Samsung P1000 Galaxy Tab preview: First look

Samsung P1000 Galaxy Tab hands-on

Samsung P1000 Galaxy Tab is Samsung’s move onto the tablet warfield and luckily we are right here in the battle fray to give you first-hand scoop from the announcement event. Some might argue that it’s rather a step down from laptops but the Samsung Galaxy Tab smartphone DNA is obvious from the moment you touch it.

Samsung P1000 Galaxy Tab official photos

The 7-inch Android tablet has full phone functionality and the only thing that separates it from being called an insanely oversized cell phone is the fact that you cannot make phone calls by holding it next to your ear. The rest of the specs sheet looks like it belongs to a cell phone if you don’t mind the oversized screen.

Samsung P1000 Galaxy Tab at a glance

• Form factor: Tablet
• Size: 190.09 x 120.45 x 11.98mm, 380g
• Display: 16M colors 7” TFT LCD capacitive touchscreen of WVGA resolution
• OS: Android 2.2 Froyo
• CPU: 1 GHz Hummingbird CPU with PowerVR SGX540 graphics accelerator, 512 MB of RAM
• Camera: 3.2 MP autofocus camera with D1 video recording; LED flash
• Memory: 16 GB internal memory, expandable through a microSD card slot
• Connectivity: quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and tri-band (900/1900/2100 MHz) UMTS with HSDPA 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA 5.76 Mbps support, Wi-Fi b/g/n, Assisted GPS, Bluetooth 3.0, 30-pin connector
• Battery: 4,000mAh (Up to 7 hours of video playback)
• Extra features: Gyro sensor, accelerometer sensor for automatic UI rotation, ambient light sensor, Adobe Flash Player 10.1 support

However the Samsung P1000 Galaxy Tab specs don’t have the privilege to be considered in isolation. With the biggest player in the tablet world also belonging to the phone OS tablet category, the Tab will always be compared to it. The Apple iPad has quite a head start and it will be hard for a newcomer to steal the spotlight, but so was the iPhone back in the day and that didn’t stop Samsung from trying.

So here’s a brief look at what the two big guns hold as advantages over each other.

Samsung Galaxy P1000 Tab over Apple iPad

• Lighter and smaller, easier on the pocket
• Telephony (including 3G video calls)
• 3.2 MP camera with D1 video recording @ 30 fps and LED flash
• Android OS v2.2 Froyo
• Proper multitasking (though the iPad is getting that too in couple of months)
• microSD card slot for memory expansion
• Uses regular size SIM card
• 16:9 widescreen display
• Adobe Flash player 10.1
• Bluetooth 3.0

Apple iPad over Samsung P1000 Galaxy Tab

• Larger screen
• Better viewing angles of the display
• Metal body
• iOS 3.1.3 with more than 25 000 apps written for it
• Larger internal storage (iPad 64GB)
• Longer battery life

There’s something we would like to highlight in the lists above. The first items in each of them turn this into a choice between handling and functionality (because a tablet’s main feature is its screen), which boils down to picking your priorities, rather than picking the better of two.

Hands-on photos with the Galaxy Tab

And that leads us to suspect that it may not be a battle for survival between those two. There might just be a spot in the sun for both of those cool gadgets after all. But it’s still too early to tell as we have a whole lot of touching to do before we make any conclusions. And even if those two do eventually settle in their own corners of the ring, punches will fly quite heavily at one stage or another.

Samsung's hall 20 at IFA 2010

So let’s not waste any more time and see what the Galaxy Tab does in real life. After all specs are a good place to start but they don’t even begin to tell the whole story.