Samsung Galaxy Tab (T-Mobile)

More apps are coming, we've been told. Next Issue Media will offer tablet-format magazines from Condé Nast, Time, Hearst, News Corp., and Meredith next year. But while the iPad launched with a range of rich apps you just couldn't use on a tiny phone screen, the Galaxy Tab still looks and works too much like an overgrown smartphone.

T-Mobile pre-installed another few apps which, like most of Android's 100,000 apps, work very well on the tablet but don't take your experience to the next level. The driving game Asphalt 5, Slacker Radio, and the Kindle e-book reader all look great, but they look like Android phone apps, just bigger. That's a little more immersive, to be sure, but not transformative. I'm also wondering where T-Mobile TV went; that would be nice to have here in place of Samsung's expensive Media Hub TV and movie store.

Of course, some of the built-in Android apps work better on a tablet than on a phone. Samsung customized the contact book and calendar for the Galaxy Tab's large screen. Web browsing on the built-in browser was a bit slow in my tests (thanks in part to Adobe Flash), but Opera Mobile was faster. Samsung's video player played 1080p HD videos beautifully, with simulated surround sound, as long as I wasn't using Bluetooth headphones. Bluetooth audio tended to skip.

Samsung also needs to stop advertising video calling on this device, for instance. While the Tab's front-facing 1.3-MP camera works fine, there's no functional video calling app. Qik failed to work for me many times, on several devices, over a period of two weeks, and Fring can't use the front-facing camera at all.

VoIP voice calling worked better. Even though the Tab isn't supposed to be a phone, it has a microphone and a very good speaker, and voice calls made through Skype on a Wi-Fi network were crystal clear. There are too many "buts," though. Because of a Faustian tie-up between Skype and Verizon, Skype refuses to work with T-Mobile's 3G data network—it will only make calls over Wi-Fi. The Tab wouldn't pair with our Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, 4 stars) mono Bluetooth headset, either, although wired headsets worked fine.