have gotten very fast compared to when I started. I personally can't wait for the swifttype tablet version to be released.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/02/touchtype-debuts-swiftkey-tablet-app-for-android-tablets/
Looks pretty amazing.

Sadly I can not get free bluetooth tethering to work at this time. However, the tablet client app of PDAnet is still in beta, and I bet it'll work after not too long. If I needed tethering tomorrow I could just pay for the sprint mobile hotspot. Also, I'm pissed that it takes the stupid proprietary Samsung connector. There is no reason to not use micro USB these days. These are the only fails right now, in my mind.

This is definitely a worthy competitor for the mighty ipad. Especially since wifi + 3G/4G versions are on the horizon.

All tolled, I am pretty stoked.

sent via Android 3.1