As the device's name so subtly suggests, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 has a 10.1-inch display. It has a resolution of 1,280x800 pixels, which is just enough to put the iPad 2's 1,024x768-pixel resolution in the shade. Furthermore, Samsung's new Super PLS technology provides an astonishingly bright and vivid picture, with excellent viewing angles, making this one of the best displays we've yet seen on a tablet.
But, to achieve this eye-searing degree of luminosity, you'll need to disable the auto-brightness system. We noticed that the Galaxy Tab 10.1's light sensor -- located next to the front-facing camera at the top of the screen -- has a tendency to be rather stingy.
Even in quite poorly lit rooms, the screen's brightness dims right down. Naturally this has a positive side effect, as battery life is protected by keeping the screen on a low light, but, when you've paid almost half a grand on a piece of consumer electronics, you want it to look dazzling.
Another issue we noticed was touchscreen latency. Many tablets suffer from this ailment, but there were times when the Galaxy Tab 10.1 was rather sluggish to acknowledge our input. Mercifully it's a fairly rare occurrence, and, for the most part, the device responds promptly to finger stabs and swipes.
If you’ve handled the 7-inch Galaxy Tab, then the chances are you may have reservations regarding the jump in screen size. While the larger screen makes this tablet a little less easy to stow away in your rucksack, the additional inches really do make a massive difference when it comes to the overall experience. It's hard to go back to the smaller display after witnessing this.
Even when placed alongside the iPad 2's stunning screen, there's no denying that Samsung has set a new benchmark in tablet displays with this offering, and, if you're the kind of person who is picky over the quality of their screens, it's worth making note of that fact.
It's hard to believe that there's a 1GHz, dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 CPU beating inside the impossibly svelte frame, but the Galaxy Tab 10.1 packs some serious processing muscle. It's backed up by 1GB of RAM, which is vital when you're throwing around all that data on the screen.
The slim nature of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 has forced Samsung to leave out USB ports. This means the tablet isn't capable of taking advantage of Android 3.1's ability to host USB devices such as external drives, mice and joypads. You can buy a USB dongle which links via the 30-pin connector located on the bottom edge of the device, however.
Also absent is the ability to augment the Galaxy Tab's internal memory via microSD or SD cards. This isn't such a pressing issue if you plump for the more expensive 32GB model, but, during our tests, we found the 16GB edition's storage quickly vanished once we'd loaded up a few 1080p videos and imported our music library.
Should you plan on turning your tablet into your personal media player, you might want to consider laying down a few more sheets for the 32GB version, or looking at rivals like the Asus Eee Pad Transformer.
It's also a shame that no HDMI connection is included, as we would have appreciated the ability to hook the Galaxy Tab 10.1 up to a television.
When you're presented with such a gorgeous 10.1-inch Super PLS screen, it's only natural to want to show it off to the best of its ability. The most impressive way of doing this is watching 1080p HD movies. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is powerful enough to ensure flawless playback of video -- something that can't be said of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, which notably struggled with HD footage.
At the time of writing, we couldn't gain access to Samsung's Media Hub application, as it's going to be made available around the same time that the Galaxy Tab 10.1's interface is updated with TouchWiz features. The service will, however, allow you to rent movies and watch them on the tablet in much the same way that HTC's Watch app does on the HTC Sensation.
The company's Music Hub app is included, however, and it attempts to mimic Apple's iTunes with its selection of downloadable songs and albums. You can sample 30 seconds of each song before committing to a purchase, and it's possible to grab entire albums for around £5 a pop. Single tracks cost 99p each.
Purchased tracks are downloaded to the Galaxy Tab 10.1's internal memory, and aren't saddled with any digital-rights-management nonsense. Once you've grabbed some choice tracks, you can either listen to them using the tablet's preinstalled media player or transfer them to another device.
The ebook reader is another neat pre-installed app, and could potentially soak up more of your time than the movie and music variants. It allows you to link to your preferred ebook store in order to download books directly to your device and uses a cool 'bookshelf' interface to display all of your tomes.
If you already have a sizeable collection of novels, you can import existing libraries and even PDF files. The text-to-speech option is an interesting feature, although the robotic female voice does tend to grate after a few chapters.
The dedicated Android Honeycomb YouTube application comes pre-installed as standard, and it's arguably one of the best apps currently available. The large screen allows you to browse video content effectively, and the cool, curved 3D menu effect still manages to impress us, even though we marvelled at it on the Motorola Xoom many moons ago.
Playback can be toggled between standard and high definition, and, when you blow the footage up to full screen, it really does look rather scrumptious. If Google can apply the same level of polish to some of its other exclusive apps, that will go a long way to enticing customers over from the iPad.
Next page: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 camera and video
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User reviews33
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kaley 15 April 2013
Good: light easy to use
Bad: screen freezes constantly
Comment: I have only had this for two weeks and it has packed up working all together, returning it to the shop tomorrow, very dissapointed with it.
Arsenalfan9999 17 September 2012
Good: Great screen, battery life, the entire experience, storage, looks great
Bad: A bit of slowdown and freezing, some games don't look quite as sharp as they would on an iPhone or similar
Comment: I have a 32gb version of this tablet and I love it. After a slight malfunction with the screen on the previous tablet, it had to be sent back and I didn't thing anything could compare with it. That was a 16gb. Now I love this one. I had an iPod Touch before so had no experience with Android before I got this tablet and I love it. It might not look as sophisticated as Apple but I can cope. It's almost like a touchscreen laptop, as the browser looks just like webpages on the computer. The little screenshot button is nifty, it's great for when you have 100 friend requests on Facebook and want to show the world. The display is excellent, and the whole look on the outside is amazing. It has a professional look about it and the black front on the white version makes it harder to see fingerprints if you use it a lot like I do. The homescreens are brilliant, it was nice to see a few preloaded ones on there and it's easy to make it look like an iPad if you really love Apple by saying you want to create a homescreen shortcut for all apps you download. However, I didn't know how to turn that feature off for a while but it doesn't matter, I can customize all I want. It's very flexible, with 2 app stores, the Google Play and the Smasung Apps, which isn't as broad as Google Play. Like quite a few people, I downloaded Angry Birds first and noticed that the display doesn't look quite as sharp as on my previous iPod Touch, but I can live with that. I'm enjoying the flexibility of Android and the way everything is customizable, and the preloaded apps are pretty handy.
When it's been used for a while, or has too many apps running, I've noticed it occasionally freezes or slows a bit, but not for long.
The battery life is pretty good, and the charger is great. However, I plugged it into the computer first and it took a while to charge, and when I turned the computer off it didn't charge any more, which is understandable now I look at it. But it won't need as much charging as an Apple device.
So overall, I've found this to be a great tablet :)
George89 10 May 2012
Good: light and easy to use
Bad: operating system android and little battery life
Comment: prefer the ios operating system for tablets and phones, but samsung decide to put windows on tablet then definitely I will buy it. Ipad is better to use it for Business doing spreadsheets, word and stuff like that for the reason that Apple has better apps than android
See all 33 user reviews