Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 hands-on impression

We’ve had several encounters with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 before but this time, we actually have a review unit in our hands (and I know a lot of people are eagerly waiting for this tablet to be released in the Philippines).

After unboxing the 10.1″ Galaxy Tab yesterday, the very first thing you’ll notice with the tablet was how thin and light it is. In fact, it’s as thin but much lighter than the iPad 2. Of course, all of that can be attributed to the plastic construction of the tablet, compared to the aluminum of the iPad 2.

The variant that we have here is the 3G + WiFi model (with the SIM card slot easily accessible from top right side of the device).

Here are some things I observed from my initial tinkering with the device:

• The display is bright and crisp; the colors are vivid and vibrant. The black bezel isn’t that much thicker compared to the iPad 2.
• The back panel is made up of pearly white plastic, has a glossy finish and is accented with silver lining on the sides and around the camera.
• Speaking of the camera, I was hoping it would be just half as good as the Galaxy S or S2 but the one they had on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 isn’t any good — still grainy even on well-lit conditions.
• The rear camera is only rated at 3.2-megapixels (2048×1536 pixels) and the video recording is only up to 720p (1280×720 pixels). The front-facing camera has a resolution of 1600×1200 pixels (around 2MP). There’s an LED flash beside the rear camera.
• There’s no external microSd card slot but system info says it has 16GB internal storage and another 16GB of internal SD storage giving it a total of 32GB.
• The charging port uses some sort of a proprietary USB (similar to that of the Dell Streak 5 and iPad/iPhone).
• I got a Quadrant benchmark score of 1367, almost half the score of the Galaxy S2 (2622) but still better than the Galaxy S (962). I guess the high screen resolution made it harder to get a higher score.
• Samsung used some sort of tablet-friendly TouchWiz UI for the Galaxy Tab. It’s not much of an eye-candy but is functional. Besides, it really didn’t change much what Honeycomb offered out of the box.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 GT-P7500
10.1″ display @ 1280×800 WXGA screen
NVidia Tegra2 1.0GHz dual-core processor
724MB memory (actual)
16GB/32GB internal storage
3.2 megapixel camera with LED flash
720p video recording
2 megapixel front-facing camera
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth
3G/HSDPA
6850 mAh battery
GPS w/ aGPS support
Android 3.1 Honeycomb

Those who were asking earlier, the P7100 model (the earlier one) is 10.1v while this review unit is the P7500 model (v10.1 only). It’s likely the 10.1 will be the one that will be released in the Philippines.

There are two important things we still don’t know exactly: when is the release date of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (sometime in August) and how much will it be priced (somewhere around Php30k – Php35k). Full review should be out next week.