Eight months after launching the iPad, Samsung brings to the market what most people
called "the first serious competitor" of the Apple tablet. At least on paper Galaxy Tab is superior to the iPad; the most noticeable advantages over the iPad are the number of functions and the ability to run Flash content. It also has two cameras. Galaxy Tab has a diagonal of 7 inches and is made entirely of plastic. The white case is very well finished, leaving the
impression of a solid machine, built to last. The display is covered with a special glass panel, capable of high-resistance, called Gorilla Glass. This is designed to withstand serious abuse without getting scratched or cracked.
The design also brings a multi touch display with a resolution of 1024×600 pixels and a quality of 171 pixels per inch. The LCD screen comes along with high quality, but the default settings have colors which are too intense.
Galaxy Tab uses an ARM Cortex A8 processor at 1GHz, similar to Apple A4 chip used in the iPad. The tablet offers 512MB of RAM and a 16GB standard storage space, expandable to 32GB via the microSD slot.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1v is an outstanding device for personal media and web consumption. There isn’t much Samsung can do about the sub-par app support for Android tablet so far (but this is bound to improve), though I do think not including HDMI or DLNA in the out-of-the-box experience is missing a trick, to say the least. The lack of micro SD card support and a user-replaceable battery isn’t going to win favour from those who refuse to buy an iPad for the same reasons.
Samsung’s own announcement of updated Galaxy Tab models arriving in Q3 2011. Boasting a thinner profile and the possibility of larger storage, good things may come to those who wait.