Analyzed: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

It is hard to keep up with all the new tech gizmos that are being introduced in the market. It seems like every other day a new product is being launched before users even get a chance to get acclimatized to the old ones! Samsung is definitely one of these companies that keeps putting out frequent launches, but good thing for us a lot of their products are actually very good. But that's another story. We are here to discuss the largest of the Samsung Tablets, the Galaxy Tab 10.1. There are other variants of course, like the Tab 7.7 and the Tab 8.9, but the Tab 10.1 is the top of the line version.

The first thing that caught our attention is how thin the Tab is. It is so thin that at times we were afraid we might break the tablet by mistake! The Samsung Galaxy Note we tested is 9.7 mm thick while the Tab is just 8.6 mm. Amazing the technology these days isn't it? With a weight of 565g (~1.25lbs) the Galaxy Tab is quite light as well. It is a very nicely built device and you feel the quality when you hold it. The tablet comes with the 1GHz dual core Tegra 2 processor, 1GB RAM, 3G vs. non-3G versions and 16, 32 or 64GB of storage. The 10.1" widescreen LCD supports a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. It comes with Android's Honeycomb operating system (which should get upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich sometime this month). The battery life is great and we managed to use the tablet for almost 3 days on a single charge.

Where we feel Samsung skimped out on is the camera. Their top of the line phones come with 8MP cameras these days and they went ahead and stuck a 3MP camera in the Tab. That doesn't make much sense to us. We also noticed some lag (which is livable) while running multiple apps and scrolling across our documents/app list. These are the only faults we could find with the Tab. If we really wanted to gripe we would also say we wish it had the same game controller features like the Sony Tablet S. As with all Android powered devices, you get complete access to Google Play and the apps. You also get to plug your USB device to the tablet and it instantly recognizes the different file types. This makes it very enticing to the business user. There are also a myriad of accessories that can be purchased for the tablet such as a docking station, keyboard etc.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 retails in India between Rs. 23,000 and Rs. 33,000 (depending on the storage size). It will be interesting to see what changes Samsung is going to incorporate into the Galaxy Tab 2 (next version of the Galaxy Tab 10.1) now that the new iPad is also out in the market.