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Samsung Galaxy Tab Review

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This week I have been lucky enough to have my hands on a Samsung Galaxy Tab to review. Thanks so much to MobiCity for providing me with the review unit, as it has enabled me to have a good play with it and decide if I would want to buy one myself. The short answer is No, not right now, but I will most likely get one eventually.

If you follow this blog, my twitter, or know me, you will know that I’m a bit of a gadget freak. I love to try out new gadgets and change my gadgets over frequently. (Last year I had 6 phones, including the iPhone, until I fell in love with my HTC Desire, which I’ve had for a few months now). I now know that I will never buy a gadget on a 2 year plan because I will never keep a gadget for more than a year at most.

There are many technical reviews of the Samsung Galaxy Tab out there on the Interwebz, so this review won’t be one of them. This is more about the look and feel of the device.

I really really wanted to love this device, I have high hopes for the slew of Android tablets that are on the horizon over the coming months. Since I love my HTC Desire so much, I thought that I would definitely love the Android in the tablet form factor.

Hardware and Form Factor

The 7″ screen size is interesting – smaller than an iPad and larger than a Phone. For a large male hand it would sit in the hand quite nicely, but I find it is a little big to hold in one hand, and it would be easy to mishandle and drop.

The screen, like most other gadgets of this sort, is a fingerprint magnet, and on a larger screen it is so much more noticeable, so keep your screen wipes handy.  The smooth white plastic back of the device is just as much of a fingerprint magnet as the glass front. As soon as a few greasy fingers have been near this device it is a very slippery sucker, and it will slip out of your hands and smash on the ground before you know it. (I was very careful with the review unit). Therefore a case will be necessary, but there are not a lot of accessories out there yet for this device.

One of the things I love about my HTC Desire is the hardware buttons. The Galaxy Tab, like the Galaxy phone and even the new HTC Desire HD all have “software buttons” or buttons that are integrated into the glass. Whilst the buttons on this device are backlit, they are not backlit all of the time, so in a dimly lit room, you have to fumble around to find a button to light up the buttons and find the right one. This is very annoying, especially when the home and menu buttons are in a different order on the Galaxy and the HTC devices.

Charging this device is a bit of a challenge. The new style PDMI cable is kinda cool, but difficult to get a hold of right now, so buy up a few when you buy the device. The device can not be charged via the PC or laptop, only when plugged in to the wall. Also, there is no LED on the device to tell you it is charging – surely this would be a useful thing to have. Once it is charged the battery life is pretty good and lasts longer than the phone.

No microphone input is a bit of a let down, as talking over Skype into the tiny Mic on the side of the device is strange. The call quality on the other end was not good. (I did try to get the front facing camera working with Skype but it did not work straight away so I did not bother trying to work out why).

ROM

I’m sorry to say, but the kiddy-like ROM on this device is just yuk compared to the beautiful lines and finesse of the HTC”s Sense UI. If I purchased this device, I would be putting a different ROM on there straight away (do this with caution though, if you are on a 2 year telco contract and want support on the device). At the moment, with no tablet specific Android ROM, this device is just a huge telephone.

Samsung, what were you thinking when you decided to put that ugly ugly home screen on what could be a beautiful device? If you want this thing to be compared to the iPad, it has to be at least as beautiful as the iPad. The hardware comes close, but the ROM, and specifically the default home screen lets it down, and it’s all about first impressions.

Another comparison to the iPad is the concept of “Instant On”. Yes, it’s instant on, if it’s already on, but booting up from scratch is quite slow, and slower than my Phone. So it’s not a device I will be taking out of my handbag to google something in a hurry. (Oh, and yes, it can fit in my handbag, where an iPad would not – my handbag is not that big).

Apps

I installed and set up the basic apps like Twitter, Gmail, Skype etc, plus some apps that I thought might work well for the larger form factor of the tablet like Tweetdeck.

The built in apps like Mail (which I would not use, as I would use Gmail) and Calendar take up the large screen nicely, but the Calendar is an ugly shade of brown, which makes it very difficult to enjoy using.

I connected to my Dropbox account and used the inbuilt Think Free office to edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. This is something that I would not bother to do on my Phone as the screen is too small, and I’ve got my laptop with me most days. That worked kinda smoothly and would be something that I think I would use – for quick on the go edits before sending a document off via email (as long as it was not a heavily formatted document, as I would be worried that it would loose the formatting).

YouTube and Maps work very well on this size screen, and it is a beautiful screen, so the device is made for these types of apps. The browser is nice to use, and many sites benefit from the larger screen real estate. Some apps, like Tweetdeck and twitter, are actually harder to use on this size screen as there is much scrolling needed to get through the larger sized tweets. When someone comes up with a twitter app similar to the iPad app, that will be really cool.

It comes with a built in e-book reader, and of course, you can download the kindle app.  Having a lovely screen means that the e-books look great, but there is just something nice about the e-ink display on my kindle that would bring me back to the kindle for long term reading. It’s also a lot heavier than the kindle, so harder to read whilst lying on the couch.

Overall

It is a great lounge room or kitchen device, something that just hangs around the house, plugged in and connected to the Wifi, ready for casual browsing, recipes and tweeting whilst watching TV. Whilst I’m out and about, I would probably not use it that much. I did take it car shopping with me, and did get it out to look up some documents on PDF that I needed for the finance figures, so that was useful. Some people are using their iPad as device to take to conferences, and / or on short trips instead of their laptops. I’m not sure that this device would work for that purpose just yet, but it could grow on me.

So, would I buy a Samsung Galaxy right now. No, not for $999 – not when it is more expensive than the iPad. MobiCity has them outright for cheaper than the RRP at $989, and I’m sure the price will drop a bit more in the coming weeks. If it was pitched at the $599 mark then yes, I would definitely buy it. Then I would not worry so much about dropping it, scratching it, or modding the ROM.

If you are going to buy this device, I would strongly recommend buying it outright from MobiCity rather than on a Telco’s 2 year plan, because it is not a gadget that will last you 2 years – you will want to upgrade it to something new and better within the year, and give the old one to your Mum or something (well, that’s what I tend to do, anyway).

It’s interesting that I showed this device to at least 10 people in the week that I had it, and not one of them was enamoured with the device enough to even think about wanting to purchase one. If you had shown an iPad in the first few weeks of release to 10 people, I’m sure that at least half of them would be convinced that they needed or at least wanted one.

I personally will wait, until either a cheap enough generic android tablet is readily available, or I can get one of these for a few hundred dollars less in a few months time. As I’ve just spent all my money buying a new car, there are no more dollars for Xmas gadgets for me this year. So, for the ability to play with the device for a week, I am so grateful to MobiCity – they has allowed me to have my gadget fix, without the post-purchase regret.

Switching to Android – My Thoughts After a few Months

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I do love my Android phone. I love it more than I ever loved the iPhone, and here’s a quick post as to why.

I decided to definitely switch to the Android on the day that Apple changed their T&C’s to not allow any apps to be built in anything but their compilers. I thought that this was the end of the road for me and Apple. Even though I’m not an Apple developer, the mere fact that developers could not build one app and port it to many platforms just does not sit well with me. Thankfully that decision has now been reversed, but I don’t think I will be going back to the iPhone any time soon.

In a post back in 2008, I wrote about the things I use a mobile device for, and looking at that list almost 2 years later, it is still pretty much current. The main things I use on my Android are (in order):

  • Clock and Alarm Clock
  • Calendar
  • Twitter
  • Gmail
  • Gmail Contacts
  • ToDo List
  • Facebook
  • Photos (mainly for Twitpics)
  • Web browsing
  • Maps
  • Calculator

Plus the occasional phone call and text message.

I don’t use that many apps, and never really did on the iPhone either. However, there were a few apps that I found that I absolutely loved on the iPhone such as TripView, the Pzizz sleep app, and the Jamie Oliver cooking app, but all those are available on the iPod Touch so I have one of these and have the best of both worlds. I keep my music on the iPod with few apps, and have my Android be my main web connection device.

I also don’t do games on mobile devices, and did not on the iPhone. I just don’t really see the point in wasting my precious battery life on playing games. (And whilst I will rant about the Android’s battery life, it is better than the iPhone, and I can have two!).

The things that absolutely stand out for me on the Android as the things that I love are:

  • I have never ever had to plug it into my PC – EVER! I don’t need to put music on it, and I can not for the life of me think why I would want to look at Word or Excel documents on a mobile device (and I would use Dropbox anyway). With OTA updates, emailing or directly uploading pics, and the seameless Gmail integration, there is absolutely no need to plug this thing into a PC.
  • The Gmail integration is almost flawless. I can star messages, label them, see threaded messages (yes, I know you can do that on the iPhone now). My contacts and my multiple Gmail calendars sync without any issues, now that I have set up Gmail as my primary contacts store. I love the simple dialling system where you start typing in the person’s name to find their phone number.
  • I love Swype! It is so much easier and better than the tap tap tap of most other onscreen keyboards. Yes it does take a while to get used to it, but now even going back to the iPod touch is hard to type on. And, there is no way that we will ever see Swype on an iPhone so it’s another reason to avoid the iPhone.
  • I have my calendar appointments on my Home Screen! and I have Calendar Alarms and an Alarm clock that works really well. This was one of the biggest issues I had with the iPhone. I was forever missing appointments because it just beeped twice and that was it! The Android will keep beeping at me every few minutes until I acknowledge it.
  • I have my ToDo list on my Home Screen. I have a sync with the wonderful RememberTheMilk.com and all the ToDo’s due today are shown on my Home Screen.
  • The wireless hotspot feature on Froyo (Android Version 2.2) is really cool and I have actually used it a few times and it worked really well.
  • I love HTC Sense UI. I got my HTC Desire from Clove.co.uk so it is not overloaded with the Telstra crapware on top of Sense, and I think that people that are complaining about the bloatedness of Sense and the slowness of the device may be because of the Telstra issues. I don’t use their twitter client and I have not used many of their other social networking features (except having Facebook photos in the contacts list is quite nice). But I love the Home Screens (I turned off the active Home Screens on day 1, due to it sucking battery life), and the Sense system widgets just look lovely (even though you can get other widgets that do the same thing).
  • I love my widgets. With one tap I can turn off the 3G connection (try doing that on an iPhone without mods), or turn the Wifi on or the GPS and Bluetooth on or off – yes you can do these things on an iPhone if you delve down through about 20 screens to get there. The widgets are just so damn handy.

Other great features are:

  • The notifications panel – it works well
  • Multi tasking – of course!
  • The Task Killer app
  • The browser works really nicely (and similar features to the iPhone browser)
  • Google Maps of course!
  • The night clock and alarms

I could go on… However there are some things that I really don’t like so I do have to mention those too…

  • The click to dial a number feature from emails and text sucks as it built for US numbers and depending on how the number is entered, it just won’t work.
  • The complete inability to copy and paste from Gmail and texts – that is a true shocker! Yes I can “share” to the clipboard, but if I just want part of the message it is a real pain.
  • The battery life is dismal, but so is the iPhone’s (well 3G and 3GS anyway). The good thing is that I can swap the battery with a new one during the day if I need to. The other good thing is that if I turn off 3G then the battery lasts about double the time than with 3G turned on.
  • The lack of apps – I really really want a good AU weather app and TripView for Android. But now that the Market is available for Australian apps, they should come in time. Even Skype is now on Android.
  • The Facebook app is so bad it is laughable. There is no ability to see status updates by only those people in Lists, so I have to wade through all of the updates I don’t want to read to see the ones from family that I do want to read.

But for all the bad things, the good things really outweigh them, and I love this phone. Considering I tried 6 different phones last year (with the longest time spent on the iPhone), I have no desire (ha, pun intended) to switch yet… but maybe when the Desire HD comes out then I will think about it…

Swtiching to Android – Gmail Contacts

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This is my first post about switching to Android for my primary phone. Whilst there are things I love about the iPhone, I just HATE the way it works with Gmail and I want the Android phone specifically for it’s gmail integration. The first thing I have to do, however is import my contacts into Gmail… and so the fun begins.

Last Christmas (2008), whilst working on my Mum’s computer I accidentally deleted her whole Outlook contacts list – 400+ contacts. As she was moving to Gmail anyway we decided to rebuild the contacts list from old backups and import them into Gmail. Well long story short, it took me about 3 days and I ended up having to manually edit all of the 400 contacts to get them to appear correctly in Gmail.

When Gmail when out of Beta in 2009 I could not believe it – how could they take it out of Beta when the contacts support was sooo bad! But, here I am and now I have to use Gmail for Contacts. My Mum loves having all her contacts in Gmail now and I can see the benefit.

My contacts were a complete mess… I had:

  • 1300+ email addresses in Gmail, of which probably 200 are of any value.
  • A very old outlook file with contacts that are probably mostly irrelevant
  • 250 or so contacts from my phone that have shortcuts for names (generally only Initials or @twitter names) and the barest of minimum info like Mobile number only.
  • My Mum’s family contact list from her Gmail, which I would like to have the contacts from
  • My Gmail contacts are in a complete mess – some have names, some done.
  • Some people could be in all 3 lists, and some could be in just one… it’s a mess.
  • My phone also includes non people data such as bank accounts, ABN numbers etc – which I like to have handy in my phone at all times

A quick Google search on importing Contacts into Gmail says it’s easy – it’s just a few steps – export your CSV file from outlook, and Import into Gmail. But my past experience is that the fields just don’t match up.  But Reading posts about things not going well does not fill me with confidence, and I agree with that post. Google needs to provide the definitive CSV list that will import 100% of data 100% of time. Outlook does a perfectly acceptable job of importing contacts, so why cant Google.

I found a great post last year with a guide to the full Google Contacts CSV file and another post that reveals the trick to importing Gmail Addresses by switching to the Old Version of Google Contacts (which is what I had to do last year). Thankfully, however, Gmail has improved a bit and I will NOT recommend using the Old Version trick as there are just too many issues with it not labelling details correctly.  Gmail now has a great tool for finding Duplicate contacts, which really does help, but it is still not good enough!

(Note: I manually cleaned up all my contact lists in Excel but I think the Gmail duplicates would have done a great job of cleaning up my duplicates, but I wanted to do a really thorough clean-up).

So eventually I did get my 420 (yes, that’s all after the clean-up) contacts into Gmail. I had huuuge dramas getting them in there, and tried reading every post about the terrible “Oops. An unknown error occured while importing your contacts” message to no avail, as it seems that everyone’s issues were different. But here is a quick guide to getting it right, I hope:

  • Use the full CSV File – See my version of the full CSV file, including notes on which fields to use
  • Save as the DOS CSV file format
  • Delete Suggested Contacts*
  • Delete All Contacts*
  • Delete any commas in the CSV file*
  • Delete any reference to your email address in the CSV file*
  • Ensure there are no non-blank cells in the CSV file!

* Whilst I can’t vouch for the accuracy of these fixes, for me it was the non-blank cells issue. Here’s how I fixed it. Select all the cells in your spreadsheet, hit F5 then click on Special…, choose Blanks. This selects all blank cells in your worksheet. Colour those selected cells any colour. Now go through your sheet cell by cell looking for any white cells that have no text in them. Click on that cell and hit the delete key, deleting the contents of that cell. Repeat this process by re-selecting and re-colouring until you are 100% sure there are no non-blank cells.

Oh and I did delete all my contacts – all 1300 of them that were in Gmail originally, but I’m now not convinced that was necessary (and I forgot to take a backup, so it was an enforced cleanup of my contacts in a way).

So if this long winded post helps at least one other person save a few hours of frustration, then it will be worth it. But Google really really really need to get their act together. Surely they could have an error message that tells you which contact it failed on, why it failed, and then import the others. Without this fix Gmail contacts is still completely crap and not worth dealing with unless you really really have to (or really really want an Android).

Update: As @trib just very rightly pointed out, if all I wanted to do was switch my already super organised contacts over from the iPhone (or any other device) into Gmail, then there are a number of Google Sync tools that may help. These did not help me because my contacts were in such a mess.