Gadgetory

alex tab the android tablet electronics show travel down the hall was also a telephone and only by this time from actually make calls with us this is the home screen of the samsung galaxy tab as you can see it's got a pretty nice display it's an LCD display samsung took a little flack for not going for mo lead but they cited costs and power consumption concerns maybe we'll see one of those in future years Samsung has a lot of display experience so this is with one of the live backgrounds they're really rich on this relatively large screen for an Android device as you can see you can slide around see different screens there are five home screens available here's the gadget for facebook if you want to add a new gadget you can simply hold down on the screen it will provide you with some options we'll put a new widget say the daily briefing perhaps and it loads up pretty fast so that's very convenient as with all android devices so far you have the home screen of course you can also get more options if you click the applications button this shows you all the applications that are installed one that I thought showed off the tab screen really nicely with Google Earth will load that up takes a minute for it to load it's a nice little geographic exploration application here put in landscape mode it's got a nice ability to take advantage of the multi-touch user interface here for example you can change the view you can zoom in with pinch you can rotate with by turning two fingers zoom in a little bit more it takes a while for the imagery to upload but it's very nice and flick to zoom around so it's fairly impressive application on a screen this size with multi-touch interface when it comes to productivity apps these tablets are an interesting new option because they of course can show a lot more screen real estate for reading email or checking calendars one thing I liked about this tablet is the calendar actually seemed to take a lot more advantage of the screen real estate so there's some views of that however I have to say that the email application left me a little cold this is the built-in email app that can talk to exchange servers and I think it could use the screen real estate a little bit better if you one nice thing about it if you have it in landscape mode then you can see your email on the left your inbox on the left and your contents on the right but even when its vertical I prefer to be able to see a bit more this also applies to the google mail application which i find has text it can be a lot smaller it's nice to have an option for large text but it would be very handy to have to be able to read more as you go one of the popular applications here at the IFA show that everybody is trying out is NFS shift this is a car racing amplification from EA as you can see takes a little while for it to load it's one of these drive around games and it's a work in progress so some of the glitches are unfortunate but not that start a new race this doesn't use the most advanced graphics when it comes to actually rendering while you're driving but it's fairly respectable it was pretty clear that we're going to have a lot more android games hitting the market as we have some nice displays like this to show it off clearly I'm not a born car racing aficionado there to the boost and a crash video is a nice aspect of the samsung galaxy tab and we launched the video application here you get number of options this works better in landscape mode obviously let's watch one of these videos here I've found generally the video to be fairly high quality sometimes lags but mostly even during fast transitions it tends to play very smoothly first the video option on the tab here that's interesting is you can connect it to your TV via hdmi which is something of a novelty there's also YouTube video let's go back to the home screen you can watch any number of online videos if you like he nodded I just load one up here to see looks like it's pretty fast over Wi-Fi and a fairly impressive high quality display for streaming video on a small tablet device one of the areas that Samsung likes to highlight is the leader application you can check out news if you like their number of pages photography oh here in Germany some tips poke up zoom in real newspaper takes a minute for it to render a nice version we go back here take a look at a book the book reader seems reasonable sometimes it seems a lag for me but that might just be a matter of downloading take a look at Michael Lewis the big short to see how it works here so you flick to the right there's no animation so you have to kind of understand that you're changing pages you can change a number of settings versus day mode very handy you can change fonts firms serif to sensory if you prefer and you can of course change the font size if you want it to be larger or smaller the tab comes with the swipe interface for the keyboard if you like that and we'll show you how that works basically you just slide your fingers over the words so you can type noaw for example is it does good job T IME does time and if you do like a little loop it'll do two letters like a ll or g 00 d so swipe is it fairly useful I actually found I could touch type faster with this nice large screen real estate here it's not so constrained as a mobile phone so swipe it's kind of a matter of personal preference but it's definitely not as necessary on device this size as it is on a mobile phone your built-in browser works pretty well as you can say you can click on links and they'll load reasonably fast at least on this Wi-Fi connection you can show the responsiveness of this scrolling it's pretty good here can follow links depending on the complexity of the page I've been taking a while to load but it's generally much better than with a mobile phone as with Android phones if you double tap it will zoom in on a particular aspect of the screen it's also available multi-touch is also available so you can use multiple fingers to change the size and a single finger to pan around of course android system still have a back button so you can go back to where you used to be tap comes the music hub application that's powered by 7digital you can see here and with it you can click on various tracks and see how they sound you can see here we get a one-minute clip a lot of songs I've tried were just a 30 seconds but it's a nice way to preview and of course then you can buy the songs if you have an account this one cause 9999 tents in the UK here's a look at the Android Market on the galaxy tab loads a lot faster than the Android Market on most mobile phones I've used you can then look in and see what the apps are it was relatively fast if you're scrolling through this of course it has to download the thumbnails as it goes so that was always a little bit of lag there check out the different categories and the games are a relative weakness of Android compared to the iOS ecosystem that Apple's help build but things are definitely improving now oh nice feature of the galaxy tab we haven't see on most Android devices is extra use of the status bar here you'll notice in the status bar you have different options for turning hardware off or on or changing configuration you can put it in silent mode take it out in silent mode you can lock the orientation so it won't flip obviously you rotate it and turn the bluetooth off and on no bluetooth devices here it's particularly handy if you are working with GPS which uses a lot of battery power you can turn it on and then turn it off and you don't want it anymore