This is awesome! Thanks Bergie!

Too bad it doesn't have phone function on US version...sucks!

He raises some interesting points. To sum up:
1) Phones still have a very useful feature of being small and usage in a pinch
2) 3.5" is too small, though 4" and greater is acceptable
3) The iPad size is superior for sharing between people
4) The Tab size is superior for sustained usage
5) The iPad is at about the maximum size a Tablet should be
6) The Tab has excellent battery life (full day of heavy usage)
7) Tablets suck as cameras because they make you look like an idiot (too large)
8) New programs are coming around for content-creation for tablets.
9) The Tab's aspect ratio works really well for movies
10) The Tab's size works really well for games

Point 1 is very interesting -- phone's are not going away -- and worth consideration for individuals that use their phones frequently one-handed, or quickly to take a call. While a BT headset, or the BT stylus-handset would work, a small handset is almost certainly more convenient than using a Tab as a phone. As it turns out, I use phones infrequently and my N810 has worked as a phone with a wired headset, so this is a less of an issue for me, but it should be noted for individuals seeking to replace their handsets with the Tab.

Point 3 is interesting as well: larger screen is better for sharing. One of my intended uses is 'sharing' the Tab with other viewers. This will generally be for meetings and the like. However, the speculated frequency of this situation is rare enough for me to overlook this problem. The article states that the Tab is still fine for sharing, but size matters in this use-case, and 'bigger is better'.

Point 7: Tablets suck as cameras, seems to be an idea predicated on how dumb they make you look. This is not a concern for me at all, as a) I wouldn't really care, and b) I rarely take pictures in social settings anyway. However, like the author, I'm glad for inclusion of the camera on the Tab. It opens up the door for augmented reality, bar-code scanning, documentation, and personal photos (eg. scenery/family). But size matters in this department as well, so for someone looking to replace their handset camera with the Tab's may be disappointed.

All in all, I'm pleased with this. If after a month of serious usage, these nitpicks are the largest problem that he could find with using the Tab as a primary device.

Great first impressions!

After a week I am starting to get it, and I must admit I am liking the Tab more and more.

Would I quit Maemo and go Droid? Not now but let's see how things go with Meego vs Gingerbread, whether it's possible to get some debian goodness on the Tab, and whether Nokia or somebody will make a 7" Meego tablet with good hw and battery life.

Now my impressions. The first important factor is that I am getting presbyopic (other than seriously myopic ) and my N900 gets a good strain at my eyes, while the Tab is way much more relaxing to use.
I have also discovered that the onscreen kbd is not worse to use than the hw kbd of my N900, at least when doing normal tasks (not coding). Swipe is definitely a no-go in Italian.

The capacitative screen is less sensitive than my N900 resistive one, believe it or not. Sometimes you need to press an icon two or three times before it gets recognized; maybe my fingertips are not conductive enough... and my wife's ones are worse - but it's not a great nuisance, you get accustomed quickly. I think that when wifey comes back home I'll make some experiments with gloves on to see if the Tab is sensitive enough to get it.

The form factor, that's so nice when actively using it, becomes unpractical if you plan to carry the Tab in your trousers pocket - you need to use the internal pocket of your jacket or a murse - or your bag if you're a woman We are going to get a Noreve leather case - see http://www.noreve.com/brand/Samsung/...Tradition.html
- in the meantime the Tab rests in a slightly oversized neoprene pouch.

Apps are plenty and one life isn't enough to test them all : I am scared though of spyware, malware and trojans and am reluctant to test many of them when I read that they have full control of telephony, internet and personal data. Guess I'll have to live with it.

The stock google browser refuses to change its user agent - the about:debug trick doesn't work for user agent - and I had to install the Skyfire browser to get a decent user agent, to avoid to get only mobile version of web pages, and paid-for versions of online newspapers.

And, I have been struggling for a week to make a video call between the Tab and the N900 but no joy yet: both sipdroid and imsdroid get to connect audio but not video, and interestingly when I try to originate a videocall from my N900, sipdroid complains of incompatible codecs. More indepth info are lacking, though.

All in all, though, we are happy of the purchase, and I have a feeling that it will get better in the next months.
Now, I'd like to have a community to interact with concerning the Tab, and I don't know of any community better than this one ... why not having a section of TMO (maybe reverting to ITT after Nokia drops Maemo) dedicated to android/nitdroid devices?

Two years ago I argued that a device needs a proper hardware keyboard to be more than just a consumer device. There was also recently an interesting article by a Finnish UX designer about how touch screen interfaces ought to be more about making choices and narrowing down than actually writing text. But maybe the text entry tools are getting better with things like Swype, time will tell.

Obviously for other kinds of creativity, like drawing, photo editing and music tablets may be already better than desktop computers.

@debernardis,

Simply fantastic! These are great impressions of the tablet, and I thank you very much for sharing your experience. I was hanging off of your every word.

It's nice to see that your impressions are generally improving as time progresses the Tab. But I can appreciate the annoyances that a new platform brings (ie. the user agent/video calls), but all things in time.

Are there any things that you really dislike about the Tab; more than just annoyance?

Oh, and I fully support the idea of going back to ITT (Internet Tablet Talk) rather than TMO (talk.maemo.org), to provide a rich community for many tablet devices! Enough with the infighting! We can all coexist peacefully!

It is indeed interesting. I think that on-screen keyboards have their advantages:

1) casual text input of known words. Swype capitalizes on this, but would be just a regular OSK for non-standard text input; ie. command line, or programming. Also technologies like blindtype almost imply that OSK can be faster than physical keys for casual text input.

2) Non standard keyboards. Because the keyboard is on the screen, you can lay it out any way that you choose. One of the more creative uses that I've seen, have replaced the OSK with a URL so that text could be input from other devices. I could also see a gamepad OSK and others still.

3) Fewer moving parts, often none at all. Devices with OSKs tend to be much smaller and lighter.

In the end, I think it really depends on what you're inputting. I've read impressions of getting the Epic 4G (a Galaxy S handset with a physical keyboard) in which the user rarely uses the keypad an instead mainly uses the swype OSK. Similarily, I barely EVER use my N810 keypad. I typically use it when on the command line, but I tend to go to my workstation for serious CLI anyway. And this is despite the N810 having an arguably simple featured OSK.

I cannot see using the Tab for 'serious' work, but rather for casual usage, and so, I think the OSK will suffice. Then again, I wouldn't use a 7" screen or 1GHz A8 for serious work either -- the size, resolution, and performance are all too little. However many of my computing tasks are not serious work. Much of my time is spent reading, surfing, watching, listening, playing, etc, all of which Tab like devices excel at for its convenient size/form/battery.

Also, I own a Wacom active-digitizer for pen-like input. In this regard, the PC has something that modern tablets do not. AFAICT, there's no equivalent for modern tablets (no, I'm not talking about stylus input -- there's a huge distinction). I wish there was, because pen-like input is EXTREMELY useful for more than just drawing. It can be used for note taking, quick annotation, document signing, and white-boarding. I was hoping that the Samsung stylus could do the same, and maybe it can with the correct software, but I'm not holding my breath.

I think tablet OSK input is more than sufficient for the tasks that one would use a tablet for. For those looking for a more serious work station, it's probably best to use an external keyboard (or official dock) and more importantly, wait until both the software (in the case of Android) and hardware performance improves. Thankfully, at the rate of progress, this shouldn't be far off, and promising (productivity) OSs like MeeGo are right around the corner!

Wow. Sounds like he hasn't had too many problems with the form factor. Making me want one even more!

Yep. Websites that don't provide proper HTML5 form elements (different input types for email addresses, URLs, numbers, etc) already annoy me quite a bit as I mostly browse with the iPad at home and the keyboard on that changes based on what you're entering.

Similarly morphing to language-based layouts would be great. Want to write Korean? Georgian? With Scandinavian characters?

Depends on the definition of serious work. I used a 10" netbook as my primary (well, only) work computer for a year and it worked fine. I also like the distraction-free all apps run fullscreen environment.

For my work availability of development tools for also hacking when offline are important. I've already done a bit of Python app development on my N900, and having Git on the device has helped with that.

Typing something like PHP or Perl on the keyboard wouldn't be fun. On mobile/tablet devices you really want a simple programming language like Python or Genie.

Maybe a morphing on-screen keyboard could help with that, too?

The Tableteer name that Nokia used with the older ITs was also quite cool.

Who knew that the gadgets and concepts we were playing with years ago would become the hottest area of computing