Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 review

Samsung's original Galaxy Tab from 2010 had a 178mm (7-inch) screen and was small enough to fit (just) in your pocket. The updated version may or may not owe some inspiration to a certain US-based manufacturer of tablets, but it's certainly cute, slim, cheaper than its predecessor and very, very desirable. It's slimmer and lighter than its main rival, the Apple iPad 2, at 257x175x9mm and 565g and looks like a thoroughly well put together piece of kit.
The edges are rimmed with grey metal trim around a slim black plastic casing. On the sides are a power/sleep button, volume buttons and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It also has stereo speakers at each end but unfortunately the power/sync slot is of the proprietary Samsung kind, so you can't make use of a random microUSB cable if you forget to charge your Tab while you're out and about.
The 257mm (10.1-inch) capacitive multi-touch screen is beautifully sharp and clear, offering 1,280x800-pixel resolution, just ahead of the iPad 2's 1,024x768. It has a terrifically wide viewing angle too, which comes in handy if you're sharing.
The Android 3.1 Honeycomb operating system is specifically designed for tablets (we saw it recently on the Motorola Xoom), but that doesn't mean it's radically different from the mobile phone versions we've all become used to. There are five home screens you can fill up with all the usual Android widgets including calendar, email, weather and Samsung's own Social Hub, which pulls together your social networking updates and keeps tabs of your favourite contacts. You can resize them too, giving each the prominence you feel it deserves.
It doesn't have the four control buttons lined up in a row the way Android does for smartphones, instead the key buttons are dotted around the screen -- search at top left, menu and widgets at top right, with back and home at bottom left. You can check the status of downloads and messages from a menu at bottom right and also access your favourite apps by brushing up from the bottom of the screen.
It's a neat and intuitive system and there's loads of room for additions from the Android Market. Incidentally, the Market for Android 3.1 is nowhere near as well stocked as the standard one, and there are a few glaring omissions. Android's Facebook app isn't optimised for tablets yet, for instance, so it won't show up when you search the Market for it on the Tab 10.1, though you can get TweetDeck, or view your updates via Samsung's Social Hub.
Usefully, Android 3.1 includes a viewing pane for your emails, just like Outlook, so you can view your messages without having to open each one individually. Samsung's email programme supports attachments too.
And speaking of messages, the onscreen keyboard is just about big enough to use all your fingers on and it's sensitive enough to make you want to. The four-line layout also includes some handy keys up front, like @ and .com.
Polaris Office is on board allowing you to create and view Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents as well as back up to the cloud, though you'll need a Box.net account to do it this way.