Gadgetory

well this is David at the verge and this is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 for verizon when you first think about it it seems like just another screen size in the galaxy tab lineup but it's actually much bigger change than that it's super thin it's only seven point eight millimeters thick which is only point one millimeter thicker than the toshiba excite and this is a way better built tablet weighs about 12 ounces and is much thinner than the Galaxy Tab 7.0 plus it's the first galaxy tab to use a super amoled plus display and that's really the best thing about this tablet it's 1280 x 800 has incredibly deep blacks and really great viewing angles and it just looks great it's definitely among the best displays we've seen are an Android tablet of course it's nowhere near as good as the retina display on the new iPad but it's still really solid the device runs Android 3.2 plus Samsung's TouchWiz skin and TouchWiz changes pretty much everything about Android and on at allit it actually really helps honeycomb has some serious issues with being sluggish and laggy and then can cause some real problems with tablets and TouchWiz helps it adds some new functionality there's an easy way to take screenshots there's a quick access settings menu that lets you change connectivity settings and things like that and there's also a little bar that has many widgets that you can just pop up over an app that you're in and take a note or change the music that you're playing without disturbing the app that you're actually in which is pretty cool but unfortunately it can't get around some of what's really awful about honeycomb and it's still difficult to use there's still some browser issues fortunately this device actually loads full sites instead of the mobile sites that most tablets do but it still runs into problems with pinching and zooming or even just basic scrolling and moving around from apps so honeycomb is still a huge frustration but TouchWiz definitely helps Samsung has promised an update to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich but Samsung actually has a pretty bad history of delivering updates on time or really at all so we're certainly not holding our breath for that update to come the Tab 7.7 has two cameras it has a 3.2 megapixel camera on the back and a 2 megapixel camera on the front both are fine neither is worse than most tablet cameras but neither is particularly interesting either the camera app on the other hand is great it has tons of settings readily available on the left side which make it really easy to change white balance exposure or a timer and it's just a really great way to get a little more control over your pictures you can also shoot 720p video but there's no image stabilization and holding up a tablet this big to try and shoot video is pretty difficult so you get really shaky really blurry video there are two speakers on the device one thing that's really cool is the peel remote app there's an IR sensor on the Galaxy Tab 7.7 and it works at the peel app to basically create a universal remote control for all of your home theater stuff out of your tablet it has a really easy setup wizard that walks you through all of your different devices and lets you control them straight from your tablet and it also kind of works as a TV Guide so you can find stuff to watch and it's a pretty good remote the tablet connects to verizon's LTE network which is great Verizon's definitely got the best LTE network in the u.s. right now and we got solid and consistent speeds and it was fast but not nearly as fast as the iPad which was odd we consistently got better scores from the iPad even though the Galaxy Tab 7.7 s were still pretty good and even despite having the LTE connection battery life is still really good on the tablet it's good enough for at least a couple days of use if you're using it just regularly and even using it heavily it lasts more than a full day the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is really a reminder of how limiting honeycomb is it has great hardware great internals and even the LTE connectivity is great but without better software it's just not as good a tablet as it could be it'll be much better when it's updated to Ice Cream Sandwich but even then there's the problem that there just aren't that many good apps designed for larger screen android devices right now and at four hundred ninety nine dollars on contract or 699 without it has some really serious competition especially the iPad which best sit on almost every level and even other Android tablets like the transformer prime which is already been upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich are probably a better buy right now you