Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 Review

                                        

                      SAMSUNG GALAXY TAB 2 P3110 REVIEW

   Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 3110 is the successor to the successful Samsung Galaxy Tab P1000. The Galaxy Tab 2 is Samsung's flagship budget 7'' tablet which has been released to carry on the success of it's predecessor. So can it really deliver? Let's See.

1. Brand Talk-

     This tablet is manufactured by Samsung, the Korean electronics giant who hold the largest mobile market share in the world. Samsung has been delivering quality devices with buyer friendly price tags in the past three years along with promising after sales support.

2. Gadget Avatars in the Market-
      This tablet is available majorly in two types one is with WiFi only and the other is with WiFi and 3G. It is also available in different internal memory sizes and colours for the above two types. For the Internal Memory there is 8gb, 16gb model available and for the colours there is white and black. The type which i am reviewing is the 16 GB Wifi Only White model.  

3.  Out of the box

    The box as usual has the typical Samsung'ish look. Well designed box which gives you a clear idea on what you can expect inside.

 Once you unbox, you find the tablet seated on a white cardboard which separates it from its accessories, lifting the tablet you find Samsung's 30-pin proprietary connector  to USB charger cum data cable ("it is not micro USB guys"), charger with USB port, standard headphones, three pairs of eartips of different sizes, quick start guide and the warranty card.

 All the accessories included are of very good quality. 

 

                                      

                                   
                                     


Overall Samsung has provided all the necessary contents inorder to get a complete multimedia experience.

4. Design and Build quality

   The tablet has a sporty look to it ("that’s what I felt"). I feel it appeals to those who want to make a fashion statement and also those conservative people out there ("weird, but true, haha"). The tablet has a rectangular shape with curvy edges framed by a brush metallic plastic. The tablet has dimensions of 193.7 x 122.4 x 10.5 mm and weighs 345 g. In the front there is the 7" screen covered by glass ("I found it difficult to differentiate whether it was glass or plastic"). Above the screen at the right there is a front facing camera and to its left there is an ambient light sensor. A Samsung logo is engraved below the screen between the bezel and the glass. 

At the right hand side there is the power button at the top and volume rocker below it, the power button feels fragile and has a loose feel to it however there were no problems with the volume rocker. 

At the left hand side there is a micro SD card slot.

 On the top there is the 3.5 mm headphones jack and a mic pinhole besides it to the right.

 At the bottom there is Samsung's 30-pin proprietary port for connecting the charger cum data cable. At it's both sides there is a speaker each.

 The back is fully plastic with a ceramic feel to it with Samsung's logo printed in the middle, to the top left lies the rear facing camera. However, the back cover cannot be removed to replace the battery.

 Overall I found the design pleasant for usage with no strange or wild looks in it.

5. Features-

      So let's see what this tablet packs in itself for Samsung to call it a budget feature packed tablet.

a) Screen-

     This tablet has a 7" PLS type LED Backlit LCD Display with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels with a pixel density of 170ppi and capable of showing 16 million colours ("Oh,yeah!"). 

To be frank the screen is, I can say adequate or average for budget users. It has good colour reproduction, enough sharpness but has very bad viewing angles.  Tilt the tablet a little bit from your eyes you see the colours washed out ("But why the hell would you tilt the screen").It is a multitouch display which can register upto 10 touches simultaneously. As told before, it is an adequate quality screen for budget friendly consumers.

b) Performance-

     This tablet has some interesting firepower which is a good decision by Samsung. At its core, it houses a Dual Core 1 Ghz Cortex-A9 processor in a TI OMAP 4430 chipset. For the graphics, it has a PowerVR SGX540.  It has 1 gb of RAM and 16gb of Internal Memory. It also has a micro SD expansion card slot which can support upto 32 gb capacity card. Coming to its performance in benchmarks we saw average performance from this tablet. In Benchmark Pi it scored 504 (lower the better). In NenaMark 2 (which is a gaming benchmark) it scored a meagre 21.2 fps. It scored 2226 points in SunSpider (lower the better) and a 94621 in BrowserMark. All said this tablet has specs sufficient for day to day activities and for moderate graphics games.

c) Connectivity, GPS and Sensors-

    This tablet has good connectivity options in its case. It has WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n with 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz support. WiFi Direct and DLNA support is available. It has Bluetooth 3.0 with support to A2DP profile. As for the sensors it has accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and an ambient light sensor. Coming to the GPS, it has A-GPS along with GLONASS which provides pretty accurate positioning data. There is a 30 pin proprietary port, which can be used for charging through the supplied power adapter (but not through the pc) ("Shame on you, Samsung"). You can however expand the port's functionality by plugging in the Samsung Adapter ("you have to buy it separately for about $25") which connects to the proprietary port and has a SD reader and usb port in the other end. You can connect USB flash drives, mice and keyboards to the USB port. It has a 3.5 mm audio jack for your headphones and audio out. Overall it has good connectivity options.

d) Software-

    This tablet comes with Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean out of the box.
There is no latest over the air updates released by Samsung for this tablet ("booh!"). It comes with Samsung's TouchWiz UX UI which I must say is very good.

 This tablet is blessed with good apps, it has Polaris Office which has a document viewer/editor. It supports internal and web storage. You can easily view and edit word documents, spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations. It also has a PDF viewer in it ("Great").The calendar app call S Planner is great, I found it's design and uses very impressing. You can add new event, set alarm, reminders. It has daily, monthly and yearly views. There are good calculator and alarm app also. There is also a World Clock app which looks beautiful with its animated views when a certain location in the globe is selected. There are flags, day and night animations as well. Custom apps have also been bundled along which includes My files, S-Memo, Photo Editor, Video Editor, Paper Artist which are you know add light to the party (" They are great").  For Web browsing it has the default android web browser which has support for flash contents. Google Maps takes care of the map department with concise representation of places in the map. I can say software us a strong point of this tablet and will definitely woo buyers. It has all necessary apps to provide a productive experience from your tablet.

e) Battery-

      This tablet has a 4000mah battery built into it.  The battery is non user replaceable.  The battery life is poor, you hardly get a day's charge with heavy usage like web browsing and playing games. But it should suffice budget users.

f) Audio, Video and Camera-

      This tablet has a custom TouchWiz music player, which is more functional than the stock Android app, but lacks the cover-flow-like browsing. You can sort your tracks by album, artist, genre, folders, composer or year. It also has playlist options. There is a dedicated video player app for this tablet. It has thumbnails, list and folder view modes, which is great. It supports DivX/XviD/MKV files ("Finally"). High-res videos are handled without any hassles even the 1080p ones. The player can also play videos which other third party apps cannot and it can also play videos smoothly than other apps out there ("Well done Samsung"). To sum it up the video player has support for a wide varieties of formats. Coming to the camera, this tab has a 3.15 MP rear facing camera which supports 720p HD video recording. It also supports geo-tagging and smile detection. There is a dedicated camera app which has a lot of useful features like panorama, share shot, buddy photo share and also smile shot for the shooting mode. There is also a 2, 5 and 10 sec timer for family portraits. It also has many special effects like black and white, sepia, and negative. It also has exposure compensation of -2 to +2. There are also different white balance modes. You can also set gridlines for easy shooting. You can use both internal and memory card as preferred storage. The camera takes surprisingly good photos with great dynamic range and low noise in them. The camera also shows similar performance in the video recording, The videos have good detail, low noise and somewhat accurate colours. Coming to the front facing camera, it is just enough for low quality video call and definitely not great for taking photos. Overall this tablet excels in this section with good hardware-software integration.

6. Conclusion-

       Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 was aimed at targeting the budget audience. Have they succeeded? Yes, they certainly have. Samsung have done a great job packing in a decent hardware and complementing it with great software. With good multimedia and productivity features, it is also going to appeal gadget freaks who are on a low budget. Overall it is a serious player in the budget category.