First impressions using Samsung Galaxy Tab 7″

My tablet is operated on Android system and it’s Samsung 7″.

Since I’ve always used those electricity things with my study all throught out my life ever since I graduated from primary school , I’ve been looking forward to this project very much. All these new technologies do brought a lot of convenience to my study, and what I’m looking for is something that can integrate all my needs, which gives me a great reason to give the tablet a try.
First of all, I have to say the tablet do seems very helpful for gathering information.  Reading e-books is much more convenient and affordable in modern time besides from the damage to our sight. Ever since I was 12 I’ve been used to read books on screen mainly because that it’s  much more affordable compared to real books. If I feel like reading some novels or textbooks, I don’t have to carry all those books in my bag from Grayson Heights to the university. It’s a long journey and I seriously hate that weight.  Also, it’s very useful when some information is needed emergently, we can directly log into the Internet and check about the information. For example, when I have got some doubts about my time table I can directly go to my tablet and check it in my classroom during the break instead of going to the computer cluster.

But there are  also some pitfalls about the tablet during the process of gathering information. First of all, as i’ve mentioned before, it will do serious damage to our sight if we try to read all the materials from it, personally my family  really has a crush on the newly developed screen used in the kindle series which claims themselves as much more eye-protecting than those colored screens. I don’t know wheather it can be adapted to tablet some day.  Secondly, I don’t know if that’s my problem but it seems that it’s not very convenient to download the files and open it directly when I was browsign the internet, sometimes the information is simply packed in some pdf or ppt files which needs to be downloaded and open, however my tablet never successfully downloaded it nor opened it.

However, what I really counted on the tablets is making notes. I’ve been used to making notes with PC for a long time, last year I’ve made piles of notes from the Economics course with my PC, it does have a lot of advantages over paper notes like computer files are more easy to be managed and corrected. Futhermore, When they are printed out ,the outline will be more clear for reviewing, not to mention about the environment friendly and time-saving part. However, when I really started to try making notes with the tablet, I find it really disappointing to put  in this way. First of all, for making notes, I have to pay my attention to those books I’m currently reading or  what our teachers are lecturing, however, without attention on the tablet keyboard, it’s impossible to type correctly.  It’s really annoying for me when I have to pay attention to my tablet when I try to copy down some words from those books that I’m currently reading. Also, the speed of typing can never compare to that when I was using real keyboards, I doubt wheather it can be quicker than writing actually!!

That’s all my first impression, it seems a bit over too long on the first week and I’m really sorry for those grammar mistakes.  Hope this will helps a lot in our projects.

First impressions on the Galaxy Tab by Dave V

Dave here with a few thoughts….

From the start of this project I have come from the bias of being an iPhone user. Seeing as I have progressed through the iPhone 3g and 4, I have become used to IOS. Due to this, I believe that if left to my own progression, I would have bought an iPad in time. This project shall be interesting to me, to see if I can become converted to Android.

The tablet (Samsung tab 10′) has proven easy enough to use so far. On the whole, the operating system seems more similar to windows than apple. I found it very annoying that you have to use a Gmail account to use android store as I have no desire for a new email address. Registering for the store proved easy enough once this was done. The use of the store is much the same as the iTunes app store.

I have found the use of features such as the key code lock, changing your settings and importing the university time table to the tablet time table, to consistently require more effort than the IOS equivalent.

Upon receiving the tablet I decided to do a feature by feature analysis of this tablet vs the iPad 2. Though this tablet proves better on the majority of features, it proves less smooth to handle and completes like for like tasks slower, for example logging in to the Leeds portal, or searching and downloading an app.

Though I have found several negative features, I have still enjoyed the use of the tablet.

I have perhaps found myself using the tablet as more of a laptop substitute than an independent product in its own right. An example of this was when a friend commented – why are you turning off your tablet? I thought that I had completed the tasks I wished to use it for and had turned it off like you would a laptop. Their point was that you can let your tablet accompany you though your day, use the calendar more vigorously and incorporate it more in to your life like a smart phone. I suppose I have used it less often in this capacity due to owning an iPhone for so long and having gotten in to habits. The lack of 3G on the tablet leaves the phone superior in a large proportion of situations throughout my day, so I don’t think a direct substitute has been found just yet.

Any way I think I shall sign off for now…

Android Galaxy Tab

Hi, Duncan here.

I’ve bought the previous Samsung Galaxy Tab 7” model from 2011 and am using it with an OS X platform.

I’ve so far had it 1 day.

My initial impression on Samsung,

I’m very pleased with the responsivess of the touch screen, the resolution and technicical capabilites however concerning the software;

I updated my Android Tablet to Gingerbread 2.3 through the official update that samsung supplied but however I found afterwards that the Samsung Kies software suit did not recognize my Tablet anymore!  This meant that I cannot use any of the Samsung pre-installed apps as they all require to sync media (photos/music) through the Samsung Kies suite. I think this is really bad on samungs part as this tablet is 1.5 years old and already totally not supported anymore!

On another note I found that the pre-installed samsung apps such as Movies usually just take me to a website and that was it.  The pre-installed samsung ebook app was an exact copy of iBook, not necessarily bad but again very limited.

Another annoyance on Samsung’s part was the fact you can’t remove any of these pre-installed apps, unless you “Root” your Android device.  But having worked with Samsung laptops before, that’s exactly what I expected. Shortcoming preinstalled software.

Luckily the community site of Android compensates for Samsung’s shortcoming

Apps I can recommend:

Defintely install the Dolphin browser (for Android & iOS)

It’s a tabbed browser such as Google Chrome, really userfriendly and also offers the option to sync it with Google Account (bookmarks) http://www.dolphin-browser.com/

For Android tablet users, defintely install Swiftkey Tablet X , it’s an optimized keyboard for Tablet users, it’s makes typing fast so much easier https://market.android.com/details?id=com.touchtype.swiftkey.tablet.full&hl=en

For news, I found Pulse extremely pleasant, I usually don’t like RSS readers but this newsfeed gave a “magazine” touch,N You can input different news sources and it displays it very pleasantly. https://market.android.com/details?id=com.alphonso.pulse&hl=en

Despite the initial hick-up on Samsungs part I am thoroughly enjoying the massive android community concerning the tablet

I have not installed a productivity office suite yet but will do it this weekend and test it next week in class, I’m also planning to test several movie/ebook/music apps.

Duncan.