Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon mini-myth from pocket now calm the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 is running the TouchWiz interface but on an EXO nose 1.4 gigahertz processor super fast the same chip that's found in the galaxy note how fast is it in this video we're going to find out let's get to it so the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is running pretty much the same software that you will find on the Galaxy Tab 8.9 and 10.1 we're on Android 3.2 which is of course honeycomb and as most of you know honeycomb is quite slow and quite horrible and you're going to see a lot of examples of why it's slow and why it's horrible even on this device which has a 1.4 gigahertz Exynos processor Ice Cream Sandwich cannot come soon enough the development community has still yet to get Ice Cream Sandwich even on a beta or alpha form on the Galaxy Tab 7.7 so of course we've got the TouchWiz interface here which has a variety of widgets that you can add you can go up here and press the plus button and add more widgets there's a great example of the slowness of honeycomb it took about two seconds to access the widget tray and yet if I go back in it now it'll probably be much faster honeycomb is inconsistently slow so here of course we can flip through all the widgets that we get in honeycomb and in TouchWiz get a lot of lot of choices you can add and remove home screens if you'd like and add more which is a nice touch and let's go back to the main screen and flip around now just like the 8.9 and 10.1 samsung is added what I like to refer to as quick apps so down here if we press this up arrow we'll get these applications that will actually float on top of the application that you're using I'll demonstrate but to go into the weather application you get this nice full screen display and let's say I want to just bring up the calculator calendar task manager any of these things real quick so here's the calculator app and I can use I can still use the app behind the calculator as if the calculator was kind of a stay on top application and we can do that with other apps as well so we'll go to that little up arrow let's add the calendar and you can only have one on at a time you can also use these quick to launch the full application so let's go back in to say the calculator application we'll click the up arrow here and it will take you into the full calculator application kind of a cool use of the bottom bar here in honeycomb which doesn't get much use otherwise so you see what just happened I went back to the home screen and the widgets took about two seconds to load however if I were to go back into an app and back to the home screen the widgets are inconsistently loading so that's just again a a side effect of having honeycomb another interesting thing that Samsung lets you do is customize this fourth key or this fourth button on the bottom bar here so if I click on it right now it's set to go right into search kind of like an old-school Android 2.3 effect a lot of Android devices these days do not have the search icon where you can configure that as you go into settings here you go into screen and it's called quick launch and you can set it to one of four things you can have it do a screen capture with which is default for the eight point nine ten point one and seven point seven and then we can also do applications so we'll launch your application tray search or a quick way to launch the camera so a really cool customization feature there and we're going to go back to the home screen now of course with honeycomb we've got the honeycomb application tray which is probably very familiar to most people you can actually edit the application tray here this is a little Samsung touch we can move items around reorder them so that you can have the apps that use the most frequently up at the top and let's go back to the home screen ok so let's jump into the web browser and take a look at web browsing performance which obviously is very important in day-to-day operation see how the 1.4 gigahertz Exynos processor shines of course this is the honeycomb browser so you're gonna expect honeycomb performance that might be slightly better because it's a 1.4 gigahertz processor so we're going to jump to pocketnow.com let's see if we can go to the desktop view first so we'll actually go to the mobile site and of course we can go up here and we can do a few things we can print although of course you can only print to a samsung printer which is a little bit ridiculous and we've got these standard settings here that is set up in a two pane grid that set the home page you can do google chrome sync which is nice so to keep all your passwords up to date based on what your browser preferences are and we can clear cache clear history all of that stuff and then there are a couple things in labs really like the quick controls you turn that on and what it will do it will hide the top bar and give you a full-screen browsing experience then you can take your thumb and from the side and you get all of these controls and there are more controls than you would experience on other Android devices so what we can do here is we can go to the URL bar we can go back we can go forward we can refresh we can enter tab mode really cool way to access tabs we can stop add bookmark and go to settings let's go to the full version of pocketnow.com we'll test screen rotation speed let's see how it looks as it's loading a little a little stutter there saw the page kind of load a little bit slowly there it's not done yet let's zoom in very smooth but as you can see it's having trouble keeping up with the page loads a lot of blank spots there now that the page is completely loaded it gets a little bit better but it's still not as fluid as it should be with such a nice processor so while it loads we're gonna flip it into landscape no screen animation because I have got the screen animations turned off pretty quick there let's go to a very long web page let's go to any gadgets I'm gonna go over here and go to the URL bar I'm gonna type in end gadget and by the way while we're on the keyboard I want to talk about the options that you get because Samsung adds in their own keyboard options this is the standard Samsung keyboard you can also press the button in the upper left corner here to get a taller keyboard kind of like the smaller keyboard it's more conducive to typing in portrait you can go into the bottom right corner here tap on the keyboard icon and change to swipe and the cool thing about swipe is that it brings you a smaller keyboard the same size or kind of the same aspect that you would get on a Samsung phone and you can actually move the swipe keyboard to the right or to the left which is really cool if you go into landscape you can do likewise so you can move it around on the screen or there's actually button too bandit to fit the entire width of the window so a lot of keyboard options on the Galaxy Tab 7.7 which is quite great so we're gonna go to engadget.com let's switch back to the regular Samsung keyboard just more practical and gadget comm and press go let's open up another tab to push it to the test here so we're gonna go to say The Verge get some graphic intense websites up here see how the Galaxy Tab 7.7 handles it let's keep it going let's go to Google ok there's Google and now we have three tabs loading we can switch between them with this cool quick view let's go up to end gadget and here is the website very long web page a lot of graphics let's flick down and see how it goes not the smoothest thing in the world it gets the job done but again honeycomb really keeps it back if you were to put an Ice Cream Sandwich ROM on this this browsing experience would be immediately improved another thing we should mention is that we cannot figure out why the Galaxy Tab 7.7 has a speaker grille at the top very strange in fact the Verizon version of this does not have the speaker grille at top when you play sound on this device this sound comes out of the dual speakers on the bottom here not out of the top when there's a speaker grille on the top it implies that it can be used as a phone obviously you're not going to hold the 7.7 to your head and use it as a phone so we're wondering what has sam sung has planned why they have a speaker on the top there and it went into kind of the inverse orientation so bottom line with the software in the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is that it's held back by honeycomb it's got the potential to be an amazing tablet TouchWiz is a great interface of the screen the Super AMOLED screen really pops fantastic color fantastic contrast but the speed issues of honeycomb make this tablet difficult to use at times in fact at times I want to go back to the Galaxy Tab 7 with Gingerbread on it because that at least is consistently quick so we can't wait for the Ice Cream Sandwich update on the Galaxy Tab 7.7 keep an eye out for the final review on pocketnow.com we'll put a link in the description when that's ready if you liked this video please give us a thumbs up and of course thanks for watching that's it for now