Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus.

This Christmas marked the very first return of a gift for me other than to trade up or down sizes of clothing. I was lucky enough to receive an iPad2 32Gb with wifi from my mom and step-dad, but as I'm not particularly impressed by Apple products, I decided to swap it out.

Playing with the iPad for a few hours throughout the weekend, I really tried to like it. I tried a few e-books, an episode or two of Married with Children on Netflix, but I just couldn't get into it. So I made the decision to swap it out for a smaller Android tablet and use the leftover cash towards a new TV for the living room. I took a trip to Best Buy and put fingerprints on all of the Android tablets they until finally, after a bit of deliberation and some ooh's and ahh's, decided on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus 16gb edition.

I drove home as fast as I could swerve in and out of traffic, laughing maniacally as raced from South Philly to Fishtown. Upon arriving home, I darted up to my Fortress of Nerditude and plugged in this sexy looking piece of machinery for its first charge. After a short amount of time, I heard the chirp which signaled the charge was complete. Finally I was ready to set this thing up. It was only about 2 minutes later, that I experienced my first disappointment. Now, I'm still a Linux newbie and should have probably been on the lookout for this, but... Samsung's sync software Kies(r) was not compatible with my system. No problem. I'll work around it. I should be able to do this via USB, right? After plugging the tablet into my PC running Ubuntu Oneiric, I couldn't view any of the mounted file system. It looks like I'll be doing any sync activities through my Windows machine. No big deal. However, I do take issue with the inability to charge via USB, not even for a slow charge. It would be nice to be able to sync and charge at the same time. Two birds, one stone blah blah blah. Not one make quick judgments, I decided to press on.

I really wanted to investigate the PEEL Smart Remote that interfaced with the built in IR transmitter to control my TV, STB, and DVD player. It seemed like a pretty cool option, but I was a little disappointed to learn that the initial setup requited a set top box and TV service. This essentially rendered the software useless to me, but from the reviews I read about it, it does look pretty useful if you have a FiOS or Digital Cable provider. I searched the Android App Store for a Roku remote and found a satisfactory one, but I barely use it. It's much easier to just grab the remote from the coffee table than it is to switch out of whatever I'm doing and open the remote and then switch back. This speaks somewhat more about the poor multitasking ability of tablet technology as a whole and less about the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus itself.

This thing is awesome for streaming video. Crappy selection aside, Netflix Instant Watch works extremely well. The picture quality is awesome and I haven't had any problems with the audio feed sync or choppy video. I'm a little sad that Hulu Plus doesn't support streaming to this device yet, but I'm patient. The YouTube app is decent enough and the experience is what I expected. I have the Plex App for my media server installed and watching The Goonies last night was awesome. I didn't have to leave my bed to find a DVD, or use my laptop form across the room on the nightstand.

The Amazon Kindle App works like a light weight version of the Kindle Fire. I've read a Star Wars Universe novel, a couple of tech books and downloaded a score of free literary classics. I wish I could port my Popular Mechanics subscription over, but oh well.

I'm impressed with the internal storage capacity even though it is only 16 gb. I have installed about 70 apps and haven't had a problem with running out of room. Among my favorite apps are Spotify, Pulse, RTFM (Linux Man Pages), and Evernote. Evernote is a recent discovery of mine. When I make notes for myself, or have an idea or momentary lapse of stupidity, I usually write it down on the closest piece of paper and then promptly lose it. For the last couple of weeks, I've been forcing myself to use Evernote. I;ve been able to maintain a solid collection of my thoughts and access them from my phone, tablet, PC and laptop. I like this app so much, I'll likely pay for it. When I run out of storage or have a need for some of the premium features like collaborative notes, larger storage or offline note history.

As a higher end “cheap tablet”, The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus has a great user experience. I even like Samsung's TouchWiz Android Skin. The interface is comfortable and easy to use. The graphics are smooth and give me the warm and fuzzy. Aside from the proprietary Cable and lack of Linux support for the Kies Wifi Sync, I'm very satisfied with this purchase. It's lightweight, feels nice in my hand and performs like I would have expected. The battery life is excellent, and I'm impressed with the quality of the streaming video.

As usual. If anyone have any thing to say about this post, please comment!