The Galaxy Tab 7.7 "Real-user" Review: Part 1 - Unboxing, Initial impressions, Design/build quality, Screen and Benchmarks

So, I've had the Galaxy Tab 7.7 for a few weeks. I'm tired of people asking me about when my review will start going up, so I decided now is good (seriously, in a microcosmical way I start to understand how the Cyanogenmod guys must feel sometimes). Make the jump past the break to see how the Tab 7.7 stands up to our usual intense scrutiny!


If you read my Note review then in parts a lot of this is going to sound familiar. I make no apologies for that, there are various preambles that I think are worth laying out again for new readers, or that help qualify or contextualise comments on this device whether you've read them before or not. Furthermore, the Tab 7.7 and the Note share almost all the same internals, so it seems like wasted effort to paraphrase what I've already said on things that are essentially identical.

Despite those similarities and being able to legitimately cut a few corners here in there in this review, I have to say that this review is proving a difficult one on several levels. The first is trying to really work out the use-case scenarios that dictate the smaller form factor over the larger screen size on other tablets, or "how does this tab fit into my life" as it were. The second is trying to review this in a fair context, but also one that reflects the reality of the current tablet market (and that important market just over the horizon). On the one hand it's not really fair to judge this against the ASUS Transformer Prime, being that this is clearly last-gen hardware in comparison, while on the other it's impossible to ignore the presence of a tablet with much better hardware credentials existing at the same time, and the looming possibility of a number of others soon to arrive. I hope you'll bear with me as I muddle through this though, as I can already say that devoting a bit of reading time to the Tab 7.7 is well worth your while.


Initial impressions 

The brushed metal is gorgeous - make no mistake - this is one seriously
good looking tablet.

There isn't a whole to say here really, the first impressions are simply impeccable. From the first moment you lay eyes on it, to the first time you lift it from it's box, to the first time you behold it's screen everything simple reeks quality. In fact, it's so good that may actually leave a bad taste in your mouth if you've owned any of Samsung's finest during the last couple of years - you'll simply wonder why Samsung can't bring this much game in the design and materials to all of their offerings. Who knows, perhaps this marks a new beginning for Samsung in the design stakes? I certainly hope so.

Naturally I grabbed some footage whilst unboxing the Tab, so if you want some completely off the cuff first impressions take a look here:

Design  

Build quality and ergonomics

I want to start out here by drawing a distinction between build materials and build quality. The two terms tend to be thrown about like synonyms, but they're not. It's possible to have one without the other.

The Galaxy S II and HTC Sensation are two examples that spring to mind to make the point. The Galaxy S II build materials are disappointing plastics, but they're durable. There are no moving parts or creaks, and as you can see on YouTube, it holds up to drops and knocks better than an iPhone 4S which is made from much nicer materials. In other words its build quality is good. Contrast this with the HTC Sensation, which is made from great materials with metal and high quality soft-touch plastics, but has a more suspect build quality with the 'sleeve' design causing creaks, dust accumulation under the screen, and volume rockers that break (of course not every Sensation is afflicted by these, but it's sporadic failure rate is higher than I've observed from other high-end handsets). Now obviously I want a handset with both, but if it's a matter of choosing I'll take build quality, thank you very much.

The bottom edge has the (stupid) proprietary port for charging/HDMI out
/USB adapters/USB computer connections, two speakers, and a small hole
- a microphone! You know, for all those times when you make calls on your tablet

OK, with that out of the way let's get into it. In terms of both these elements let's just say that my early impressions have endured. The materials are utterly superb. The metal backing has a really nice brushed finish which resists fingerprints exceptionally well, and the presumably reception-sparing plastic elements at either end are nicely matched to it so as not to detract from the overall effect. The build quality is excellent also. I guess when you're talking about a slab without moving parts or a removal battery you kinda expect that, but there's still plenty that can go wrong in the fine details. Screens can be inlaid so they're not quite flush with the casing, connectivity ports can be poorly inset, there can be creaks or loose elements and so on. Here, at least on the unit I have, everything is just done right.

In ergonomic terms the Tab 7.7 excels. You could say that it has to really. If you're going to give away the usefulness of a larger screen you'd better be getting repaid commensurately in some other important area, right? Naturally the trade off here is for gains in the portability stakes. It's excellent slimness of 7.9mm, in concert with nicely rounded edges, and it's 'feather' weight of a mere 340g make for great comfort in the hand. Better yet, this comfort holds even after much more extended sessions than you can manage on a 'normal' sized tablet. The reduced width and length also make this considerably more comfortable to type on than any other tablet I've used, whether it's held in portrait or landscape orientations. I don't know whether it's barn door obvious or not, so for the sake of clarity I'm going to come out and say it: the ease and comfort of typing on the Tab 7.7 adds a very great deal to how enjoyable it is in regular use.

I guess Samsung understood that this tablet lives and dies on it's design matching the niche it fills. To understand that you need to understand what a 7.7 inch tablet is actually good for, and I'm going to speak to that point a bit later. For now suffice to say that Samsung have absolutely nailed the design.

The right hand lengthwise edge of the screen (when held in portrait), home to only
the power button and the volume rocker, nice travel and tactile feedback on these

The Screen

The vital statistics: 7.7 inches, 1280x800 resolution, a pixel density (or PPI) of around 196. To put that into perspective: that's a third more pixels than the iPad 2's 1024x768 resolution screen, and a considerable increase in pixel density over the iPad 2's PPI of only around 132.

The good news doesn't end there though, since this screen happens to be the first of the Super AMOLED HD+ variety. Let's briefly cover what that means. Super AMOLED displays are characterised by the following characteristics - infinite blacks, amazing contrast ratio, near perfect viewing angles, and super saturated colours (which may or may not not be a plus, depending on your point of view, fortunately like Samsung's other recent offerings there are options in Settings --> Screen --> Mode to alter the colour temperature a bit). The "+" bit here designates that this one has what's known as a true stripe matrix, which relates to how the subpixels are laid out. In contrast, SAMOLED screens without the "+" instead utilise a pentile subpixel matrix, which causes a variety of issues. There's truckloads one could right about these differences on the technical level, but I'm not going to labour that here. If you want that kind of detail my recommended reading would be found at Anandtech and GSMarena, who have each written several pieces about screen technologies and what they mean. What you need to know is that amongst it's tablet brethren this screen is untouchable right now.

Rounding out the still image hardware tour we have the
bottom of the Tab's left edge (in portrait), adorned with
the micro SD card slot. As expected my 64GB micro SDXC
card works perfectly, despite what Samsung's own spec
sheet would have you believe.

That's not of course to say it's perfect by any means. If you really want to look for faults, and I mean really want to look for faults (for example zooming in on extremely close-focus macro shots of the screen), you'll find them. Android developer guru Supercurio has detailed many problems, from red subpixels being too bright, to oversharpening of images, to lord knows what else. I just can't bring myself to care I'm afraid. I look at the screen and I just think "wow". Looking at what other users have had to say about the screens of the Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note it has become apparent to me however that my eyes/expectations are less demanding than lots of other peoples in this area. That being the case I have to be honest and say it's not really possible for me to advise that hardcore 'displayophile' minority on the Tab's screen. If you count yourself in that group then ask Supercurio for his feedback, or better yet get some eyes-on time with the Tab.

You can see that the Prime's screen looks a little washed out in comparison to the 7.7's with both on
maximum brightness, but the picture doesn't really come close to illustrating how big the
difference really is side-by-side

Speed and synthetic benchmarks

Hopefully everyone reading this is up to speed on benchmarks; they are less important than how the phone performs in actual use, and additionally some of them actually aren't even particularly good (Quadrant, I'm looking at you). Despite their relative lack of real-world usefulness you all love them anyways, and so help us, so do we.

What I'm going to do here is run the Tab 7.7 through a number of benchmarks, and then give my early impressions for how the device is in terms of responsiveness; the benchmarks in context as it were.

So, here are the benchmarks, and a few words on how we rate their usefulness:

Quadrant

I mentioned in my Note review that we won't be reporting quadrant scores in our reviews past that point, and that applies here. Move swiftly along and read about some benchmarks that actually matter.

CF-Bench

Here is the first of the benchmarks we have some regard for here at AndroidNZ - Chainfire bench. CF-Bench for me probably has the biggest bearing on actual use, and for that reason alone stands above most others. The Tab 7.7 scored admirably here, as you might expect. I've included the Note's CFBench score screenshot beneath this one, since the comparison is interesting given the similarity of the internals in these two devices. My guess is that Honeycomb largely accounts for the Tab's winning margin here.

Antutu Benchmark


Antutu is another benchmark that tries to evaluate the device's performance overall, taking into account how quickly it processes a number of tasks, as well as integrating graphics performance and read/write tasks to the internal storage space. The Tab scores well here in comparison to most Android devices, weighing in with 6741 points, although if you look at the Prime you'll see it manage almost twice as many points in this benchmark.

Smartbench 2011

Smartbench is one of the better general benchmarks out there in terms of it's results having some relationship to the reality of using your device.

Vellamo

Vellamo is a browser benchmark software made by Qualcomm. The Tab's score here is a resounding success, as you can plainly see. If you factor in the fact that it's rendering almost three times as many pixels as most of the others in the list, I think the result is truly excellent. Here the Note really does fall well short, and I guess that's a testimony to Honeycomb's browser.

[Note 1: on more recent firmwares the Note scores much more respectably in the low 900's, but it's still well adrift of the Tab's 1200+ scores]

[Note 2: Previously we've also reported the Sunspider score as an browser benchmark, I'm not doing that here since Sunspider is one of the elements that comprises a part of the Vellamo score]

Browsermark


Another widely reported browser benchmark here, and another great result for the Tab. In fact, this result is actually better than the Transformer Prime manages on Ice Cream Sandwich, which is particularly impressive. That said, if you ask me which iteration of the Android browser I'd rather browse on I'm going to say the ICS version every time. It's features just totally outdo the Honeycomb version, so again don't get too carried away with raw benchmark scores.

Nenamark 2

A graphics benchmark. Bearing in mind the fact that the Tab is driving more pixels than lots of other devices, it scores a very respectable 38.4fps (not very far adrift of the Transformer Prime's scores of around 45fps, and a nice wee nudge up from the Note's 32.3fps). It's more than enough to power the current high-end crop of Android games, so likely to be perfectly sufficient for the needs of almost anyone for some time yet.

Actual use


Before I get into this segment proper I need to preface what's here a little. As I started typing this segment some thoughts that have been percolating for a while kind of bubbled to the surface, and I got a bit carried away elaborating on them. I realised as I did so that I was truncating the entirety of the thought in order to try and fit it into the review format, and that's when it dawned on me that these thoughts are really the basis for a standalone editorial piece. That piece is coming, and it'll be written collaboratively between myself and Editor Nik, who it turns out seems to have been having a very parallel stream of consciousness in his own musings on the topic. In the meantime I decided to leave what I had written intact here, but don't be too hasty to judge it, it's very much the incomplete expression of an idea.

So.

If you paid attention to the benchmark preamble above then you'll know this is where it's really at. When it really comes down to it, how many peta-flops my device can do is just so much academic mumbo-jumbo. If it lags when you're doing everyday things on it then your bragging rights are going to feel pretty empty, pretty quickly.

I didn't have the highest expectations, in all honesty.

I'd already owned and used a few prominent Honeycomb tablets extensively, and none of them performed to a level where you could be totally immersed whilst using them. Too often tiny micro-lags and micro-hitches crossed the line, becoming frank lag and delays. I can actually forgive the former, but the latter just jerks you out of the immersion and makes you aware that the tablet isn't keeping up. Instead of unalloyed immersion, where everything just seems to happen organically, there is a continual nagging awareness in the back of your head that you're operating a machine (and worse, one whose performance falls just short of doing what you need it to).

What I'm describing is a sense of duality when using a device - there is me, and there is this thing that I'm trying to do stuff with. It is of course inevitable at least some of the time we use any device, but what's important is the degree to which that sense is prevalent. That might not sound like much, but I think the thought I'm trying to express here, far less eloquently than I'd like, is pretty important.

I think it gets to the heart of why so many people have picked up an iPad2 and been wowed, where Android Honeycomb tablets only left them cold. I think there's been a tendency for Android fans, myself included at times, to simply attribute this to uncharitable explanations like "Oh that's just because Apple fans are sheep", "they're hopeless with tech" and "the iPad2 is so limited in comparison that of course it's harder to get to grips with the extra features in Android devices". That kind of thinking is seductive for a number of reasons, chief amongst them being the fact that it denigrates Apple users while simultaneously elevating ourselves as Android users. It sets us apart as intelligent and tech-savvy, while designating them less intelligent, and their opinions less valid. Like all the best lies we tell ourselves there is this tiny little kernel of a truth reflected in it though, just enough so that our conscious brain never has to actually hold that belief up to scrutiny.

(and before you go accusing me of being partisan for Apple users here let me be clear; they tell lots of lies to themselves also, just different ones mostly)

You know what I'm actually coming around to thinking now? The same thing iPad users have told us all along. Android Honeycomb tablets simply aren't good enough. If they were good enough, if the user experience was fluid enough, if there wasn't that ever-present jarring sense of duality, you know what users would do when faced with not knowing how to do something? They'd find out. The experience would be welcoming and organic enough that they'd want to. It hasn't been. It's got nothing to do with them not being up to working it out, it's just that the experience doesn't make them want to. Before you go making arguments against that, let me say this: I know this isn't universally true, some people really are just that stupid, and some people really are sheep etc etc, but it's true in much larger part than we've ever wanted to acknowledge as Android fans. Try and see the forest and not just the trees that you want to see for a moment here, OK? In some respects I think you could make a case that being more able than their competitors to strip away that sense of duality is Apple's singular success.

Er, anyways, if we move away from my slightly esoteric aside there, and get back to the review proper, the question becomes: is the Galaxy Tab 7.7 the Honeycomb tablet that changes the game? Is the performance really, finally, there, or are it's failings a continual drag on the user experience?

Big question. My answer is that the performance is there, just, even if the Tab 7.7 has come along to the party far too late to be considered a game changer. I largely put that down to finally having a decent SoC running the show - Samsung's Exynos SoC - rather than the flawed Tegra 2 that dominated the Android tablet landscape till now. Some wee hitches and lags are still there, and so are some slightly bigger ones too, don't get me wrong. This isn't some utopian vision of future-computing here. It's just that the prevalence of these is beneath some crucial threshold where they become too bothersome, at least for me at any rate. I guess that threshold is a pretty subjective thing, so your mileage may vary, but I think many who couldn't get on with Honeycomb tablets before will find the Tab 7.7 refreshing.



Summary 

• The Galaxy Tab 7.7 is beautiful. The build quality, materials, looks and ergonomics are simply top notch. People who find themselves frequently disheartened at Samsung's choice of materials, and the accompanying 'plasticky' look and feel will find this a breath of fresh air. Right now, at least in the humble opinion of this reviewer, the only other tablet that reaches the same giddy aesthetic heights is the ASUS Transformer Prime.
• The screen is nuts. Sure if you really, really, really dig down into it you'll discover it's not perfect, but I think you'd be overly picky if you did't conclude that this screen sets a new high bar for tablet displays. I said the same thing about the Transformer Prime a only little over a month ago too, but that's how quickly your device can be dethroned in the display stakes these days - if you see these side by side the Tab 7.7 makes ASUS looks average. 
• Performance in actual use is good, there are tiny little micro-hitches here and there, but I've not used a smoother Honeycomb tablet. In terms of performance one thing that I really like is that this is the only Honeycomb tablet I've used where text entry in the browser doesn't drive you nuts with lag, but we'll come to that in more depth in the next part of the review.

So, part one down. Next up we'll cover entertainment and media - encompassing music and video playback, gaming and the browsing. That part should be along pretty quickly, since broad swathes of it will be taken virtually directly from my Galaxy Note review (as alluded to earlier, they do after all run all these things off essentially the same hardware).

Naturally your commentary is welcome, and if there are particular questions you just have to know the answer to it's not too late to get them in.