I’ve been using a Samsung Galaxy Tab for a few days, having received one as a Christmas bonus/incentive to develop website versions for tablets. This is my first experience with an Android device and my first tablet computer, although I’ve played with iPads quite a lot and I’ve had an iPhone 3GS for nearly two years. These are just my first thoughts and impressions.

The positive view:

Despite its rough edges, much due to Android 2.2, which is not really a tablet OS, the GTab is a wonderful portable device that has the potential to transform the way you access data on the go. It is radically more portable than the iPad in a critical mass way that makes it much more likely that you will have it with you and available when you want to use it. It has a clear, razor-sharp display that makes reading text a pleasure. Instant on and the ability to have it nearby all the time are already changing the way I access the Net and my data. The ability to read newspapers and magazines is amazingly convenient and eliminates the vague sense of guilt caused by all those dead trees piling up in the corner of the room every week.

The in-between screen size means that its success will depend on a lot of applications and web sites being optimized for it. At the moment, quite a few mobile apps are designed for smaller screens and most normal websites are designed for larger screens. That matters less than you might expect, however. Most of the time I find I get on fine with pretty much everything, and the optimization is happening quickly. An increasing number of online forums use Tapatalk, which makes them wonderfully accessible on devices like the GTab and modern smartphones.

The freedom compared to my iPhone is great. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I love being able to install free apps that automatically synch all my podcasts without having to link up to the desktop or laptop mothership. I also love being able to control everything, or install apps that can.

The negative view:

On the negative side, the Galaxy Tab also makes me kind of want to buy an iPad as a tablet computer and a Kindle for reading eBooks. The polish and integration of Apple’s iOS devices are still unparalleled. Android and the GTab hardware are still behind there. This goes for everything from touch screen responsiveness to user interface consistency.

The portability of the small form factor is a big plus, but for many things the screen is really too small, for all the same reasons that the 7-inch screen on the original Asus EeePC was too small. Like the EeePC, the GTab is more unwieldy than a smartphone but it has very similar restrictions because of its display form factor. I often find myself wishing for either a pocketable smartphone or a decent portable computer with a keyboard and instant on, like an 11″ MacBook Air.

Also, configuring Android is fun if you are a geek like me but can be a terrible time-waster otherwise. For my own sanity, I would definitely recommend iPad to all the friends and family members who usually come to me as their free support desk.

Google’s, and hence also Android’s, reliance on sharing your data as its business model continues to be a little disturbing and runs counter to user-friendliness in many areas, including battery life as well as privacy issues. As with Facebook, this is probably one of the reasons behind the data sharing defaults and how difficult Android makes it to curb excessive data sharing and background activity. Of course, Apple is equally anti-user in different ways. I can see value in both models and they will probably both thrive in different ways. I don’t see that there will ever be a clear winner here, although Apple will be both held back and brought forward by only having the one platform. As always, you pays your money and you takes your choice.

See this article for a good take on the current state of Android in the market.

Android generally:

So far my experience of Android on the GTab has been quite good, with annoying rough edges in places. But then, this is very much a work in process and very much a committee effort. It reminds me of Windows 95, both in the good ways and the bad ways. Windows 95 was a revelation after DOS and Windows 3.x, but it did also have its drawbacks…

My main gripes at the moment are that Android appears to be designed for battery capacities that do not yet exist and does much too little to protect uninformed users against stupid, incompetent and malicious programmers. If you don’t do some very serious reconfiguration most apps will be “syncing” (there are less kind words for this…) data in the background constantly and munching freely and unnecessarily at your limited battery resources.

Getting an Android device set up to be relatively secure, relatively useful and relatively economical with the battery is too complicated for the average user and fun but still a time-waster if you’re a techie. I’m quite happy with this personally, but as someone who works in user support I do see it as a potential problem.

The overall user experience is often unnecessarily opaque for casual users in the same way that Linux is. For example, holding the Home button gives you a list of recently-started programs but not a list of active programs. There is no task switcher. If you’ve started and exited several apps you will no longer have access to apps started previously that are still running, because they will have been pushed off the list by apps that you have started more recently but have already exited. You can install task switchers that solve this problem from the App Market, but you shouldn’t have to.

The reduced freedom of Apple iOS is offset by the superiority of the Apple operating system compared to Android. Saying this now is unfair to an extent, because Android is not really finished yet and not really ready for tablets yet, but that is the state of things at the moment. Android is open and flexible, but you have Google and free app developers collecting your data in the background and we can’t yet see where that is going to go. There are positives and negatives on both sides.

Conclusion:

I have mixed feelings. Even while writing this article I found myself vacillating wildly between enthusiasm and criticism, delight and frustration. The form factor of the GTab is certainly much more portable than the iPad, and for some things that is definitely better. At the same time, the form factor of the iPad is definitely preferable for a tablet computer used around the home. As far as that goes, Steve Jobs comments on the 7-inch form factor couldn’t be more right. In addition to this, on an Android device like the GTab you have to work a fair bit on the configuration to get decent battery life out of it without crippling its functionality and also to control the profligacy of Google and the apps you install with your personal data.

The GTab is a terrific device for reading eBooks, something for which the iPad is really a little too big — but this is offset by the inferior battery life. I find it hard to relax when reading an eBook if I’m worrying about the falling battery level. I constantly have the feeling that I need to hurry up with my reading, which is not what I want to do when I’m reading. You can improve the battery life if you reduce connectivity, but the screen still accounts for 70% of the power drain so there are limits on what is possible. On the other hand, the iPad’s large form factor is very much superior for reading eMagazines and newspapers.

The new Amazon Kindle is still the best way to read eBooks, and with current technology it makes sense to own one in addition to a tablet. As far as other media are concerned it’s pretty much a toss-up. Score for the iPad for magazines and the GTab for books, if it wasn’t for the battery life issue.

Full-sized websites are often difficult on the 7-inch screen, but this isn’t exclusively a Samsung problem. This is obviously something that will change if the 7-inch form factor catches on. Currently, you can only access the full versions of websites with alternative browsers like Dolphin HD, on which you can change the User Agent setting. The stock browser will only display the mobile version, if there is one. All the Android browsers I’ve tried so far are less capable and polished than Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPad. For example, Mobile Safari can scroll the contents of i-frames and other scrollable block elements with two fingers. Android browsers can’t handle this at all. Browsing on the Galaxy Tab is also frequently quite laggy and unresponsive, but there are claims that this will improve when the Android 2.3 update comes to the Galaxy Tab sometime next Spring.

There are lots of apps available and quite a few of them make reasonable use of the GTab’s screen. Many apps that are available on iOS are available in almost identical versions on Android. On the whole, however, app quality and polish are lower and the level of annoyances (ripoffs, unnecessary and hidden background data use, confusing and inconsistent user interfaces) are higher than on iOS equivalents. This doesn’t mean that they are unusable — you can read books, newspapers and magazines, watch movies, find the cheapest gas stations, play games, update your mail and do all the other things you do with the iPad on the GTab. However, the quality on the iPad is generally higher and the prices of the two devices are roughly the same.

The GTab is probably a more universal tablet because it’s so much more portable and very open and flexible. But if you want the best quality apps and total ease of use the iPad still has the edge. But then you have to put up with Apple’s sometimes arbitrary restrictions and their increasingly obnoxious behavior. All these things may change with time, of course, but that is the situation now.