75
Criteria
Comments
Rating
- Features It has most of the features that most tablets do, though some of them require proprietary accessories. I just have to subtract for anything proprietary.
- Display It's great. Just gorgeous. I use my tablet to read comics, and it renders them beautifully.
- Battery life Just as good as the best tablets out there. Probably not as good as the iPad, but still great. I rarely need to charge it.
- Ease of use Very simple to use. Not sure what would be so difficult...
- Storage capacity I worried, but I'm able to fit a ton on mine and the cloud makes the rest easy.
- Design and form factor It's a stunning device. It's so incredibly thin and very light.
- Portability (size / weight) Extremely light, which is essential for my main use (reading comics and news feeds).
- Durability I know it's plastic, but the whole thing feels very sturdy.
Detailed review
I wanted to submit my review after owning my Galaxy Tab 10.1 for a while. Now that I've used it for a sufficiently long time for the purposes for which I bought it, I'm ready to offer my opinion:
I love it!
I was looking for a tablet for one main reason: I wanted to read with my wife. My wife is an avid reader, but sadly I've never really been into books that much. I tend to read a great deal of comic books, as well as a large number of feeds in Google Reader. Because of that, most of the time my wife would be reading in bed or on the couch downstairs, and I'd be relegated to the office to read on my desktop. I have a netbook, but that's sort of a miserable way to read a large amount of stuff.
For the past several weeks I've been reading comics and feeds anywhere and everywhere, and it's fantastic. There's a wonderful comic reader for Honeycomb called Komik, and for feeds I simply use the Google Reader app, even though it isn't updated for Honeycomb yet, sadly...
Moving on from that, while many find Honeycomb lacking, I'm not seeing much of a problem. I've had a couple freezes, but that's all. I do wish there were more Honeycomb apps, though. At the moment it looks like there's about ~120, though there are some that are in-between, offering more for tablet users while not listing themselves as "tablet" apps. I love moving around in the GMail and Calendar apps, and find myself catching up on email in the morning with this device because it's so much easier to read it all.
I don't, however, find it easy to actually do work on this thing. Typing is kind of a chore, even with something like Swiftkey X. I find myself wanting a keyboard, so if I need to reply to an email or something, I wait for a computer for those tasks. I look forward to getting some sort of portable keyboard for my new tablet.
The design of the device is spectacular. It's extremely light, which is essential for my reading purposes. That's why I bought it, after all. It's also much thinner than most of the tablet competition (at least in the Android space). The one annoyance I have is the proprietary port on the bottom, as well as the included USB cable that's too short. Still, that's not nearly enough to detract from what I feel is an exceptional device.
The screen is just great. It looks nearly as good as the iPad 2's IPS display, and I greatly prefer the widescreen aspect ratio because it's far more suited to comic book reading than the iPad. I get zero black space on a widescreen device when it's in portrait.
The battery life, as I said above, seems fantastic to me. I'd wager to bet it's not as good as the iPad's mythical battery life, but this device is also a hair thinner and lighter. Plus, the battery life is far better than I need. I've never gotten anywhere close to depleting the battery in a single day of use. I'd have to be using it constantly all day long to do that, and I just haven't had a day where I was doing that. For the most part, I've found that I deplete about 30% of the battery on the average day that I've used the device for 2-3 hours, and that's more than enough for me!
At the moment I can't think of much more to say about this tablet other than that I love it. I carry it around with me everywhere I go and use it constantly.
***UPDATE***
I needed to update this review. This is because it took a while to realize that Samsung's add-ons to Android are FAR worse than I'd ever imagined. Sure, I found them annoying, but I didn't think they were hindering my enjoyment of my tablet at all. I was wrong.
When I got the tablet it didn't have TouchWiz HD on it. When I got that, it was highly annoying, but I felt like I could work around it. Then recently Samsung released their ICS update for the Tab 10.1, and it just sucked. It was slow, and TouchWiz was worse than ever.
So I did something about it. I went out and I installed Jelly Bean on my Tab, and now I couldn't be happier. The tablet is FAR faster now, and I've found that I can play back HD videos with ease that played very choppy with Samsung's software on there.
I urge every Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 owner out there to root/rom and get Jelly Bean onto their tablets. I've rooted/romed my Verizon Galaxy Nexus to get Jelly Bean, too, and it's the best thing I've ever done with the phone and the tablet. This is why I'm not lowering my 10 point review score of the 10.1. I honestly feel like it's still a competitive product, as long as Samsung gets the hell out of the way...
I love it!
I was looking for a tablet for one main reason: I wanted to read with my wife. My wife is an avid reader, but sadly I've never really been into books that much. I tend to read a great deal of comic books, as well as a large number of feeds in Google Reader. Because of that, most of the time my wife would be reading in bed or on the couch downstairs, and I'd be relegated to the office to read on my desktop. I have a netbook, but that's sort of a miserable way to read a large amount of stuff.
For the past several weeks I've been reading comics and feeds anywhere and everywhere, and it's fantastic. There's a wonderful comic reader for Honeycomb called Komik, and for feeds I simply use the Google Reader app, even though it isn't updated for Honeycomb yet, sadly...
Moving on from that, while many find Honeycomb lacking, I'm not seeing much of a problem. I've had a couple freezes, but that's all. I do wish there were more Honeycomb apps, though. At the moment it looks like there's about ~120, though there are some that are in-between, offering more for tablet users while not listing themselves as "tablet" apps. I love moving around in the GMail and Calendar apps, and find myself catching up on email in the morning with this device because it's so much easier to read it all.
I don't, however, find it easy to actually do work on this thing. Typing is kind of a chore, even with something like Swiftkey X. I find myself wanting a keyboard, so if I need to reply to an email or something, I wait for a computer for those tasks. I look forward to getting some sort of portable keyboard for my new tablet.
The design of the device is spectacular. It's extremely light, which is essential for my reading purposes. That's why I bought it, after all. It's also much thinner than most of the tablet competition (at least in the Android space). The one annoyance I have is the proprietary port on the bottom, as well as the included USB cable that's too short. Still, that's not nearly enough to detract from what I feel is an exceptional device.
The screen is just great. It looks nearly as good as the iPad 2's IPS display, and I greatly prefer the widescreen aspect ratio because it's far more suited to comic book reading than the iPad. I get zero black space on a widescreen device when it's in portrait.
The battery life, as I said above, seems fantastic to me. I'd wager to bet it's not as good as the iPad's mythical battery life, but this device is also a hair thinner and lighter. Plus, the battery life is far better than I need. I've never gotten anywhere close to depleting the battery in a single day of use. I'd have to be using it constantly all day long to do that, and I just haven't had a day where I was doing that. For the most part, I've found that I deplete about 30% of the battery on the average day that I've used the device for 2-3 hours, and that's more than enough for me!
At the moment I can't think of much more to say about this tablet other than that I love it. I carry it around with me everywhere I go and use it constantly.
***UPDATE***
I needed to update this review. This is because it took a while to realize that Samsung's add-ons to Android are FAR worse than I'd ever imagined. Sure, I found them annoying, but I didn't think they were hindering my enjoyment of my tablet at all. I was wrong.
When I got the tablet it didn't have TouchWiz HD on it. When I got that, it was highly annoying, but I felt like I could work around it. Then recently Samsung released their ICS update for the Tab 10.1, and it just sucked. It was slow, and TouchWiz was worse than ever.
So I did something about it. I went out and I installed Jelly Bean on my Tab, and now I couldn't be happier. The tablet is FAR faster now, and I've found that I can play back HD videos with ease that played very choppy with Samsung's software on there.
I urge every Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 owner out there to root/rom and get Jelly Bean onto their tablets. I've rooted/romed my Verizon Galaxy Nexus to get Jelly Bean, too, and it's the best thing I've ever done with the phone and the tablet. This is why I'm not lowering my 10 point review score of the 10.1. I honestly feel like it's still a competitive product, as long as Samsung gets the hell out of the way...
good review!
6 people find this review helpful
review history
- 2012-09-12
-
Updated detailed review