Day 14 - Media Capabilities

One of the main tasks any tablet owner is like to use their tablet for, particularly when travelling, is watching or listening to media. So its important that a tablet is able to cope with most media formats thrown at it. The Samsung Galaxy Tab is very good at this and in fact the official list of supported media formats includes:

• MPEG2
• MPEG4
• H.263
• H.264
• DivX
• XviD

In fact when I tried to play most of my media collection it ran it absolutely fine. The screen gorgeous 1280x800 screen on the Galaxy Tab is made for watching media files and is clear and bright and has a great viewing angle so it will be perfect for 2 people on a long journey sat next to each other. The resolution will support 720p HD quality as well and the power of the Tegra 2 processor means that there is no stuttering or jumping when watching back anything in HD.

Michael Palin in Around the World in 20 Years

Here we can see a screenshot from the Galaxy Tab while watching a short excerpt from Michael Palin's Around the World in 20 Years, now you can see the taskbar at the bottom but this will normally disappear when you want to watch video. However, it doesn't go completely! You get some very small square markers where the buttons would be and the unfortunately the video doesn't fill the whole screen those 80 pixels for the task bar are always left grey which can be annoying. The sound is also very positive with a nice rich quality to it despite the small speakers and them being inside a tablet cover. This can of course be sorted by using the 3.5mm headphone jack on the top of the unit which again delivers first rate quality sound. I would certainly recommend the Galaxy Tab if your looking to get a tablet for watching or listening to content on.

I have also had a look at the rear camera, but I have to say on a personal level I really think that a rear facing camera on a tablet is a complete waste of time. I mean who is going to stand in front of a subject and hold a 10 inch tablet up in front of their face to take a photo. I completely the understand the need for a front facing camera for video conferencing or chat but a rear facing camera is just pointless. 

Camera shot

Here you can see a typical camera shot taken in a normal living room in low light conditions. Even with excellent full daylight I have found the photos come out looking very washed out and with a lot of digital "noise" in the image. Most people have a camera in their phone which is better than what is provided by the tablet. The tablet camera is made even more pointless by the fact that the camera included is a poultry 3MP. I realise this is better than the likes of the iPad or the iPad 2 but the rumour is that Samsung scaled it down from 8MP. Sure that would have made it much better but I still feel in a device this large its not needed, I mean you don't see laptops with rear facing cameras in them!