IT Pro Verdict

We had high hopes for the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and if you need a tablet with a more flexible operating system than iOS then its slender, lightweight design makes it an attractive choice. You do have to sacrifice ports and battery life in the process though so it's not an ideal choice for everyone. The iPad 2 remains the best all-round tablet, while the Asus Eee Pad Transformer is still the most flexible, if bulky, Android tablet.

By Alan Lu

published 4 August 2011

in Reviews

Dual-band wireless N networking is built-in, although 3G isn't and there's no word on availability of a 3G-equipped version. GPS is built-in, but you'll need to be connected to WiFi to use Google Maps or use an offline maps app. There's also a pair of rear and forward facing webcams for use with video chatting apps. Using the Tab 10.1 as a camera will make you feel dorky, but the image quality is reasonably good.

We had our suspicions that the Tab 10.1's thin design would leave little room for packing in a large battery.

We had our suspicions that the Tab 10.1's thin design would leave little room for packing in a large battery and these suspicions were borne out by our H264 playback battery test. The battery lasted just under nine and a half hours which compares very well to most ultraportable laptops, but it's the shortest battery life of any Android tablet we've seen so far and way behind the iPad 2.

As with almost all other Honeycomb tablets, the Tab 10.1 comes equipped with 1GB of RAM and a dual core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. It managed 2162ms in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark and 2224 in the Android Quadrant benchmark so it's fast. Despite all this, there's clearly still work to be done in making Android run smoothly on a tablet. Although the interface and multitouch gestures generally worked well, it occasionally felt a bit juddery and panning and scrolling inertia still feels off.

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