Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 review

SAMSUNG’S ANDROID

We’re pleased to see that Samsung hasn’t changed Android much. It has added a screenshot button to the soft buttons bar, as well as a Mini Apps bar. Mini Apps are utilities that you can bring up in front of the main Android interface and include a calculator, music player and calendar, among others. They work quite well, but for us they don’t add anything over widgets or standard applications.

Samsung has also made minor changes to the mail and calendar apps. They’re mostly cosmetic, but S Planner, the calendar replacement, also lets you pinch-to-zoom to switch between day, week and month views. It’s a useful feature, even if the actual operation is a little jerky.

HARDWARE

The tablet has a 4,000mAh battery, which is only slightly less than the 4,325mAh battery of the Nexus 7. It lasted a respectable 8h 45m in our video playback test, although the Nexus 7 is clearly more efficient as it lasted 10h and 20m. Realistically both tablets will last you a day’s use, but the Nexus 7’s extra 90 minutes is useful.

Both Samsung and Google’s tablets are available in 8GB and 16GB Wi-Fi versions. There’s less need to buy the 16GB version of Samsung’s tablet, as a microSD card slot means you can add up to 32GB more storage; the Nexus 7 is not upgradeable.

While Google doesn’t have a 3G version of its tablet, Samsung does, which is brilliant news if you want data wherever you go and don’t want to mess around with personal Wi-Fi hotspots. Expect to pay around an extra £80 for the 3G versions over the equivalent Wi-Fi model.

The Tab 2 has a rear video camera for video and stills capture. It only has a 3-megapixel sensor and shots are adequate but far from inspiring. We found that fine detail was lost, while highlight clipping meant we lost all the detail in the sky in our tests shots. Video is recorded at 720p at 30fps. It’s smooth, but the picture is very noisy and there’s not a lot of detail in the picture.

Annoyingly, the default setting for the tablet is to connect over USB in MTP mode, which hid all the images and videos taken using the camera from Windows Explorer. Changing to PTP mode let us access everything, but a standard mass storage mode would have been better.

CONCLUSION

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 is nearly two years old now, but its price has halved in that time. You can pick one up for a bargain price of £99, that’s £100 less than the Nexus 7. While its dual-core 1GHz processor isn’t especially fast the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 has an excellent screen and looks stylish. It runs Android 4.0, which is a little outdated now but still perfectly usable if you don’t have too many demanding requirements. There’s 8GB of storage and a microSD card slot to expand this further, which is a plus over the non-expandable storage capacity of the Google Nexus 7. The 4,000mAh battery lasted 8h 45m in our video playback test, which is pretty much a whole day so is pretty impressive all things considered.

Having said that, it has been blown away by recent launches in the budget tablet sector. Most obvious is the new Tesco Hudl2, which for £129 is a cracking device with everything you need, including a fast, modern processor, a surprisingly gorgeous screen and excellent build quality making it by far our favourite budget Android tablet. Do keep in mind it’s an 8in tablet if you are after a smaller device, the extra screen space is a real positive otherwise. If you are cash-constrained picking up a cheap, used Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 isn’t a terrible idea but we would much rather stretch to a new Hudl2 if you can. Tesco has long been promising an update to Android 5.0 is on the horizon as well, which is another feather in the Hudl2’s cap.