Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 review

For a start, the 7.7 has Android 3.2 Honeycomb installed, the tablet-only version of Android that’s now been superseded by Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). This is disappointing, considering that manufacturers such as Asus and Motorola have started rolling out 4.0 for select tablet models. On the 7.7 Samsung has used its own customised icons for common Android apps, and preinstalled a host of software, which you can’t uninstall or even hide the app icons. For example, there are a number of Hubs, or collections of apps. One of these is the Readers Hub, which integrates apps from PressDisplay (for news), Zinio (for magazines) and Kobo (for eBooks). We like the idea of bringing multiple apps into one screen, to save clutter, but if you only use one of the apps, the hub simply adds complexity – we’d rather just open the Kobo app directly.

We’re even less impressed with the Game and Music Hubs. The Game Hub says it’s “powered by Mobage”, but when you try and add a game you’re invited to download a separate Mobage app. The Music Hub isn’t really a hub, but an app powered by 7Digital with a selection of pop tunes. The Social Hub is more useful, aggregating feeds from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This isn’t as wide a selection as other social aggregation services such as HTC’s Sense or Motorola’s Motoblur, though.

It’s not all bad – there are some useful preinstalled apps, such as the AllShare DLNA client and server, the Polaris Office Suite – which lets you edit Word, Excel and Powerpoint files, and view PDFs – a file manager, and both photo and video editors.

It’s Samsung’s own apps that annoyed us the most. The Samsung Apps app and the Samsung Hub are poor imitations of Android’s own Play Store (formerly known as the Android Market), with an awful selection of apps and a focus on games. Samsung Apps installs an ad server and a push notifier in the background after you’ve agreed to a general set of terms and conditions (thankfully you can manually uninstall them), while the Samsung Hub devotes a whole section to a special offer from John Lewis in return for your personal details. Luckily there’s still almost 13GB of app storage space available – but we prefer users to have the choice over what software they install and to make any preinstalled apps easy to remove.

Like the larger Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (which is soon to be replaced by the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2), the 7.7 is an amazing piece of hardware, but we were disappointed with the software – more so than on the larger tablet, because there’s more of it and it’s more intrusive.

The 7.7 has a simply incredible display, and if you’re looking for a more compact Android tablet then it justifies its £100-odd premium over the Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition, but only just. With an upgrade to Android 4.0 and a reduction in price, the Galaxy Tab 7.7 will become a very tempting tablet. Until then, if you’re looking for a great display on a tablet, then we’d recommend a new iPad (full review later this week) and a slightly bigger bag.