Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Review
by Volker Weber
There are reviews that appeal mostly to people who have no intention to ever buy the product. Like John Gruber of Daring Fireball who was quick to link to this relatively weak opinion piece:
I'm sad to report that Samsung failed at execution on all fronts. Samsung has been pushing the skinning envelope further and further, and, with this revision of TouchWiz, they've slammed into a brick wall. Couple this failure with astonishingly bad hardware and a $500 price tag, and you've got yourself a real disappointment. Samsung promised us the moon, and then cut corners everywhere possible, and it's hard to walk away not feeling a little insulted.
It's a very negative review of the new Samsung tablet. But it suffers from the reviewer knowing only iPad and Android. Let me give you some examples:
I really love the speakers. Loud, stereo, front-facing speakers. It's such a common sense thing, I really don't understand what's taken so long. Tablets are supposed to be media consumption devices, which means, after the screen, the speakers are the most important component. This is the first tablet I've played with where headphones or "cupping" wasn't mandatory.Speakers that face your ears need to be a standard feature on all phone and tablets. I feel stupid typing that, yet this is the first device I've seen with them.
This person has obviously never seen, let alone used a BlackBerry PlayBook.
The Note 10.1 is wrapped in the trashiest, most awful, cheapest-feeling plastic I've ever experienced. Sure, the finish is Samsung's usual glossy-plastic junk, but this plastic isn't even rigid. It's squishy.
That would be a HP TouchPad case.
The reason this is so slow is because the two apps aren't actually running in the foreground together. Samsung doesn't have the technical ability to actually make this work, so they used a bunch of tricks to make it seem like two apps are running at once, when really one app is "on" at any given moment.
Surprise, surprise. Android doesn't multitask apps. If you want that, you need a BlackBerry PlayBook. Which can do stupid things like play two videos side by side.
Comments
My S3 can play two videos at the same time...
Even when this is a feature I rarely use. But watching a video and do something else like chatting at the same time is also no problem
