Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus

Seven-inch tablets may’ve been dead on arrival after all. We can think of at least a couple that match the description down to the body bag. In hindsight, we should’ve known better about the original Samsung Galaxy Tab. What we thought was the iPad honking its horn as it sped ahead, was actually a flatline beep.

But well, that was then. A couple of software versions and scores of Droid slates later, it’s a different story altogether. And we may as well be looking at the best 7” tablet on the market.

The Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus upgrades the original seven-inch Samsung slate, which obviously doesn’t cope well with ageing. And although it doesn’t sound as a particularly thorough upgrade, it couldn’t have made a bigger difference. Honeycomb is a welcome replacement of Froyo and the dual core processor is a warning shot to the competition. It’s worth noting too that the new release is slimmer and lighter than the original. After all, people shopping for a seven-inch tablet obviously care about portability.

On the minus side, the 7.0 plus keeps the screen resolution and the battery backup of the original. The Galaxy Tab 7.7 for example manages to squeeze a 5100 mAh battery in a much slimmer body. But well, that S-AMOLED screens do take less space on top of being superior in almost every other way. As to the screen resolution, WSVGA (1024 x 600) seems to be the norm in the class and it’s fine for a 7-incher.

Read original review at GSMArena.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus is a premium device in the 7-inch market all the while being a niche device in the phone market (the phone-enabled version, that is). It's packed full of nice hardware and you're never really left wanting something that isn't there, although a digitizer pen and a better camera would of course be good. It's portable yet does an excellent job at home where it can function as a remote control. Through built in DLNA support it can even work as a media server, though frankly the GPU's ability to decode video using hardware means that it's better used with an HDMI dock to power a large screen directly. The original Galaxy Tab was quite an innovation when so long before other Android tablets, and while the market is no longer the same today, Samsung honors the original quite nicely with this updated version.

Read original review at Pocketables.

Now that the negatives are out of the way, we can focus on the positive attributes of the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. We’ve already discussed its excellent overall design, but it bears repeating that this tablet is a looker. It also has a nicely balanced weight to it, and it’s easy to manage with either one hand or two.

Lumping the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus in a general category with other 7-inch devices such as e-readers would be a mistake, like comparing a subcompact car with a sexy little sports car just because they weigh the same and have similar legroom. That’s nothing against e-readers, which are great devices for what they are, but the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus should be considered just a smaller version of the full-featured tablets we compared it to in our benchmark tests.

Indeed, performance-wise this tablet boxes outside of its weight class, consistently delivering strong scores in our benchmark tests. That Samsung Exynos chip is quite impressive, mostly leaving Tegra 2 chips in the rear view.

Further in that same vein, if you love the features of the iPad 2 or the Galaxy Tab 10.1 but are looking for a more compact option, the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus is perfect. It’s small enough to handle with one hand and easier to stash in a pocket or purse, but it’s also (just) large enough to type on reasonably comfortably. Other than screen real estate, you’re not missing a beat when it comes to gaming or watching movies compared to larger tablets, either.

Finally, the Galaxy Tab’s extra software features, in particular the Peel Smart Remote, nicely complement the device’s excellent hardware to deliver an overall superb experience.

Even though 400 bucks is a lot of money to drop on a device that only connects to the Internet via WiFi, if any such tablet is worth the money, it’s the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus.

Read original review at HotHardware.