Engadget’s Samsung Galaxy Tab Review

Joanna Stern:

The browsing experience on the Tab is rock solid — pages loaded quickly over WiFi and scrolling / zooming was snappy. […]

Perhaps the best part about the Tab is that you don’t have to worry about the sluggish performance we’ve seen on other Android and Windows tablets. The entire experience is very snappy, and it kept up with us even when we had four or five applications open. Of course, there were times when it would freeze up — notably when we had a game of Angry Birds running and we were attempting to test a 720p video — but chances are you won’t be taxing the 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor and 512MB of RAM that much. As we mentioned earlier, Flash videos within the browser took a few seconds to appear and did slow down the general browsing experience, but once we were able to hit the play button they ran smoothly. […]

So, how about that battery life? It’s pretty good. After periodically surfing the web and reading on the Tab for about a day and a half with just 3G on, the battery is at about 20 percent.

Very different comments on scrolling, performance, and battery life than the aforelinked review by James Rivington at TechRadar. So which is it? Smooth scrolling and long battery life? Or juddery scrolling and poor battery life?

Update: Stern has slightly updated her review, at least regarding scrolling. It now reads:

For the most part, the browsing experience on the Tab is rock solid — pages loaded quickly over WiFi and scrolling / zooming on most pages was snappy. When loading a few sites — like this very technology site — we did notice the scrolling to be a bit jittery and not as smooth as on the iPad.

★ Monday, 1 November 2010