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Samsung showed off the Galaxy Tab in the U.S. for the first time in New York City. Despite the fact that Samsung used the event to announce its distribution deals with the four major U.S. carriers, it only had the international version on hand. That means the hardware isn't representative of what American consumers can expect and none of the carrier-specific builds were on hand to play with.

The Tab is a comfortable device to hold that really feels more like a giant phone than anything else. It is made of smooth plastics, has a nice weight, but I thought it was a little bit on the thick side.

As Samsung was sure to demonstrate, the Tab will actually fit into the back pocket of your jeans, though I'd be shocked if anyone actually transported it around that way. It will more easily slip into a backpack, purse, satchel, man-purse than the iPad.

Body  

The four typical Android controls are on the front of the Tab in the form of touch-buttons instead of real, physical keys. They were responsive enough to the touch and large enough that finding and using them wasn't a problem.

The right side side of the Tab has the most going on. The power/lock key is there, along with the volume toggle, microSD card port, and microUSB port. Interacting with these controls was no problem.

The bottom houses a proprietary dock connector and stereo speakers. The 3.5mm headset jack is positioned at the top.

In all, the hardware is decent, but it's hard to pass final judgement until we see the actual production versions for each U.S. carrier.

The Android 2.2 user interface appears exactly as it does on Samsung's Galaxy S Android phones. The only discernible difference is the lack of any controls for the phone. Speaking of which, it is worth pointing out that the Tab cannot make voice calls via cellular networks. It is capable of VoIP calls through services such as Skype, but regular cellular calls are out.

The Tab has Samsung's newest version of TouchWiz on board, but again it is the same as the version that appears on the Galaxy S smartphones. The menus, controls, and features all work and act the same.

Interacting with the software really does feel like interacting with a really big Android phone.

Android UI  

On the versions Samsung had on hand, the auto-rotate feature was unavailable, so many of the customized software features that Samsung created for the Tab were unavailable to look at.

Watching movies on it was nice. The combination of the size, weight, and screen resolution made the Tab really comfortable to use for movies. I imagine it would be a better airplane companion than a larger device such as the iPad.

The Tab on hand did have Samsung's MediaHub installed. MediaHub will be a place for users to access and download content such as music, movies and TV. The interface was clean — almost Spartan-like — and was easy to navigate.

The other most noteworthy aspect of the software is the way the Android Market works. Some applications support the screen size and resolution of the Tab, others do not. For those that don't, they will fill the center of the screen, but can't be double-sized to cover the entire screen real estate.

In addition to the four carrier models, Samsung said a Wi-Fi only version will be available. How the carriers subsidize the Tab in conjunction with data plans and data plan pricing, will all play a big role in how the Tab is priced at retail.

In sum, I'd say the Tab is a decent computing device that could perhaps serve as a smartphone alternative for those who still prefer to user feature phones.

Eric has been covering the mobile telecommunications industry for 17 years at various print and online publications. He studied at Rutgers Newark and University of Kentucky, and has a degree in writing. He likes playing guitar, attending concerts, listening to music, and driving sports cars.

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