Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 Officially Unveiled
It's thin and it's aimed squarely at the iPad 2
First displayed in a teaser poster a couple of weeks ago, Samsung has officially unveiled its ultra-thin Galaxy Tab 8.9 tablet at the CTIA show in Orlando, Florida.
Pocketnow.com has managed to get some shots of the stand, highlighting the tablet’s specifications. It’s clear from what’s on view that Samsung is clearly aiming its sights at the Apple iPad 2.
For starters the Galaxy Tab 8.9’s screen has a higher resolution (1,280×800 vs 1,024×768 on the iPad 2), while at 460g and 8.6mm (the iPad 2 is 8.8mm thick and weighs 601g). Admittedly, it’s how the device that’s important and we found the iPad 2 a lot more comfortable to hold than the original iPad due to its thin frame and lower weight.
A 1GHz dual-core processor will power the tablet, and it will even have dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi networking. As you’d expect for a new tablet, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 will run Android 3.0 (Honeycomb); however, Samsung has stuck its own UI on top of it. While this made sense with older versions of Android that were missing some key features, such as proper copy-and-paste and tabbed browsing, Android 3.0 is a lot better and much easier to use. Our worry here is that the new UI means that updates to the OS could be delayed, as Samsung will have to do more tech work to roll them out.
There’s a way to go before we’ll see one of these tablets, though. A US launch date is mooted for this Summer, with the UK sometime after that. Pricing looks competitive with the 16GB version priced at $469 (around £290) and the 32GB version priced at $569 (around £350).