Samsung's Galaxy Tab Android Tablet Now Official

itwbennett writes "Samsung held a media event Thursday introducing the Galaxy Tab, and making official what we've already known for weeks, says blogger Peter Smith. 'We still don't have a price or a concrete ship date (though definitely this fall; Samsung says it'll be available for the holiday season),' says Smith. 'It'll ship with Android 2.2 (Froyo), runs Flash, has a 1Ghz Hummingbird CPU, 16GB of memory, a 7" LCD (1204 x 600 ) screen and weighs about 13 ounces. They're claiming a 7-hour battery life. Two cameras: a front-facing 1.3 megapixel, and a back-facing 3 megapixel. It has an HDMI port and will also share media to DLNA devices on the same network.'" Engadget adds some video footage.

Unlike The IPad...

[MogNuts]

Hey, unlike the IPad, a tablet that is actually useful!

I'm looking forward to using that Android app that puts anything on screen (everything, not just video) and pipes it out the HDMI to another device, like an HDTV. I could see this being a truly useful device.

Re:Price

[GordonBX]

Agreed. The one thing that gets forgotten in the hullabaloo about the iPad is that when it was announced, the prices were significantly cheaper than many people had been expecting, and that this caught a lot of the 'me-too' manufacturers off guard. If the Galaxy is more expensive than an equivalent spec iPad, then not only does it lose out to the 'buy the cheapest' crowd, it also gives Apple ammunition to say: "see: we aren't expensive". TBH though, because of the app-store lock-in, Apple ought to be able to virtually give-away iPads and still make lots of money, so I can see this battle going on for a good while yet.

Re:Soundly Trounces EEE 701

[MichaelSmith]

701 has a keyboard. I can't see myself coding on a tablet. Also the laptop gives you root access.

Price

[Andy Smith]

UK retailers are already pricing this thing at £600+ which gives Apple a nice big helping hand to maintain market dominance. No way people are going to pay nearly double the price of an iPad for a tablet that isn't as good. And I say that as an Android fanboi who can't stand Apple.

memory: ram or storage?

[Vectormatic]

minor off topic nitpick, but it pisses me off when people use "memory" ambigously meaning either storage or RAM

in this case i can sort of deduce that this thing has 16gb of storage, but how much working RAM does it have? not entirely unimportant for a computing device, especially when you get into tablet territory (the ipad/iphone already suck at multitasking, or hell, even multi-tab browsing because of low memory)

Such an Odd Product

[whisper_jeff]

Too small to compete with an iPad, too big to compete with the iPhone. And, let's be honest - they're trying to compete with Apple's offerings here. I just don't get their vision of this product. Seriously. It's too big to casually put in your pocket and carry around easily and it's too small to be a "put in your bag" computing device when there are other options with bigger screens available. It might do well - time will tell - but I suspect the screen size puts it in an awkward position that very few customers want.

Re:On the other hand, iOS App Store doesn't need 3

[DrgnDancer]

I dunno, if it's true (and it seems to be) that you have to have a phone data plan to access the Android App Store, that's going to be a huge impact on the tablet/PDA market. The sales numbers on iPod Touch indicate that while tablet and phones are both more popular, there's a pretty big market for unconnected phone sized devices (PDAs essentially). That's two markets Android is essentially cutting itself out of by making people pay an unnecessary monthly fee. Google needs to change that pronto if they want to get into this market.

Re:Price

[DrgnDancer]

It's kind of a moot point if you don't want the 3G though. It's a 170 pounds more for a not as nice tablet and a 3G modem that I don't want. That's not chump change. (For the lazy, 170 pounds is around $260 at current exchange rates)

Re:Unlike The IPad...

[samkass]

I'm looking forward to using that Android app that puts anything on screen (everything, not just video) and pipes it out the HDMI to another device, like an HDTV. I could see this being a truly useful device.

I'm curious as to what you'd use that functionality for besides movies, photo slide shows, and Keynote (PowerPoint) presentations like you can do on the iPad. Any developer can add video-out on the iPad for those with the connector cables, and besides the listed apps some games support it. But overall having the thing anchored to a TV kind of defeats the primary purpose of the device. So instead of just leaving this hanging, enlighten us as to why this converts the device from useless to useful.

Re:Very much so

[Anonymous Coward]

I help run a huge LARP

I have to admit, when I saw "LARP", I googled it to see what that was. When I found out, I bemoaned the 20 seconds of my life I lost and stopped reading your post. I can't IMAGINE a device relevant to you is relevant to the average consumer.