News - Samsung unveils two new tablets, sort of

[HEXUS]

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 has been redesigned, and now there’s an 8.9 version.

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[Spud1]

Very curious as to the pricing of these two..If they can undercut the iPad 2 by a reasonable margin, then they would be serious competition...

Sadly I doubt they will (Samsung will undoubtedly use the screen size as justification) but here's hoping.

At £350 (max) i'd be tempted to pick one up later this year...

[[GSV]Trig]

Agree'd, I'll be looking at a tablet this year to replace last years fadbuy which was my N220

[crossy]

Very curious as to the pricing of these two..If they can undercut the iPad 2 by a reasonable margin, then they would be serious competition...

Sadly I doubt they will (Samsung will undoubtedly use the screen size as justification) but here's hoping. At £350 (max) i'd be tempted to pick one up later this year...

Not buying an iPad2? Burn the heretic! (looked at your sig and figured you for one of the Apple acolytes)

350 notes for the 10" version sounds a good deal to me too. Even better if it meant that the smaller one was closer to the - for me at least - £200 magic figure.

Samsung is opting for a ‘vanilla' build for its Honeycomb tabs and is leaving it to exclusive partner Vodafone to customize its tablet. Price and availability details are not out yet.

Vanilla build - good. Exclusive - bad. Exclusive to Vodafone - very bad.
I'm guessing that these are the SIM-equipped tablets, rather than the WiFi-only ones that I'd like.

[Spud1]

Hehe I'm no devout follower - I just really like iOS as a mobile phone OS (not so keen on it as a tablet), the mac air is unbeaten in the portable power stakes and my mac pro at the time was the cheapest workstation available (faster than anything alienware could do at the time, and 1/2 the price).

Android has potential with the right skin, and much more so as a Tablet OS than as a mobile phone OS (where I dislike it immensely without HTC Sense to make it usable). So that way I am curious about these..will be interesting to see if Honeycomb can resolve my issues with the older versions of android, if a 10" android tablet is really any good, and if they can finally make the price appealing. Samsung don't have the style rights to charge a premium on their products.

[zpiders]

I like the 8.9" one, great size for a tablet. I also like the fact the resolution is higher than Ipad's.

[scaryjim]

350 notes for the 10" version sounds a good deal to me too. Even better if it meant that the smaller one was closer to the - for me at least - £200 magic figure.

Can we say wishful thinking?

Cheapest you can currently buy a SIM-free 7" Tab (as far as my google-fu will get me) is £379. 10.1", in a slimmer designer, is likely to be around £500, I imagine. Of course, you could always get one on a data plan... on Vodafone


incidentally, I'm currently on Vodafone and haven't had any problems with them at all...

EDIT: However, expansys has a pre-order for the Viewsonic Viewpad 10s, which is a Tegra 2, 10", 1024x600 Android 2.2. tablet, for £280. Now that *is* a tempting price...

[Spud1]

Can we say wishful thinking?

Cheapest you can currently buy a SIM-free 7" Tab (as far as my google-fu will get me) is £379. 10.1", in a slimmer designer, is likely to be around £500, I imagine. Of course, you could always get one on a data plan... on Vodafone


incidentally, I'm currently on Vodafone and haven't had any problems with them at all...

EDIT: However, expansys has a pre-order for the Viewsonic Viewpad 10s, which is a Tegra 2, 10", 1024x600 Android 2.2. tablet, for £280. Now that *is* a tempting price...

Indeed..i'm 99.99% certain that it's wishful thinking for them to release one at £350..even for a basic wifi 16gb model. If they do though i'll be incredibly tempted. You can of course get them on a data plan, but then you end up paying much more than the initial cost, so have to really use that data..

Shall have to see though!

[scaryjim]

I was just having a browse of Expansys' list of pre-orders and there's some interesting stuff in there, quite apart from the ViewSonic. For the note-takers among us (me included) there's both the HTC Flyer *and* the ASUS eeePad MeMO coming with bundled stylus for note-taking / highlighting / etc, there's the ASUS slider and transformer which Hexus have already covered in terms of convertible Android tablets, and there's the *very* interesting Acer ICONIA W501, which is a Windows 7 tablet rocking the AMD Fusion C-50 chip (1GHz dual core + Radeon 6250), for which a bit of hunting has revealed a keyboard dock (like the ASUS Transformer) - dunno if it comes with the tablet or if it's an "optional" extra though.

I've been considering a tablet for a while, and though my primary inclination is towards Windows for the flexibility and compatibility in productivity terms (I'd see my tablet as much as a business tool as a media player / web browser) I did have a prod at a Galaxy Tab on Sunday in Phones4U and I have to say it was impressively responsive and really very usable. Leaves me with a difficult, if enjoyable, decision to make when my current phone contract runs out

[crossy]

Can we say wishful thinking?
Cheapest you can currently buy a SIM-free 7" Tab (as far as my google-fu will get me) is £379. 10.1", in a slimmer designer, is likely to be around £500, I imagine. Of course, you could always get one on a data plan... on Vodafone
incidentally, I'm currently on Vodafone and haven't had any problems with them at all...

It's not that wishful - after all Creative feel that they can sell their ZiiO 10" tablet for £249, (check out their website if you don't believe me). Okay, that's only 'droid 2.1 - but that's a small point. Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that - for the smaller screen sizes - the closer they get to £200 (or less!) the more attractive it becomes.

Not got any axe to grind with Voda myself - other than the local network gets stuffed between 10am and 11am on Mondays. Other people seem to regard Voda as satan personified for their "improvements" to their phones. Can't comment on that because "my" phone is with Three, although the works-provided one uses Voda.

EDIT: However, expansys has a pre-order for the Viewsonic Viewpad 10s, which is a Tegra 2, 10", 1024x600 Android 2.2. tablet, for £280. Now that *is* a tempting price...

Dammit, that's a tempting price.

[scaryjim]

... after all Creative feel that they can sell their ZiiO 10" tablet for £249 ...

Indeed, a quick browse of expansys shows them selling the ZiiO 7" for only £209. But then ithey both have a number of questionable specifications: like the resistive touch panel, and the processor - by "Ziilabs", so no telling what the performance will be like (and processor power makes a big difference to the responsiveness of Android devices - my Magic really struggles with a lot of apps / games, and is quite often jerky or slow just browsing or flicking round the homepage / apps screen...).

I do quite like the look of the Archos 101 as well: particularly as it has USB host and client ports for mass storage (so you can plug USB sticks into it to expand the storage ). That's only £250 for the 8GB version (£295 for the 16GB), and it's got a 1GHz Cortex A8-based processor (perhaps an early snapdragon?). So if you shop around and don't mind going for some of the less popular names in mobile computing, I reckon you'll be able to get some reasonable bargains in the next 6 months or so...

[[GSV]Trig]

I looked at the Archos a while back when I found out the price of the original galaxy tab
That 8.9 looks like a winner so far, only problem is it being Samsung who arent exactly known for there after sales...

[crossy]

I do quite like the look of the Archos 101 as well: particularly as it has USB host and client ports for mass storage (so you can plug USB sticks into it to expand the storage ). That's only £250 for the 8GB version (£295 for the 16GB), and it's got a 1GHz Cortex A8-based processor (perhaps an early snapdragon?). So if you shop around and don't mind going for some of the less popular names in mobile computing, I reckon you'll be able to get some reasonable bargains in the next 6 months or so...

Thanks for the tip - a quick session with Google shows that simplyelectronics.net has this for £218.95 inc VAT and delivery. At that price - like the original netbooks - I'd argue that this was into the realm of "impulse buy".

Okay, it's not got Google Market Place, but I know there's ways to get the .apk's and install manually.