Day 2 - Browser and Batteries

So welcome to day 2 with my Galaxy Tab, so far so good! Today I want to look at the Browser application and the battery life, 2 things that you might not think of but is very important.

Battery Life

One of the things that Android devices have always suffered with is poor battery life, I don't know of an Android mobile phone that will last more than 2 days without a charge. The Android tablet market is still too young to see if this is a similarly affected but the Galaxy Tab seems to be doing ok. I last charged it back on day 0, and started using it from 11pm on that day. Now I haven't turned it off just left it on standby, as most people would, and it has always been connected to the Wi-Fi. Its had a heavy day of downloading and installing on day 1 and then spent most of day 2 in standby and its currently down to 27% which is pretty good I think as when I left for work approx 11 hrs ago it was on 34%. Looking at all the reviews most say your looking at a battery life of around 7-8 hrs with constant use on Wi-Fi and the screen brightness up high. There is one thing I will say here that is the Galaxy Tab does have an auto brightness function on it which will probably get you longer battery life, but I can't stand the constant changes that it makes and in fact its really distracting.

Browser

The browser is probably the app you will use the most on any tablet from any manufacturer, so you want to make sure your comfortable with it. The Honeycomb browser is really nice its fast and really user friendly, even for those of us with long nails or chubby fingers. It has a nice tabbed interface which is so useful, you never realise quite how much you use tabs in a browser until you don't have them.

Android Honeycomb Browser

 The address bar isn't too big and and hides as you scroll further down the page and in fact you can hide it all together by using a Google Labs feature called "Quick Controls". This hides the bar at the top and provides all your controls at the side of the screen when you swipe your thumb in from the edge of the bezel. Its a little hard to get on with but it could be useful in the long term.

Android Browser with Quick Controls

The only issue I would have with the browser is the fact that because its a "mobile" version of a browser most website detect that and show you the mobile phone version of a website which can be annoying. The best way I have found to counteract this is to install Dolphin Browser for Pad, which allows you to set what the browser should pretend to be i.e. a desktop browser. This gets round this issue and can be useful if you want to use things like Facebook Chat. The only thing I will say is its still in beta.