Okay finally time for Part 2 of my 3 part review of the Tab. This part focuses on my dislikes.

I have used the term dislikes to broadly refer to all the negatives from my own point of view. Some things are outright hatred some are just minor issues, some are things that may be fixed by the discovery or future creation of an app and some may not really be a case of the Tab/Android handling something badly but more a case of the N900 handling it so well. Some may just be a case of me having unreasonable expectations.

Bear in mind that this is the first ever Android device I have used. I have greatly admired the HTC Desire range from a distance but have never actually used an android device. Some of the negatives are more a negative for android than for the Tab itself.

Automatic Lock

This absolutely drives me mad. I would go as far as saying this is the most annoying thing I have ever come across on a device. My wife has already decided she does not like the Tab because of this alone. I called Samsung to ask about this and they said it is a feature of all Galaxy range devices. It is not much of a feature to me. More like a flesh eating parasite.

The issue here is that you set how long you want the screen to stay on. Once it switches off the device locks automatically. There is no way to set different timers for screen off and automatic lock.

Of course you cannot leave the screen on for too long after last interaction otherwise you would run the battery down. So you set something sensible like 30 seconds.

Of course 30 or 1 minute when reading a document, page, etc is not very long. So every time I am using the device I have to constantly keep unlocking. Super annoying. It also means I cannot have any security on the device cause entering an unlock pattern or code constantly could drive a man insane.

I use No Lock app to disable having to do slide to unlock but always having to press unlock instead of just touching screen to wake it up is just so annoying.

Enough from me on this. Here is a quote I found on the internet when I was (unsuccessfully) searching for a way to disable this nonsense. He expresses exactly how I feel:

"What a brilliant piece of technology the 'Galaxy s' is. All the technology & design imaginable to make the phone slick. Except not quite !

Designers too often forget the ABC of ergonomics which are at least as important to design as the high tech aspects of the device.

Instead the designers have managed to create something in the Galaxy almost as irritating as the Iphone which I sold within a week of owning & went back my N95, because within 1 minute of getting my Galaxy out of the box & starting it up I found my blood pressure rising as I found myself having to swipe the virtuel unlock key every 15 seconds !
I'm thinking I don't believe it.
They are whizz kids at high tech yet they seem unable to design simple things & get them right.
Then I find there's no option to adjust the auto phone lock time !"

Lit Android Buttons

The android buttons on the Tab are touch buttons rather than actual hardware buttons. Helps to keep the device beautiful looking but the implementation is very frustrating.

The buttons light up when you press them or when you touch the screen. However, if you press one of the buttons it does not just wake up the buttons (like touching the screen when off). It actually registers the press. So you either need to know where the buttons are and what you are pressing or you have to find somewhere on the screen to press that does not execute a function.

It frustrates me enough but it gets worse when the battery drops to around 10%. At this point the buttons no longer light up. Which means touching the screen is not going to help you. You need to either be in a brightly lit place and so can manage to see the buttons without them being lit or you need to know exactly where each of the four buttons are.

I have found myself a few times unable to use the Tab cause the wife has gone to bed and so lights are off and my battery is around 10%. Quite annoying. Made even more annoying by the dislike immediately below this one.

Bear in mind that Honeycomb no longer uses these fixed android buttons. Would be nice if the Tab got Honeycomb and this disabled this annoyance of lit buttons. However, the way the Honeycomb buttons look it seems unlikely. Doubt the Tab already has the ability to display and have functioning software buttons anywhere on the bezel. The alternative would be for the buttons to appear on the screen itself but then that would reduce the used size to below 7 inches. We shall see.

Apple Accessory and Connectivity Tactics

Samsung have really annoyed me by taking an Apple like approach in designing the Tab. The decisions were clearly made to make as much money of customers as possible.

The Tab comes with a non-standard connection port. So you cannot just plug in any usb charger. You may also have to buy expensive replacements from Samsung as 3rd party ones may not be made and/or may not work.

You need to buy an expensive accessory from Samsung to connect via HDMI, another expensive one to connect via composite video and another expensive one to charge the Tab in your car.

On top of that the Tab just comes with a charger adapter and a usb cable. To use the charger you need to plug the usb into it. No separate charger and usb cable. So lose the usb cable and you cant use the charger.

The usb cable is also extremely, extremely, extremely short. So short that you are going to find it difficult to find yourself in a position where you can comfortably use the Tab whilst charging it.

To compound this whole issue the Tab does not charge from the usb cable being connected to a PC (apparently it will charge if the Tab is switched off, but very slowly). So if you need to charge when at work for example you need to carry but the adapter and the usb cable (and risk losing one of these precious devices both of which you need to charge the device and both of which would cost you a fortune to replace from Samsung).

Weight

Given how portable this thing is (more in the Likes section of the review) I am quite shocked at how heavy it is. I think I am getting a bit more used to the weight but lying on your back in bed and holding the device in front of you is no mean feat.

Best to lie on your side and put it down on the bed holding it with one hand (remember to lock the screen in portrait mode if you do so).

After using the Tab and going to the N900, the brick like N900 almost seems like a feather.

May just have been may expecting miracles thinking the Tab would be lighter than it is. From what I hear the blackberry playbook which is also 7 inches may turn out a bit thinner and lighter than the Tab.

Given that it apparently weighs half as much as the ipad it would seem it is a relatively light device. If the ipad actually weighs twice as much as this then to be honest I completely fail to see the point of an ipad. Given the fact 10 inches is too big to be portable and with the weight you might as well use a netbook or laptop where you can at least type properly (unlike with the Tab in portrait mode the ipad is too big to be able to type even remotely close to swiftly). So but for it carrying the Apple badge the ipad and all 10 inchers following it would be dead on arrival and not 7 inch tablets as Mr Annoying Jobs claimed.


Excessive Bezel

Again with the weight this may just be a case of me having unrealistic expectations. However, the Tab does seem to have quite a bit of wasted space due to how much the black bezel takes up. The device is almost always going to be held from the back with it lying in your palm or completely from the sides. I have never really had a situation where I needed to hold it from the bezel.

There may be perfectly valid reasons why there is so much Bezel on the Tab but it seems there is a lot of wasted space. With less bezel the device could have been made more portable with the same screen size or have been of the same total size with slightly more screen real estate.

Widgets

Given that this is one of the major advantages that Android has over ios I have been a bit disappointed with the range of widgets available on Android. They are not that far more impressive than what is available on Maemo 5 even though there are far more android apps, developers and users. There may be some gems I have not yet discovered but I have used a few best android widgets searches.

Desktop Browser

For some reason Samsung has decided to default the browser to view mobile pages rather than full web pages. I have set the user agent on Dolphin and Dolphin HD to desktop but for some reason the browsers keep taking me to the mobile version of some sites.

Multi Tasking

Android does multi tasking but it is quite limited compared to that on N900/Maemo 5. It is also not implemented as cleanly. I was having a bit of frustration getting used to it but something happened that made me even more frustrated with android’s multi tasking.

I had been typing a note on Think Office for about 30 minutes and then dropped down the notification area to check my messages. I then went back to Think Office to discover that all I had been typing had mysteriously disappeared. Not sure how this happened. May have been a freak accident. Have tried to repeat it but it has not happened again. However, just in case I save as frequently as possible.

With the N900 such a thing would never happen. Unless you pressed the x button to close a note app you can be sure the note would always be there intact no matter what else you went off to do on the device.

To be fair my experience with the N900 was always so buggy and frustrating that there were several times I could not do a single task without the device freezing to a complete stand still let alone multi task and I have never ever been able to receive a call when watching video (and many times when not even doing anything that intensive). But at least the multi tasking is fully implemented even if limited by hardware and a buggy operating system.

The Honeycomb video of course shows a very nice implementation of multi tasking so if the Tab gets Honeycomb this could soon be a non-issue.

Notes

The thing I use my N900 for most is probably notes. I have about 300 Tomboy notes. Would love to switch over to the Tab for note taking due to the typing speed on the Samsung keyboard (more on that in the Likes part of my review) but that is not going to be possible due to how bad notes are on Android.

I have tried about 10 different note applications but they all have the same limitation which makes them of no use to me.

The problem is that android notes do not allow any formatting what so ever. No bolding of text, no italics, no bullet points, no tabbing. Just the same plain text throughout. I need to be able to bold text for headings, underline, put bullet points with tabbing, etc.

Think Office at least allows you to bold text but for most of my notes I need something where I can search for a word in all my notes and then have all the notes with that word showing up in the results. With Think Office you can only search within a note.

To be honest I am quite shocked that something as basic as rich text formatting is missing from the Android eco-system.

Chat

Chats are not integrated on android like they are with the N900. To be honest I doubt any device would ever be able to compete with the N900 in chat integration. Ebuddy tries to fix the lack of integration by signing into yahoo, msn, gtalk, facebook chat from one place. However, yahoo signing in seems a bit hit and miss, it does not have skype integration (and even if it did would not have skype video calls) and it does not seem to combine your contacts but rather for each contact treats e.g. their facebook log in as if it is a different person from their msn log in.

No Arrow Keys

The arrow keys on the N900 make it super easy to get the cursor to exactly where you want. Also makes selecting text to copy or cut as easy as ABC. With the absence of arrow keys on the Tab text selection can sometimes be a painful experience. However, what is even more frustrating than this is getting the cursor to where I want. Sometimes the cursor could be just one space away from where I want it but getting it there takes like half a minute or repeated trying and failing. Would be nice if there was a way to switch to arrow keys (e.g. the way you can switch from letters to numbers).

Internal Hard Drive Capacity

Would have absolutely loved a 32gb or 64gb option in the Tab.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Those are my ‘dislikes’ in the Tab. Stay tuned for Part 3 which will cover my likes. Although I have been quite critical of many things on the Tab I actually absolutely love it and you will find out why in Part 3.

A great review! I'm looking forward to hearing more.

A few points:
- USB charging would be slow at best based on the size of the battery.
- The Playbook is indeed thinner, but heavier than the tab (AFAIK) due to a larger battery (that makes up a large portion of the weight).

But I'm right there with you. These issues *would* be extremely annoying and could be avoided with a bit more polish. Thanks for sharing.

I find it odd that the ebook app wouldn't disable the screen lock. As I understand, video playing apps do this to avoid the screen going black in the middle of a video. It seems like an extreme oversight on the part of the ebook developers.

Guys...help.

I tired both ADW / launcher pro and they are both great. But all I want to do is be able to center a widget.

For example: the settings widget.

Is there an app out there that does this?

Thanks a million!






Sent from my SGH-T849 using Tapatalk

I'm assuming you actually meant that you have a Nintendo DSi, since the DS can't use SD cards at all.

All Androids do this. They create a LOST.DIR folder for unlinked file maintenance and some temp directories. No, the SD card isn't expanding upon the built-in memory unless you count the application 'Move to SD Card' option an expansion of memory of some sort--it's just a way to store runable applications on the SD card instead of built-in memory.. but it's not recognized as an expansion and it's handled dynamically and differently. The Tab doesn't do anything to the SD card that should prevent it from also working on the Nintendo DSi, but I'll try doing the same thing, since I own a Galaxy Tab *AND* a Nintendo DSi and a Wii, and see what happens.

It's ironic but the Nintendo DSi and the Nintendo Wii also create their own directories when you pop in an SD card as well. You might not have noticed it, but after you've inserted an SD card into either the Nintendo DSi or the Wii, you'll have a new 'private' directory created automatically for you, and 'DCIM' for photos if you have a DSi. Inside 'private', you'll see a 'ds' or 'wii' directory. If you delve into the either the 'ds' or 'wii' directories, either of them will contain a 'title' and 'app' directory while the 'wii' directory will additionally contain a ''loc.dat' and 'loc.bat'... beyond that, it depends on the apps or channels you've installed.

I'll get back to you all about what I find out.. I have a spare 2GB microSD card with a converter that I can use to try this out.

No really, get rid of that "Sent from..." message. PLEASE.

Anyway, what do you mean by 'centering a widget'? You mean you're trying to place a widget halfway between locking grid location? If so, no--you have to place widgets in a grid placement and it's usually a 4x4 or 4x5 grid on most devices.

HAHA!! If anyone is running Gingerbread (not yet, but I will very, very soon--just waiting for the beta testing to finish on my Droid version)...
THERE'S AN EASTER EGG!!!

Check it! From the Droid Fans facebook group:

I guess I miss the freedom I had on my n900.

I can't center these widgets:

Last.fm
Twitter
Facebook
Slacker
And
Youtube

And what's is wrong with my signature?
Is it offensive?

I have another one:

Is there an app that uninstall every bit of content, file and folders from the tablet when I uninstall an app.

Titanium is not doing the trick.

Hm... still not sure what you meant by 'centering' those widgets. Like I was asking, what do you mean by 'centering'? Are you trying to align them on a non-grid location?

Thanks for removing that 'Sent from...' message. It's not overtly offensive, but it was slightly spammy (adds unnecessary spacing and repeated the same text over and over) and, more importantly, it made responding to your messages a chore because everyone has to either go back to edit it manually to leave it in and increase the spam it produces. Again, though, I genuinely appreciate that you removed it.

You need to be rooted to take advantage of Titanium Backup. It will completely uninstall any app and its configuration. If you're talking about files and folders on the SD card, those were never installed to begin with and are a matter of filesystem management for which you need to be responsible for. This is true of pretty much any operating system. Apps are apps, config files (on most OS's) should (and are, in Android) managed by the operating system, but files you've created with those apps are your responsibility to manage. Uninstalling ringdroid, for instance, shouldn't inherently mean I want all the ringtones it made for me to disappear too.