Sleekest Honeycomb tablet

Samsung has come out with the lightest and thinnest tablet on the market to rival Apple. Its Galaxy 10.1-inch tablet with 8.6mm is 0.2mm thinner than the iPad2. And you know what? At 565 grams it's also 36 grams lighter than iPad2.It's comfortable to hold and to operate, and the simplistic design has kept ports and toggle switches to a minimum.The back of the Tab is white glossy plastic with a metal tab at the top of the device. The plastic makes the Tab feel more like a toy than a serious computing device.It runs on 1GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels which is better than iPad2's 1024 x 768 pixels. So the screen is crisper and brighter. It is backed by 1GB of RAM.On top, the power and volume controls are easy to find. On the top-right you'll find the 3.5mm headphone jack. There are no buttons on the side; instead, Samsung put the speakers there. On the bottom there's Samsung's proprietary dock connector, similar to that of an iPad but slightly narrower.Overall, the user interface's performance is much improved, although with 3.1 compared to 3.01, it's still not perfectly smooth.For doing the handful of things that tablets work very well at, Honeycomb definitely gets the job done. But ask too much of it, and the experience slows down a lot.There aren't any Samsung specific widgets that come preloaded on the Tab. For better or worse, TouchWiz is gone. The Tablet also doesn't have a USB or HDMI ports or a slot for adding memory.The Galaxy Tab uses more or less the same interface as the other Android 3.0 tablets. Most of the interface enhancements on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 have to do with Android 3.1, although none of them are radical improvements over Android 3.0.A pop-up menu on the lower left of the screen next to the Home button shows all open apps. Also there is a button to shoot screen images and save them in picture format. The new model has a 3MP rear camera and a front-facing 2MP camera.The rear-facing camera on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 does provide some handy extra features, but overall the quality of the pictures looks a bit washed out and, in some cases, blurry.The rear camera has an auto focus and a flash. However, the focus took a second or two to work. There are very few effects for shooting video. You can add an effect such as sepia, black-and-white and negative, change the resolution and adjust exposure, but that's about it. You can adjust white balance for certain lighting conditions and set a timer. You can raise or lower exposure for lighter or darker pictures, and you can add a GPS tag. You can also shoot 720p videos with the rear camera and play back in 1080p. There is no way to stream to the device using DLNA yet.Google still has a way to go on apps for Android — there are only a few worth downloading. From / Gulf News