Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 - PC Magazine

By Eugene Kim Samsung's Galaxy Tab line has been relegated to second fiddle, with top end features and specs now going to devices bearing the Note moniker. Like last year's Tab 2, the Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 ($399.99 list) is simply an incremental upgrade to a tried-and-true formula. The one feature of note (no, not that Note) is an Intel Atom processor in lieu of your typical ARM design. What does that amount to? Not much, as performance can best be described as pedestrian. Everything, in fact, can be described as pedestrian here, from the uninspiring design to the average display to the bloated Android skin that lacks most of the compelling features that make TouchWiz tolerable on other Galaxy devices. The Tab 3 isn't a bad tablet, but unless you're completely tied to the Samsung ecosystem of devices and services, I'd take that $400 and put it towards a tablet that isn't so utterly milquetoast.    Compare Similar Products Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1     Asus Transformer Pad TF300     Design and Features Not much has changed in the Galaxy Tab world. The Tab 3 10.1, like its 8-inch sibling, looks a lot like a Galaxy S4, only stretched out to comical proportions. There are a few minor physical changes from last year. Physical and capacitive Android navigation buttons now sit below the display, while the speakers are now situated along the tablet's edge, facing out instead of towards you. Thankfully, Samsung ditched the proprietary faux-30-pin connector in favor of micro USB. At 9.57 by 6.93 by 0.31 inches (HWD) and 1.12 pounds, the Tab 3 is slightly thinner and noticeably lighter than its predecessor. Along the top edge you'll find familiar Power and Volume buttons, as well as a microSD card slot and an IR-emitter for remote control use. As far as I can tell, the display has remained untouched since the very first Galaxy Tab. You get a reasonably bright 1,280-by-800-pixel TFT display with good viewing angles. It doesn't look bad, but the Nexus 10's unbelievably sharp 2,560-by-1,600 display puts it to shame. These two tablets cost the same price, by the way. The Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 is a Wi-Fi-only tablet that connects to 802.11b/g/n networks on both the 2.4 and 5GHz bands, which is an upgrade from last year. Bluetooth has also been bumped up from 3.0 to 4.0 and you still get GPS. The Tab 3 10.1 comes in 16GB or 32GB models, but I could only find the former available for $399.99 at the time of this writing. The Tab 3 10.1 supports microSD cards up to 64GB, but the actual card slot makes it difficult to remove cards, so don't plan on swapping often. Hardware Performance and Android The Tab 3 10.1 is the first Android tablet we've tested that runs on an Intel chip. It's a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2560, to be exact, coupled with a PowerVR SXG544MP2 GPU and 1GB RAM. It's a similar setup to ones you'll find powering low-cost Windows 8 tablets and convertibles, but the performance doesn't really transfer on Android. On our synthetic benchmarks, the Tab 3 10.1 turned in respectable, if somewhat inflated scores. It absolutely crushed our Antutu overall system benchmark, but a closer look reveals some anomalies in the subscores that just don't make much sense. Move on to some of our other benchmarks and the Tab 3 falls back down to earth. On the overall system benchmark Geekbench, the Tab 3 10.1 scored a 1147, which is actually lower than the Tab 3 8.0's 1223 and lags behind older Tegra 3 tablets like the Sony Xperia Tablet S. Gaming results were also average, and the Tab 3 10.1 struggled with stuttering frame rates, slow load times, and force closes on graphically intensives game like N.O.V.A. 3. Real world performance was a mixed bag overall, in fact. Samsung released a software update midway through our review, which tightened things up a bit, but I still ran up against a few issues. When switching screen orientation or launching various apps, the Tab 3 10.1 exhibited some minor and seemingly random lag. That's not the biggest issue I had, however. The Tab 3 seems to be employing some aggressive memory management, as switching between multiple running apps causes apps to re-load. For example, I would open up a tab in Chrome, switch to the Gmail app to copy a link, then return to the home screen and open the Play store, and then when I opened Chrome again from the recent apps list, the page had to re-load. This didn't happen every time, but it was frequent enough to be an annoyance. In our battery test, which loops a video with screen brightness set to maximum and Wi-Fi switched on, the Tab 3 10.1 lasted 4 hours, 45 minutes. That's pretty bad, as it's even worse than the Nexus 10's 5 hours, 9 minutes, and that tablet has a power-hungry high resolution display. On top of that, despite disabling all power saver features, the Tab 3 10.1 curiously turned the brightness down to unusable levels when the battery reached 5 percent. The Asus Transformer Pad TF300, which has the same screen resolution, turned in 7 hours, 53 minutes on the same test.  There's a 3.2-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera. They're there if you need them, but they produce pretty awful pictures. Colors are washed out and photos lack crispness, even in the most ideal lighting situations. Video, likewise, is a mess and tops out at 720p with inconsistent frame rates indoors, but 30 frames per second in well-lit environments. I'd recommend using the front-facing camera for Skype or Google Hangouts and just forgetting the rear-facing camera is even there. The Tab 3 10.1 is running Android 4.2.2 with Samsung's TouchWiz skin. I've been starting to come around to TouchWiz, as on newer devices it doesn't seem as bloated and slow. But there are also some genuinely useful features I've come to appreciate in TouchWiz. Unfortunately, most of them are missing on the Tab 3 10.1, leaving little more than the cartoonish icons and theme that I've never been a fan of. For example: You get Smart Stay, which uses the front facing camera to keep the screen on when it detects someone looking at it. You get the quick settings from the notification shade. Multi Window, which lets you run two apps side by side, is available on the smaller 8-inch model, but is inexplicably missing on the 10-inch model where it would arguably be even more useful. What gives? Multimedia and Conclusions Like most of its Galaxy stablemates, the Tab 3 10.1 features robust multimedia support and a built-in IR-emitter for controlling an array of home entertainment devices. For video, you get MP4, H.264, DivX, Xvid, and WMV files at up to 1080p resolution. For audio you get MP3, AAC, FLAC, OGG, WAV, and WMA support. The IR emitter works with both the Samsung WatchON app and the Peel Smart Remote app, letting you browse local listings, but falling short of scheduling recordings on DVR boxes. Still, it's a useful feature that makes the tablet a solid living room companion. Samsung has left the Galaxy Tab line languishing, as it focuses its efforts on its superior Note devices. The Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 isn't much of an improvement over the Tab 2, which itself was only a modest update to the original Tab. This isn't a three-year-old tablet, but it feels dated right out of the box, thanks to its low-res display and middling real-world performance. That might be acceptable if this tablet was priced at $300, but at $400 it's tough to recommend the Tab 3 over the multitude of more capable competitors. The Nexus 10 is markedly better in nearly every way, and even the year-old Asus Transformer Pad TF300 offers a more compelling experience. And if you've got your heart set on a Galaxy Tab, the Tab 3 8.0 is the better choice. via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNE8ULuvGaUX3HRDo9JyLAG4yuZreQ&url=http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2422712,00.asp

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