- Samsung galaxy tab a 10.1 review update#
- Samsung galaxy tab a 10.1 review upgrade#
- Samsung galaxy tab a 10.1 review android#
They're there if you need them, but they produce pretty awful pictures. There's a 3.2-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera.
The Asus Transformer Pad TF300, which has the same screen resolution, turned in 7 hours and 53 minutes on the same test. 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 per cent.
That's pretty bad, and even worse than the Nexus 10’s 5 hours and 9 minutes – and Google’s tablet has a power-hungry high resolution display. 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 and 45 minutes. This didn't happen every time, but it was frequent enough to be an annoyance. 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 reload. The Tab 3 seems to be employing some aggressive memory management, as switching between multiple running apps causes apps to re-load. That's not the biggest issue I had, however. When switching screen orientation or launching various apps, the Tab 3 10.1 exhibited some minor and seemingly random lag.
Samsung galaxy tab a 10.1 review update#
Samsung released a software update midway through our review, which tightened things up a bit, but I still ran up against a few issues. Real world performance was a mixed bag overall, in fact. Gaming results were also average, and the Tab 3 10.1 struggled with stuttering frame rates, slow load times, and forced closes on graphically intensives game like NOVA 3.
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. Moving on to some of our other benchmarks and the Tab 3 falls back down to earth. It absolutely crushed our Antutu overall system benchmark, but a closer look revealed some anomalies in the subscores that just don't make much sense. On our synthetic benchmarks, the Tab 3 10.1 turned in respectable, if somewhat inflated scores. 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 over to Android. It's a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2560, to be precise, coupled with a PowerVR SXG544MP2 GPU and 1GB of RAM.
Samsung galaxy tab a 10.1 review android#
The Tab 3 10.1 is the first Android tablet we've tested that runs on an Intel chip. 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. We reviewed the 16GB Tab 3 10.1, but a 32GB model is also supposed to be available (although it doesn’t appear to be on sale yet). Bluetooth has also been bumped up from 3.0 to 4.0 and you still get GPS.
Samsung galaxy tab a 10.1 review upgrade#
The Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 is a Wi-Fi-only tablet that connects to 802.11b/g/n networks on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, which is an upgrade from last year.