Gadgetory

greetings all this is Dickie Adams with pocketnow.com and today we're gonna take a closer look at the hardware and software of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 for Verizon which also has the 4G LTE service so sit back relax and enjoy the show now we went over most of the specs in the unboxing so just as a recap this is a 10.1 inch display it's got 1280 by 800 as far as the resolution goes it's got a seven thousand milliamp hour battery the standby time is supposed to be approximately 400 hours and the continuous use time is supposed to be about 12 hours I found that as far as the battery life goes that it's actually pretty decent unless you've got an app like touchdown running on it which I happen to do and really I found that as long as you don't have an app that's continually accessing the internet or doing a lot of push messaging or a lot of notification alarms that sort of thing then the battery life lasts quite a bit of time although we'll get into a more of a comparison with some other you know another more popular tablet in the next video so I've been pretty pleased with the battery life on the 10.1 Galaxy Tab from Verizon no complaints there it lasted me quite a bit through a very heavy convention weekend I didn't have to charge it hardly at all which was fantastic even with the 4G service turned on and not being toggled on and off that was probably the most important thing to note there as far as the size goes and weight goes this is a very light unit pound in a corner is what the pr material says and as far as depth goes it's really very quite very very thin 0.3 4 inches then some of the things that bother me about this device or it cause me issues about device are the same things that can happen with and let's say an ipad namely the connector here is not a standard USB connector and so there were times that I found myself upstairs and I'm to get either charge the cable with the cable and I had to go back downstairs to get it or I wanted to do a data transfer and had to go get the cable from upstairs and bring it downstairs in order to be able to access what I wanted to the other problem that I've run into with this device is the power button sits right here and when you're holding a device like this in your hand I have tendency to rest my finger here on this side which is right next to the power button and right after we unbox the device I was using it and I had a good hold on it like this and I was trying to type with this hand while holding onto it with the other hand and actually powered off the device accidentally because the power block like this comes up right here in the middle which happens to coincide exactly where the keyboard sits so I was typing along the power box came up and I hit the power off button and the device immediately shut off much to my chagrin volume rocker doesn't seem to cause any problems it does have the ability to mute and unmute by simply tapping on the screen once you bring it up if you're looking at the quickness of the device it's actually very fast the the animations here between the screens it are slow but if the animations were fast they wouldn't look as good but if you go into a application say like decohere or however it sounds pronounced and you tap through pages I've got the animations turned off in this case it navigates very very quickly back and forth as fast as I would expect it to anyway some of the apps on this device haven't been optimized or don't give you the ability to turn off that animation and so they run really really slowly when they're doing their animation because I and again I don't think that's necessarily a part of the the processor because this this dual-core processor is it seems to be be able to handle itself very well it's just the I think it has more to do with the Android developers and perhaps even honeycomb not being really ready for super primetime or rather not ready for the average consumer to be extremely happy with it and to that end I would have to say that really what I found is that this feels a lot like the original iPad and insofar as there's not a whole lot of apps that are specifically for the device that seem optimized device there are device there are applications that are full screen but each of them kind of do their own thing sometimes the the menu button is down here sometimes it's used up in this corner it does never seem to be a whole lot of real consistency between the layout and the configuration that said it's growing every day and every day that I've used this device it has been getting better but again there's been times that I have thought to myself oh I should just go grab my iPad and use it instead of this device because I know how to work that sort of functionality on the iPad versus the Galaxy Tab screen is bright and brilliant I've got it set to auto right now but you should have the brightness all the way it's fantastic the colors look great even in a reasonable amount of light it's still pretty easy to see although with the direct sunlight there's you know with any tablet at these days it's still going to be difficult sound volume is actually pretty decent coming out of the device it's it's actually pretty good considering the the dual speakers here cameras on the other hand are just okay but again this is not something I'm particularly concerned about because I'm not using the cameras to take photos or rather not taking using the camera to take photos of things I'm going to try to keep for a long period of time if I want to capture let's say through Evernote a image to reference later then that's great to have that rear-facing camera but really like when I found as the video content is not all that fantastic on either nor is the single image capture Skype does not work with video on this device yet it's unfortunate that I was able to get Netflix running on this without any problem the the facebook messenger service seems to run just fine most apps run great speaking of apps and specifically with honeycomb it's really really nice the Google way the google apps interact with the device in general often times what I found with other tablets is that the built end of applications or the applications built by the manufacturer don't really stand up to what the third parties can offer but I've found that a lot of the apps on here specifically the Gmail the calendar have a nice layout here and are easy to manage easy to use same thing with the calendar app I can find it nice layout easy to view another thing that I've understand is that this particular device doesn't have the new Samsung interface over the top of it which is apparently calling it's causing some people some grief but others have been pretty happy with it I personally liked the blue honeycomb kind of Traum look which has been very pleasing to my eye let's talk about speeds for a second here nope wrong one my apologies as you can see here smart bench only opened up in a little window there and same thing here with speed tests so let's go look at the results so zoom in here a little bit so starting up here when I was in Seattle you can see that I was getting about 7 Meg's up and about eight point three Meg's down another test in the similar location was seven point eight and six up coming back into 3G speeds area ghost drops right back down to what you expect for 3G speeds about 754 down and approximately eight hundred four hundred and eighty five up here the the latency times were were kind of varied here is when I was in Seattle these speeds up here the latency times are really really low and when I was in the Salem area in the Willamette Valley south of Portland the latency speeds would go up because there's no 4G service available in this area soon as you dropped into 4G service it locked right in and worked great the transfer between 3G and 4G as far as Verizon has concerned is much better than the Sprint transfers between 4G and 3G there wasn't as many hiccups along the way and I found it really nice and convenient to be able to access sites on the go with this device on the road especially when I was in Seattle and looking up information we always it was at PAX and you know able to use the convention app and look up data and find information move back and forth very quickly through that data speeds were weren't getting bogged down like some other devices were at the same event one other small hardware item of note the fit and finish of this seems to be pretty good other than a couple of spots where things aren't quite right for example right here if you push down that the back kind of squishes and it sticks a little bit there almost like it didn't fully connect the edges are nice and smooth it's very easy to hold on to other than the power button item which I mentioned headphone jack is in a an OK spot but personally I would rather had it on the bottom or the side rather than having a cable run in front of your your screen while you are trying to use the I guess you could run around the back but there's a lot of extra tension on the cable to be wrapped around that side the edges are clean and tight if you push down on the screen it does bubble a little bit you can kind of see that in the video but not very well but that said I did run this device naked the whole time they've been using it and there I have been able to get any scratches on the screen or on the back of the device course I haven't dropped it but it's been very resilient to all of the attempts to use it in environments that have been somewhat detrimental and just kind of throwing it in my chrome bag and carrying it around with other objects you know waiting for it so use setting it down on tables and you know backstage and not having any problems with you know if you got moved or bumped it didn't seem to have any issues getting have any problems getting bumped or damaged during that time so so far it seems to be holding together very well which I appreciate for this device at five hundred twenty-nine dollars on a two-year contract with the 4G service that you have to subscribe to you know this is you expect it to be the hardware to be at least decent and hold together for at least a reasonable amount of time which is fantastic it doesn't seem to have the same fit and finish as other tablets which we'll get back to later in the next review as far as form factor is concerned I've been very pleased with the sixteen by nine layout and or you know more or less sixteen by nine the widescreen format I guess I should say and really the viewing angles and that sort of thing have been without problem really it's been very nice format wise I found it's a little odd when reading or looking at this device vertically because it's so long compared to other tablets but really in this sort of format when you're looking at a webpage it's been very nice and convenient for scrolling and being able to see an entire webpage very very easily you can see here the browser and able to scroll very quickly without any problems the animations and the flash sort of content over here on the side is playing just fine on all the PocketNow website this is running on Wi-Fi at this moment so the speeds are gonna be a little bit faster obviously then it was running 3G or 4G putting video contents make sure this see it's taking a little two seconds to load up but then it plays just as you expect in a standard web browser on your PC or Mac that wraps up our more in-depth view of the hardware and software for the Samsung 10.1 Galaxy Tab for Verizon if you have any comments or questions or like to hear some more information about a particular feature or functionality of this device please leave a comment below and we'll try to cover that in the next review which will actually be a comparison between this device and the iPad and the iPad 2 to kind of give an overview of you know is this a device that you should buy depending on you know the type of person that you are thanks for watching