I just got my grubby mitts all over Samsung’s brand new 10.1″ Android 3.0 tablet, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (or, as all the cool kids seem to want to call it, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2).
Once you’ve torn through our hands-on video up above, take a glance behind the Read More >> link below. There be first impressions and a hands-on gallery over in them thar hills.
First Impressions
This thing is surprisingly light. It looks heavier than it is (a stark contrast from my time with HP’s new Touchpad tablet earlier this week, which felt a good bit heavier than I expected from the looks.)
Even after a few weeks of lookin’ at Honeycomb (Android 3.0) in the SDK and in photos, I’m still not entirely sold on Android’s new look. In a tech world still in love with rounded corners and bright colors, Honeycomb’s doom-and-gloom color scheme and ultra-sharp edges comes off as a bit, for lack of a better word, depressing.
It even depressed my camera. After a minute or two of battling with my lens, I realized that the default void-like wallpaper was just too emo-kid for my camera to be able to auto-focus on — hence the super cheery flower wallpaper in the hands-on video above.
The Tab 10.1 has speakers on both the top and the bottom of the device, making for particularly nice in-bed movie watching. No more missing important lines just because you slid one of your hands into the wrong spot!
Even in this pre-release state and running an early build of Honeycomb, this thing seemed plenty speedy. Not once was I left hangin’ (outside of in the browser, but that’s the fault of terrible WiFi), nor did I ever catch it lagging between transitions. This is a presumably fresh-flashed device with next to nothing installed on it, of course, so things might get bogged down a bit with proper usage — but so far, so good.
Alas, I still won’t be giving up my iPad. Why? Netflix. What about you: are you making the jump to the Tab 10.1, be it from the iPad, a different tablet, or the world of the tabletless? If not, what’s keeping you?
