Samsung Galaxy Tab (Sprint)

I'm not bashing the Tab, but I'm also not recommending it—yet. The Tab is a blank slate. It's an overgrown smartphone without the ability to make voice calls. The Tab can do all the things Galaxy S phones do, just bigger. Samsung has done some amazing work to make the Android Market's thousands of apps work well on the Tab's 7-inch 1,024-by-600-pixel touch-screen display—almost everything I downloaded from Android Market worked well. But they're just large versions of smartphone apps. Unlike with the iPad, developers haven't created rich, unique tablet-specific experiences for the Galaxy Tab yet.

The subject of this review is the Sprint version

While the subject of this review is the Sprint version, the Galaxy Tab will come out in slightly different variations on all four major U.S. carriers. All the models run on a 1GHz Samsung Hummingbird ARM Cortex-A8 processor and Google Android 2.2. The Sprint version connects to the Internet using Sprint's EVDO Rev A network and 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi with 2GB of internal memory along with a 16GB MicroSD card pre-installed in the side-mounted card slot.

There's a speaker on the back and a microphone on the side of the tablet, but the Tab doesn't allow for voice calling over Sprint's cellular network. (The mic is for video calling, Google Voice Search, and the like.) The built-in speaker is tinny, but perfectly loud enough for music and driving directions. In my tests, the Tab worked fine with Altec Lansing BackBeat 903/906 ($99.99-$129.99, 3.5 stars) Bluetooth stereo headphones and with a standard wired headphones plugged into the tablet's 3.5-mm jack.

Software and Services The Galaxy Tab runs Android 2.2 with Samsung's TouchWiz extensions and, well, not a lot else. The software build is almost exactly the same as on Samsung's Galaxy S smartphones, with a few exceptions. I'm not going to go into everything Android does. It does everything you'd expect from a smartphone. It'll even make voice calls over the data network if the right VoIP software becomes available. I made a test call with Fring and it was scratchy and choppy, but that seemed to be Fring's problem, not the Tab's.

Samsung has done a good job making the Android Market's 100,000 apps run on the Tab, with a few exceptions. Most apps, including Angry Birds, automatically expand to fit the screen. A few, like the Engadget app, appear in a cramped little box in the middle of the display. A very few, such as the New York Times app, don't appear in the Market to download at all. I ran all of our standard Android benchmarks on the Tab, and came up with results similar to the Galaxy S series phones, which are the fastest Android phones on the market.

The Galaxy Tab comes via two on-screen keyboards

Text entry on the Galaxy Tab comes via two on-screen keyboards, both enhanced with Swype, which lets you type by dragging your finger across the screen without lifting it, is actually less useful on a tablet than on a smartphone because you have to drag your finger so darn far. The keyboards are both adequate, though when you're entering text into a Web form using the landscape keyboard, the context of your Web page disappears.

The Galaxy Tab uses the standard Android browser enhanced with Adobe Flash 10.1. I found it to be roughly the same speed as the iPhone's browser, except when Flash is involved, that added 10-20 seconds to a page load. Flash worked surprisingly smoothly including both streaming videos and button-press actions.

Why a Tablet? The iPad is successful because it isn't a pumped-up iPhone. Yeah, yeah, it plays big YouTube videos and browses a big Web. But much more importantly, thousands of third parties have created tablet-centric experiences for the iPad. The New York Times iPad app looks nothing like the company's iPhone app. Ditto for the Associate Press. Ditto for the Kayak travel app. Ditto for almost any company that builds apps for both devices. And then there are iPad-only experiences like Elements and Sketchbook Pro, that are simply impossible to reinterpret in the phone form factor.

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