The Galaxy Tab 2 is a Mixed Bag

We have our home screen which we can tap to bring up see here of course we have our time, our battery charge, what network we're connected to, date and time that sort of thing. We also can toggle Wi-Fi, GPS, our speaker sync, screen rotation, Bluetooth, notifications, and we can set it to airplane mode. Now we can also change our screen brightness we can set it to auto now we can jump to our settings as well.

This takes us right to our system settings and incidentally here we can see that Samsung has also changed our settings here so as this gray and white color instead of the black color that sense or that Android 4.0 normally ships with. We also have our media player here so we can continue to play skip through music from this control, and we have our notifications here so we can jump to our notification.

So here we have looks like I have some new song to added to Google Play Music I'll take me right to Google Play, and of course because this is Android we have to have Google search so we can either search by text or voice. So let's do Voice Search so we get it looks like it found a contact in my address book for Apple now we can also do a web search here search the web for Apple.

So as you can see that's actually something called Voice Actions which is pretty versatile. Now go back home screen, go back to Google, let's tap wake me up at 7:20 a.m. You can see it sets an alarm for 7:20 a.m. We're going to set we're all set to go now of course you can do other things like listen to Coldplay and it brings up my Google Music albums and here I have Coldplay and we can play an album and you can get more specific.

You can speak a track name or an album name, and of course because Android has built-in navigation we can say things like navigate to the Apple Store so there we go we have a map to the nearest Apple Store. Now overall I think the Galaxy Tab 2 is a mixed bag, there's some strengths and weaknesses at $399 it is a pretty good deal, I think it's a pretty solid deal for what you get.

One of the greatest strengths is the fact that it has these front firing speakers and their stereo speakers of course definitely a big improvement over what most tablet makers are doing which is copying what Apple does and putting the speaker on the back of the device which fires toward the back obviously if you're holding it or if it's in the case that mutes it. So this audio quality on the iPad is not very good, this is definitely a big improvement.

This is also much lighter weight than most tablets, this is lighter weight than the iPad the third generation iPad which comes in at one point 44 pounds and the iPad 2 is slightly lighter than that, this is not as light as the Asus Transformer Prime at one point 29 pounds but at one point three pounds one ounce isn't too bad so this is definitely a light weight tablet feels pretty nice to hold.

Has very nice comfort corners on it's not sharp or anything like that and that plastic is pretty grippy ball feels pretty nice now of course the other big drawback here is the camera which is very poor, that three megapixel camera definitely is class trailing overall there's no auto focusing there's no flash there's no stabilization there's no 1080p recording it's pretty old so I'm a little surprised they're a little disappointing there.

But most people obviously don't use their tablet as their camera but I think a lot of people expect it to be better than that and of course the front-facing camera that VGA camera could also be better but it does keep in line with what Apple offers now. The other problem I have here is the internal specs which can't quite keep up with the power of Android 4.0 so it tends to be not as smooth performing as some of the other Android tablets like the Asus Transformer Prime with that Tegra 3 quad core processor which actually has a fifth core this is still two core with which gives low priority to graphics so this is not a gaming device as really as a productivity media device.

Now the display does look very bright very vivid again it's that LCD IPS display so it looks very good off axis I definitely like the display but it's exactly like the iPad 2 that looks the same it's a wider aspect ratio of course wider and shorter than the iPad 2 but it looks pretty good definitely not as good as the Retina display but nothing does so but this gets pretty close to top quality for this type of device so again $399 gets you a reasonable resolution for a device like this it's bright clear colorful and I definitely can recommend it.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys this is Mike the Detroit pork with a look at the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 inch so obviously as the name suggests this is the sequel to the original Galaxy Tab which is also available in a 7-inch version so really this isn't a substantial change over the previous model the big changes here are the fact that they've dropped the price to 399 and it's now quit with Android 4.0 for us faster and smoother overall performance internal specs haven't changed much we still have a dual-core 1 gigahertz processor but instead of the Tegra 3 we now have a TI OMAP processor we still have 1 gig of internal ramp we have 16 gigs of standard storage but you can upgrade it up to 32 gigs thanks to a microSD card slot it's available in Wi-Fi only currently no 3g version is planned now we also get a seven thousand milliamp internal battery and we carry over the same display so we get a 1280 by 800 TFT LCD display TFT thin film transistor means the same thing for everything so it's an IPS display a lot like the original iPad so of course this won't take on the Retina display of the iPad anytime soon but will compete with the iPad 2 now of course there are other features here including Bluetooth and this has a built-in IR blaster to work with your home theater equipment and they've included an app for that called peel so you can basically use this as your universal remote control alright they've also made some cosmetic changes here we'll take a closer look at that once we get it out of its box so let's go ahead and crack into this so there is our Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 in this little cradle here so let's lift it up take it out of its box and set this aside for just a moment while we take a look inside that is our cardboard cradle so we have a little wall adapter here looks like we have the power brick right here so they give you a universal USB power adapter with this wall adapter of course which you can swap out for your region-specific adapter or of course you can attach an extension cable snap into place there you go now first they also give you a data and charging cable so again this is just a USB cable with Samsung's proprietary connector and of course they give us plenty of literature including the health safety and warranty guide in multiple languages Galaxy Tab 2 Quick Start Guide Galaxy Tab 2 accessory guide and the flower telling us about Samsung's media hub alright so let's get to the star of the show itself the very reflective Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 inch so first we're going to peel back the plastic and they give us a nice little tab here comes right off on the back we have another protective layer of plastic there you go looks like there's another layer of plastic underneath that I already said with all the plastic removed and I think there are about a dozen pieces of plastic covering just about every corner of this thing we can take a close look around so the back panel itself is a plastic it's titanium color has a nice matte finish to it so it feels pretty nice to hold in the hand along the side we have this shinier glossy charcoal color plastic you can see wraps the entire bezel of the tablet so take a look at the top first you can see this is where everything happens so we have our camera up here this is a three megapixel fixed-focus lens capable of recording video at 720p definitely an unremarkable camera this is actually carried over from the last generation and of course no flash up here we have the headphone jack which is kind of precariously located toward the center of the display up here we have our IR blaster our microSD card slot so we can pop that off off and take a look inside pop that back on we have our volume rocker up here and then our power or sleep/wake button up here now we have nothing on the left-hand or right-hand side of the tablet on the bottom we have our dock connector as well as a microphone now in the front of the device we have these grills for our speaker so we have a right speaker and a left speaker for stereo sound so this is quite an improvement over most tablets which put the speaker either at the back or at the side so said these speakers are firing right at you and you have two of them so you have much better speaker quality thanks to that arrangement so it looks also kind of unique you can see that they've speakers up here toward the top so they don't interfere or so you don't block them when you're holding the tablet this way but of course this means there's only really one right way to hold it as indicated by the Samsung branding at the bottom and also at the top of the tablet is our VGA camera again just VGA resolution so that's a sub 1 megapixel camera as well as an ambient light sensor right next to it re so let's go ahead and boot this up for the first time I'm just going to press and hold the power button and let's take a look at the boot sequence all right so now we have our setup instructions here and of course you can pick the languages you want to stick with the United States click start now we just need to select our local wireless network so I'm going to go with my time capsule here and I need to type in my password alright so we just need to set our data and time and it seems to have done this automatically so I'm going to go to next alright so we can go ahead and sign in with our Google account alright so now I have the option to restore from an existing Android device and I don't want to do that right now I just want to take a look at the stock configuration so I'm going to uncheck these for now and click Next next up it just wants me to agree to use Google location and that's fine with me and it knows my name because I've logged into my Google account so let's agree to that your tablet is set up and ready to you so let's go to finish now taking a close look at the user interface starting with the lock screen so on the lock screen all we have to do is wake it up simply by tapping and swiping left right up or down and get you into the main home screen now here we have Samsung's TouchWiz over Android 4.0 so we have some additions that Samsung has made they give us five home screens that we can swipe through I've already added a few more so we're up to seven and we'll show you how to do that in just a minute but on the main home screens we have some apps that Samsung has pre-loaded including a calendar gallery Polaris Office Dropbox the smart Ramon app which works with that I are sir Amazon Kindle Netflix settings may have a few more here a reader's hub email camera app of course YouTube Maps internet or the Android browser Samsung Apps and Play Store of course they've also included some widgets including a weather widget and some of Samsung's media widgets including game hub media hub and music hub now you can modify these or add additional apps just by going to the upper right hand corner that will bring us to the apps and widgets now if you want to add any of these all you have to do is tap and hold them so here we have Google Music we're just going to drop this onto let's go to the next home screen so let's see if we can swipe to the next one whoops too far too far oh I think I lost it so let's try again back to the apps tap and hold and let's drop it right there now we can also get rid of an app just by tapping and holding it and up here you can see some options have appeared so we have I trashcan which is what we expect new home page or new home screen and new folders so if we go up to I it simply brings up some information about the app now our next option is to add this to a new home screen unfortunately looks like I've maxed out at 7 so I can't do that but if you need to create a new home screen that's an option and you also have the option to drag this to a new folder so you can create a new folder so here we have our folder containing playing music if you want to rename it just tap it and let's name it music and we're done and of course you can also do this with all the wages so just happen hold them drag them up take them to the trash can and they're gone now on the lower left hand corner you see pretty familiar Android control so you have back home and recent apps you can tap the recent apps and see all your recent apps and you can swipe to close them or tap to bring them up now another key Samsung has included is the screen capture key so if you tap that takes a screen grab of your current screen so it should come up shortly and there you go so you can do a number of things here you can write on it and you can save it you can modify it crop it whatever rotate it share it that sort of thing now Samsung has also added a series of widgets that you can continue to use no matter what you're doing in the background so let's test that out if we tap that arrow key we see we get a bunch of them and you going to edit what you want in here so if you go to edit you can tap them and it hides them or you can tap them to bring them forward right now all of them are forward and again these are Samsung widgets so we're going to click done and exactly what this is well if you bring up a calculator you can see we have a calculator and we can move it around now I can continue to do other things so for example if I go to my web browser and you get the idea so I can continue to operate with this calculator on top of everything so that's kind of nice and that works with several other widgets here so we have an alarm we have email a music player the calendar task manager and world clock now in the lower left-hand corner we have our notifications which we can tap to bring up see here of course we have our time our Barry charge what network we're connected to date time that sort of thing we also can toggle Wi-Fi GPS our speaker sync screen rotation Bluetooth notifications and we can set it to airplane mode now we can also change our screen brightness we can set it to auto now we can jump to our settings as well this takes us right to our system settings and incidentally here we can see that Samsung has also changed our settings here so as this gray and white color instead of the black color that sense or that Android 4.0 normally ships with we also have our media player here so we can continue to play skip through music from this control and we have our notifications here so we can jump to our notification so here we have looks like I have some new song to added to Google Play Music I'll take me right to Google Play and of course because this is Android we have to have Google search so we can either search by text or voice so let's do Voice Apple so we get it looks like it found a contact in my address book for Apple now we can also do a web search here search the web for Apple so as you can see that's actually something called Voice Actions which is pretty versatile so if we go back home screen go back to Google let's tap wake me up at 7:20 a.m. you can see it sets an alarm for 7:20 a.m. we're going to set we're all set to go now of course you can do other things like listen to Coldplay and it brings up my Google Music albums and here I have Coldplay and we can play an album and you can get more specific you can speak a track name or an album name and of course because Android has built-in navigation we can say things like navigate to the Apple Store so there we go we have a map to the nearest Apple Store now overall I think the Galaxy Tab 2 is a mixed bag there's some strengths and weaknesses at 399 it is a pretty good deal I think it's a pretty solid deal for what you get for me one of the greatest strengths is the fact that it has these front firing speakers and their stereo speakers of course definitely a big improvement over what most tablet makers are doing which is copying what Apple does and putting the speaker on the back of the device which fires toward the back obviously if you're holding it or if it's in the case that mutes it so this audio quality on the iPad is not very good this is definitely a big improvement this is also much lighter weight than most tablets this is lighter weight than the iPad the third generation iPad which comes in at one point 44 pounds and the iPad 2 is slightly lighter than that this is not as light as the assist transformer prime at one point 29 pounds but at one point three pounds one ounce isn't too bad so this is definitely a light weight tablet feels pretty nice to hold has very nice comfort corners on it's not sharp or anything like that and that plastic is pretty grippy ball feels pretty nice now of course the other big drawback here is the camera which is very poor that three megapixel camera definitely is class trailing overall there's no auto focusing there's no flash there's no stabilization there's no 1080p recording it's pretty old so I'm a little surprised they're a little disappointing there but most people obviously don't use their tablet as their camera but I think a lot of people expect it to be better than that and of course the front-facing camera that VGA camera could also be better but it does keep in line with what Apple offers now the other problem I have here is the internal specs which can't quite keep up with the power of Android 4.0 so it tends to be not as smooth performing as some of the other Android tablets like the asou transformer prime with that Tegra 3 quad core processor which actually has a fifth chord this is still tool to core with which gives low priority to graphics so this is not a gaming device as really as a productivity media device now the display does look very bright very vivid again it's that LCD IPS display so it looks very good off axis I definitely like the display but it's exactly like the iPad 2 that looks the same it's a wider aspect ratio of course wider and shorter than the iPad 2 but it looks pretty good definitely not as good as the Retina display but nothing does so but this gets pretty close to top quality for this type of device so again 399 gets you a reasonable resolution for a device like this it's bright clear colorful and I definitely can recommend it so that's going to do from you guys in this video thanks for watching and I'll see you again in the next onehey guys this is Mike the Detroit pork with a look at the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 inch so obviously as the name suggests this is the sequel to the original Galaxy Tab which is also available in a 7-inch version so really this isn't a substantial change over the previous model the big changes here are the fact that they've dropped the price to 399 and it's now quit with Android 4.0 for us faster and smoother overall performance internal specs haven't changed much we still have a dual-core 1 gigahertz processor but instead of the Tegra 3 we now have a TI OMAP processor we still have 1 gig of internal ramp we have 16 gigs of standard storage but you can upgrade it up to 32 gigs thanks to a microSD card slot it's available in Wi-Fi only currently no 3g version is planned now we also get a seven thousand milliamp internal battery and we carry over the same display so we get a 1280 by 800 TFT LCD display TFT thin film transistor means the same thing for everything so it's an IPS display a lot like the original iPad so of course this won't take on the Retina display of the iPad anytime soon but will compete with the iPad 2 now of course there are other features here including Bluetooth and this has a built-in IR blaster to work with your home theater equipment and they've included an app for that called peel so you can basically use this as your universal remote control alright they've also made some cosmetic changes here we'll take a closer look at that once we get it out of its box so let's go ahead and crack into this so there is our Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 in this little cradle here so let's lift it up take it out of its box and set this aside for just a moment while we take a look inside that is our cardboard cradle so we have a little wall adapter here looks like we have the power brick right here so they give you a universal USB power adapter with this wall adapter of course which you can swap out for your region-specific adapter or of course you can attach an extension cable snap into place there you go now first they also give you a data and charging cable so again this is just a USB cable with Samsung's proprietary connector and of course they give us plenty of literature including the health safety and warranty guide in multiple languages Galaxy Tab 2 Quick Start Guide Galaxy Tab 2 accessory guide and the flower telling us about Samsung's media hub alright so let's get to the star of the show itself the very reflective Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 inch so first we're going to peel back the plastic and they give us a nice little tab here comes right off on the back we have another protective layer of plastic there you go looks like there's another layer of plastic underneath that I already said with all the plastic removed and I think there are about a dozen pieces of plastic covering just about every corner of this thing we can take a close look around so the back panel itself is a plastic it's titanium color has a nice matte finish to it so it feels pretty nice to hold in the hand along the side we have this shinier glossy charcoal color plastic you can see wraps the entire bezel of the tablet so take a look at the top first you can see this is where everything happens so we have our camera up here this is a three megapixel fixed-focus lens capable of recording video at 720p definitely an unremarkable camera this is actually carried over from the last generation and of course no flash up here we have the headphone jack which is kind of precariously located toward the center of the display up here we have our IR blaster our microSD card slot so we can pop that off off and take a look inside pop that back on we have our volume rocker up here and then our power or sleep/wake button up here now we have nothing on the left-hand or right-hand side of the tablet on the bottom we have our dock connector as well as a microphone now in the front of the device we have these grills for our speaker so we have a right speaker and a left speaker for stereo sound so this is quite an improvement over most tablets which put the speaker either at the back or at the side so said these speakers are firing right at you and you have two of them so you have much better speaker quality thanks to that arrangement so it looks also kind of unique you can see that they've speakers up here toward the top so they don't interfere or so you don't block them when you're holding the tablet this way but of course this means there's only really one right way to hold it as indicated by the Samsung branding at the bottom and also at the top of the tablet is our VGA camera again just VGA resolution so that's a sub 1 megapixel camera as well as an ambient light sensor right next to it re so let's go ahead and boot this up for the first time I'm just going to press and hold the power button and let's take a look at the boot sequence all right so now we have our setup instructions here and of course you can pick the languages you want to stick with the United States click start now we just need to select our local wireless network so I'm going to go with my time capsule here and I need to type in my password alright so we just need to set our data and time and it seems to have done this automatically so I'm going to go to next alright so we can go ahead and sign in with our Google account alright so now I have the option to restore from an existing Android device and I don't want to do that right now I just want to take a look at the stock configuration so I'm going to uncheck these for now and click Next next up it just wants me to agree to use Google location and that's fine with me and it knows my name because I've logged into my Google account so let's agree to that your tablet is set up and ready to you so let's go to finish now taking a close look at the user interface starting with the lock screen so on the lock screen all we have to do is wake it up simply by tapping and swiping left right up or down and get you into the main home screen now here we have Samsung's TouchWiz over Android 4.0 so we have some additions that Samsung has made they give us five home screens that we can swipe through I've already added a few more so we're up to seven and we'll show you how to do that in just a minute but on the main home screens we have some apps that Samsung has pre-loaded including a calendar gallery Polaris Office Dropbox the smart Ramon app which works with that I are sir Amazon Kindle Netflix settings may have a few more here a reader's hub email camera app of course YouTube Maps internet or the Android browser Samsung Apps and Play Store of course they've also included some widgets including a weather widget and some of Samsung's media widgets including game hub media hub and music hub now you can modify these or add additional apps just by going to the upper right hand corner that will bring us to the apps and widgets now if you want to add any of these all you have to do is tap and hold them so here we have Google Music we're just going to drop this onto let's go to the next home screen so let's see if we can swipe to the next one whoops too far too far oh I think I lost it so let's try again back to the apps tap and hold and let's drop it right there now we can also get rid of an app just by tapping and holding it and up here you can see some options have appeared so we have I trashcan which is what we expect new home page or new home screen and new folders so if we go up to I it simply brings up some information about the app now our next option is to add this to a new home screen unfortunately looks like I've maxed out at 7 so I can't do that but if you need to create a new home screen that's an option and you also have the option to drag this to a new folder so you can create a new folder so here we have our folder containing playing music if you want to rename it just tap it and let's name it music and we're done and of course you can also do this with all the wages so just happen hold them drag them up take them to the trash can and they're gone now on the lower left hand corner you see pretty familiar Android control so you have back home and recent apps you can tap the recent apps and see all your recent apps and you can swipe to close them or tap to bring them up now another key Samsung has included is the screen capture key so if you tap that takes a screen grab of your current screen so it should come up shortly and there you go so you can do a number of things here you can write on it and you can save it you can modify it crop it whatever rotate it share it that sort of thing now Samsung has also added a series of widgets that you can continue to use no matter what you're doing in the background so let's test that out if we tap that arrow key we see we get a bunch of them and you going to edit what you want in here so if you go to edit you can tap them and it hides them or you can tap them to bring them forward right now all of them are forward and again these are Samsung widgets so we're going to click done and exactly what this is well if you bring up a calculator you can see we have a calculator and we can move it around now I can continue to do other things so for example if I go to my web browser and you get the idea so I can continue to operate with this calculator on top of everything so that's kind of nice and that works with several other widgets here so we have an alarm we have email a music player the calendar task manager and world clock now in the lower left-hand corner we have our notifications which we can tap to bring up see here of course we have our time our Barry charge what network we're connected to date time that sort of thing we also can toggle Wi-Fi GPS our speaker sync screen rotation Bluetooth notifications and we can set it to airplane mode now we can also change our screen brightness we can set it to auto now we can jump to our settings as well this takes us right to our system settings and incidentally here we can see that Samsung has also changed our settings here so as this gray and white color instead of the black color that sense or that Android 4.0 normally ships with we also have our media player here so we can continue to play skip through music from this control and we have our notifications here so we can jump to our notification so here we have looks like I have some new song to added to Google Play Music I'll take me right to Google Play and of course because this is Android we have to have Google search so we can either search by text or voice so let's do Voice Apple so we get it looks like it found a contact in my address book for Apple now we can also do a web search here search the web for Apple so as you can see that's actually something called Voice Actions which is pretty versatile so if we go back home screen go back to Google let's tap wake me up at 7:20 a.m. you can see it sets an alarm for 7:20 a.m. we're going to set we're all set to go now of course you can do other things like listen to Coldplay and it brings up my Google Music albums and here I have Coldplay and we can play an album and you can get more specific you can speak a track name or an album name and of course because Android has built-in navigation we can say things like navigate to the Apple Store so there we go we have a map to the nearest Apple Store now overall I think the Galaxy Tab 2 is a mixed bag there's some strengths and weaknesses at 399 it is a pretty good deal I think it's a pretty solid deal for what you get for me one of the greatest strengths is the fact that it has these front firing speakers and their stereo speakers of course definitely a big improvement over what most tablet makers are doing which is copying what Apple does and putting the speaker on the back of the device which fires toward the back obviously if you're holding it or if it's in the case that mutes it so this audio quality on the iPad is not very good this is definitely a big improvement this is also much lighter weight than most tablets this is lighter weight than the iPad the third generation iPad which comes in at one point 44 pounds and the iPad 2 is slightly lighter than that this is not as light as the assist transformer prime at one point 29 pounds but at one point three pounds one ounce isn't too bad so this is definitely a light weight tablet feels pretty nice to hold has very nice comfort corners on it's not sharp or anything like that and that plastic is pretty grippy ball feels pretty nice now of course the other big drawback here is the camera which is very poor that three megapixel camera definitely is class trailing overall there's no auto focusing there's no flash there's no stabilization there's no 1080p recording it's pretty old so I'm a little surprised they're a little disappointing there but most people obviously don't use their tablet as their camera but I think a lot of people expect it to be better than that and of course the front-facing camera that VGA camera could also be better but it does keep in line with what Apple offers now the other problem I have here is the internal specs which can't quite keep up with the power of Android 4.0 so it tends to be not as smooth performing as some of the other Android tablets like the asou transformer prime with that Tegra 3 quad core processor which actually has a fifth chord this is still tool to core with which gives low priority to graphics so this is not a gaming device as really as a productivity media device now the display does look very bright very vivid again it's that LCD IPS display so it looks very good off axis I definitely like the display but it's exactly like the iPad 2 that looks the same it's a wider aspect ratio of course wider and shorter than the iPad 2 but it looks pretty good definitely not as good as the Retina display but nothing does so but this gets pretty close to top quality for this type of device so again 399 gets you a reasonable resolution for a device like this it's bright clear colorful and I definitely can recommend it so that's going to do from you guys in this video thanks for watching and I'll see you again in the next one\n"