EMail
The core of the email app looks like those on the Galaxy S phones, but when you flip the display into landscape mode you get a Microsoft Outlook-like pane that displays your Inbox on the left and the messages on the right. We preferred managing and responding to mail in this app over the Gmail app, which is just the smartphone version.
Calendar
Calendar
The calendar app is equally as attractive. In landscape mode you can adjust it so your calendar takes up the entire screen or with a similar two pane view that shows a listing of upcoming events.
Messaging, Contacts
Messaging, Contacts
These are pretty self-explanatory. Even though the Tab isn't technically a phone since all the US carriers have restricted its calling ability, you can use the messaging app to send SMS or MMS messages or e-mails to other contacts. Like the others, you've got a two pane view in landscape mode -- you can look at your contacts on the left side and message from the right.
Media Hub
Media Hub
This one has started to pop up on some Galaxy S phones as well, but the Tab is perhaps the best suited to take advantage of Samsung's new movie and TV store / player. At this point there's over 1,000 videos from MTV, Universal and Paramount, and while there is a decent selection of current titles -- we downloaded the Jersey Shore episode of South Park for $1.99 -- you'll come up empty when you start searching for older flicks. Nope, E.T nor Terminator, just to name a few, aren't available. Of course, everything here is DRM-protected so we had zero luck trying to drag it to our desktop. However, you will be able to log into your Media Hub account on up to five other Samsung devices to watch any previously purchased content. Media Hub isn't a bad over-the-air alternative, but at this point we'd recommend buying content through Amazon's Unbox and sideloading it for use on multiple devices.
Note: Samsung also has a Readers Hub app, which contains access to Kobo's e-book store and other reading content, but Sprint's decided not to preload it.
Browsing and Flash
For the most part, the browsing experience on the Tab is rock solid -- pages loaded quickly over WiFi and scrolling / zooming on most pages was snappy. When loading a few sites -- like this very technology site -- we did notice the scrolling to be a bit jittery and not as smooth as on the iPad. However, we do like that there's the ability to change the brightness within the browser. But, obviously, the Tab differs from that other tablet with its full Flash support. So, is it everything you've been waiting for? Thanks to its 1GHz processor, the experience isn't as slow as we've seen on other Android 2.2 devices, but we can't really say we took advantage of the feature all that much -- in fact we decided to disable it eventually to speed up browsing.
While it's nice to be able to load videos within sites and not have to battle that blue lego block, we were repeatedly given the "this video is not optimized for mobile" message when we hit play. Overall, videos played just fine, but Flash definitely slowed down the rest of the browsing experience. What about other Flash heavy sites? Well, as you can see above, Hulu is a dead end -- we got the same error message even when we logged into our Hulu plus account in the browser.(Hulu, please release a Plus app for Android ASAP!) On that same vein, we had no issues loading a Flash game site like Canabalt, but because it was built for mouse and keyboard environments we couldn't figure out how to jump and avoid death by bricks. What does it all mean? The Tab's Flash capability is a nice fallback, but if you've been thinking it's the killer tablet app you should think again. Not to sound like Steve Jobs or anything, but scaled-up smartphone apps and Flash compatibility alone don't create a well-rounded tablet platform it's going to take native apps for the Tab to be truly competitive.
Camera(s)
The Tab's dual cameras are a big differentiator against the iPad, and we do have to say they both came in pretty handy over the last few days. We warn you: people will look at you oddly when you pull it out and take shots with its giant viewfinder! The 3 megapixel cam with LED flash on the back aren't going to replace your point and shoot, but it did take some decent still shots. There's a few samples in the gallery below: the flash was helpful when nabbing some stills on a darkly lit street and the outdoor pics are quite sharp. The camera interface consists of the standard Android controls, and per usual it handled auto-focus and white balance. Oddly, there's no macro mode, but the panoramic mode was great for taking wide-angle shots -- just make sure to hold it extremely steady to avoid blur. There is also a continuous mode, which will take a sequence of nine shots -- it took us a while to figure out that you've got to hold down the camera button to get it snapping. We should note that the panoramic and continuous modes are limited to taking 800 x 600-resolution photos.
It's a bit of a bummer that there's no HD video recording -- the Tab shoots at 720x480 -- but motion capture is quite smooth, and there were no stuttering issues like we've seen on Galaxy S phones. We should mention here that the Galaxy Tab requires you have a micro SD card inserted to use the camera, so it's a good thing Sprint tosses in a 16GB card. Oddly, we couldn't save anything to the 2GB of internal memory or access it when mounted to our Mac or PC. (If you're interested in the European version, our UK review unit has 16GB of internal storage, which is accessible when mounted.)
Note: Samsung also has a Readers Hub app, which contains access to Kobo's e-book store and other reading content, but Sprint's decided not to preload it.
Browsing and Flash
For the most part, the browsing experience on the Tab is rock solid -- pages loaded quickly over WiFi and scrolling / zooming on most pages was snappy. When loading a few sites -- like this very technology site -- we did notice the scrolling to be a bit jittery and not as smooth as on the iPad. However, we do like that there's the ability to change the brightness within the browser. But, obviously, the Tab differs from that other tablet with its full Flash support. So, is it everything you've been waiting for? Thanks to its 1GHz processor, the experience isn't as slow as we've seen on other Android 2.2 devices, but we can't really say we took advantage of the feature all that much -- in fact we decided to disable it eventually to speed up browsing.
While it's nice to be able to load videos within sites and not have to battle that blue lego block, we were repeatedly given the "this video is not optimized for mobile" message when we hit play. Overall, videos played just fine, but Flash definitely slowed down the rest of the browsing experience. What about other Flash heavy sites? Well, as you can see above, Hulu is a dead end -- we got the same error message even when we logged into our Hulu plus account in the browser.(Hulu, please release a Plus app for Android ASAP!) On that same vein, we had no issues loading a Flash game site like Canabalt, but because it was built for mouse and keyboard environments we couldn't figure out how to jump and avoid death by bricks. What does it all mean? The Tab's Flash capability is a nice fallback, but if you've been thinking it's the killer tablet app you should think again. Not to sound like Steve Jobs or anything, but scaled-up smartphone apps and Flash compatibility alone don't create a well-rounded tablet platform it's going to take native apps for the Tab to be truly competitive.
Camera(s)
The Tab's dual cameras are a big differentiator against the iPad, and we do have to say they both came in pretty handy over the last few days. We warn you: people will look at you oddly when you pull it out and take shots with its giant viewfinder! The 3 megapixel cam with LED flash on the back aren't going to replace your point and shoot, but it did take some decent still shots. There's a few samples in the gallery below: the flash was helpful when nabbing some stills on a darkly lit street and the outdoor pics are quite sharp. The camera interface consists of the standard Android controls, and per usual it handled auto-focus and white balance. Oddly, there's no macro mode, but the panoramic mode was great for taking wide-angle shots -- just make sure to hold it extremely steady to avoid blur. There is also a continuous mode, which will take a sequence of nine shots -- it took us a while to figure out that you've got to hold down the camera button to get it snapping. We should note that the panoramic and continuous modes are limited to taking 800 x 600-resolution photos.
It's a bit of a bummer that there's no HD video recording -- the Tab shoots at 720x480 -- but motion capture is quite smooth, and there were no stuttering issues like we've seen on Galaxy S phones. We should mention here that the Galaxy Tab requires you have a micro SD card inserted to use the camera, so it's a good thing Sprint tosses in a 16GB card. Oddly, we couldn't save anything to the 2GB of internal memory or access it when mounted to our Mac or PC. (If you're interested in the European version, our UK review unit has 16GB of internal storage, which is accessible when mounted.)
The 1.3-megapixel front facing cam obviously doesn't take as crisp or detailed shots, but it's perfectly fine for video chatting, awkwardly posing with a friend, or checking your teeth for leftover lettuce. As you can see from the picture above, we were able to get a video call going using Qik over WiFi, although there was quite a lot of delay and in some cases a serious amount of pixelation. We did attempt to use Fring, but the app hasn't been optimized for the tablet yet, and we couldn't get two-way video calling working. Fring's audio was much better, however.
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