Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 Review

Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 Review

Reviewed by: William Harrel Review Date: October 2011

Uncle! We certainly can’t complain about a lack of selection in the tablet market anymore. In the year and a half since the introduction of the original Apple iPad, handheld slates—an ever-increasing assortment of them—have popped up like digital daffodils. Every week, it seems, we see slicker, faster, and lighter machines that cost less and do more. We’ve gone from slim pickings to, quite frankly, too many tough choices. Samsung has made more than its share of impressive contributions to this market. Its 10-inch Galaxy Tab 10.1 ranks among our favorite tablets. Hence, we weren’t surprised by how much we liked the company’s newest, and slightly smaller, offering, the $469 Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9. The Galaxy Tab 8.9 comes in two configurations: a $469 model with 16GB of RAM (that's one we reviewed), and a 32GB version for $100 more. This new slate doesn’t offer any groundbreaking new features versus the 10.1-inch model. Instead, it combines several proven options and brings them together in a small, light, thin, and stylish device. Nothing is perfect, though, and we weren’t thrilled with all of Samsung’s configuration choices. For example, rather than providing an HDMI port for viewing the tablet’s media content on a high-definition (HD) monitor or television, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 relies on Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) to achieve that. Relying solely on DLNA significantly limits users' viewing options. (We'll talk more about DLNA later in this review.) In addition, the Galaxy Tab 8.9’s only data port is a proprietary USB 2.0 jack, which doubles as the power connection for charging the battery. It has no onboard SD-card slot or other flash-card readers. Instead, it relies on adapters that, as you'll see, are clumsy and far from an ideal solution. Overall, though, we liked the Galaxy Tab 8.9's ultra-slim and light design. We found it very responsive and comfortable to hold and use, and as with its predecessors, the screen is nothing short of gorgeous...     Design Taking the Galaxy Tab 8.9 out of its box, we were surprised and delighted by its ultra-thin (0.34-inch) and light (1-pound) chassis. In addition, the unconventional 8.9-inch screen makes for a slightly smaller tablet than the biggest ones on the market, without compromising much on the overall screen size. At 9.1 inches wide and 6.2 inches high, this model is easier to hold for long periods than the full-size 10-inch tablets. As comfortable as the Galaxy Tab 8.9 is to hold, though, the 9.4-inch Sony Tablet S, with its wedge design, feels even better in the hand. Still, the Galaxy Tab 8.9's narrower width makes typing in landscape orientation easier, since you don't have to stretch your thumbs so far to reach the center keys. This slate feels light in your hands, while at the same time exuding sturdy, durable construction. The simplicity of its design—the lack of buttons on the front, an understated front camera lens, and an otherwise empty, uncluttered bezel—gives it an overall appearance of modest elegance. In fact, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 has very few buttons and ports anywhere on the body. Across the top (if you're holding it in landscape orientation), you'll find only a power button, the volume controls, an audio jack, and the pinhole microphone inlet...     On the bottom are the combination USB 2.0/power port (it's a proprietary design) and the openings for the tablet's two speakers...      That's all there is around the edges. You’ll find a 2-megapixel camera on the front face, centered in the top bezel. There is also a 3-megapixel camera, equipped with an autofocus feature and its own flash, on the back...       We tried the front camera in a couple of Voice over IP (VoIP) and video calls, and we were impressed with the smooth frame rate and overall picture clarity. The rear camera, though, is the one that's loaded with options. Similar to a good digital camera, it tries to find the face of the subject in the shot, centers on it, and automatically focuses itself. You can set the flash to Auto Flash so that the camera decides when to use it, or you can tell it to flash on every shot. In addition, a host of of settings control picture quality (such as Scene Mode, White Balance, and Metering), and you can even apply a few special effects to your shots (Sepia, Grayscale, and Negative). The pictures and short movie clips we shot with the rear camera were quite good, at least compared with the ho-hum results we've seen from most tablet and smartphone cameras. The pictures and videos were clear, and the color reproduction was accurate. Granted, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 is not an 8-megapixel high-definition powerhouse, but it more than gets the job done for a tablet. While the cameras are overachievers, the physical connectivity is not quite as adept. The Galaxy Tab 8.9 lacks a few ports and slots that are important (perhaps even critical) to some users, such a flash-card reader, a miniature or standard USB port, and HDMI ports. To compensate, Samsung offers several accessories. To expand storage, for instance, you can purchase a $29.99 SD-card adapter or a $19.99 USB flash-memory adapter. A drawback to this approach is that these devices plug into the charging port, which means you have to disconnect them to charge the tablet. We can envision several inconvenient situations that would result from this, such as the inability to play movies from the adapters while the Galaxy Tab 8.9 is charging. You might find yourself juggling content on and off of the memory adapters—not exactly the seamless experience we were hoping for. We consider the lack of an HDMI port on the device a semi-serious exclusion. Relying on DLNA to push and pull content from TVs and other devices assumes that the user has the latest networkable, DLNA-ready electronics. (If you're one to always have the latest and greatest gizmos, this is a non-issue for you, but many folks don't keep up.) For those who don't have a networkable TV, Samsung offers a $34.99 dock for the Galaxy Tab 8.9 that has an HDMI pass-through on it. Using this dock allows you to connect the Galaxy Tab 8.9 to your TV, but it would have been nicer to have the port right on the tablet, say, for use when you're away from home. Features In touch interfaces, we're seeing a fairly new trend, started by Microsoft on smartphones with Windows Phone 7, and continuing, it appears, in the upcoming Windows 8. (See our impressions of the Windows 8 Developer Preview edition.) Rather than providing just the icons for specific apps, these interfaces display live content in "tiles." In other words, your weather-app tile displays up-to-date weather information, your Twitter-app tile displays the most current tweets, your Facebook tile displays recent newsfeed data, and so on. As long as your tablet is connected to the Internet, these tiles update regularly, displaying the most current information associated with a particular app. Samsung has adopted these in the Galaxy Tab 8.9, calling them "Live Panels." You can create Live Panels for nearly all of your apps, and you can create multiple pages of panels. You can also mix-and-match Live Panels with the usual, static app icons and widgets. When you use Live Panels in conjunction with Samsung's TouchWiz (a user interface that allows you to resize, drag, and drop icons, widgets, and Live Panels with your fingers), you can create highly customized home screens. These screens not only provide quick access to your apps and data, but they also keep you informed without having to open specific apps to get the most current information...        As we mentioned, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 supports DLNA, which allows you to push and pull content to and from other networked DLNA devices (such as Windows PCs, Macs, TVs, and DVD and Blu-ray players) through Samsung's AllShare app and platform. Although AllShare works with any DLNA-compliant device, the AllShare platform provides additional functionality when used with Samsung appliances that also support AllShare. (These include certain Samsung networkable Smart TVs.) For example, you can stream just about anything on the tablet, including a Web browser, straight to a Samsung Smart TV. We didn't have such a Samsung TV (or any other DLNA-capable HDTV, for that matter) to test this. But in this screenshot of the interface, you can see the TV icon above the photo, allowing you to output the content to another display...       If you don't have a Samsung Smart TV, AllShare works just like any other DLNA client, allowing you to share content to and from other networked DLNA-compliant devices. When we fired up AllShare, it automatically found all of the DLNA devices on our wireless network, including the PCs, Macs, and several other tablets and smartphones. Within a few seconds, we were playing media from these devices on the Galaxy Tab 8.9, as well as streaming content to them from the tablet. DLNA is not new technology, but Samsung's AllShare app sure makes it a lot easier to use. Speaking of easy, the Galaxy Tab 8.9's Social Hub app brings your e-mail and social-media accounts together in one app, providing a list of all new activity in one easy-to-use screen. It supports e-mail, including Microsoft Exchange servers, as well as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Once you've got it configured, you can put the Social Hub widget, which displays a current list of all new e-mails, Facebook updates, tweets and LinkedIn comments, on your home screen...      Using Social Hub, you can view activity in all these locations without having to open their respective apps—unless, of course, you see something you want to respond to or examine more closely. Then, you simply touch the item in question and fire off your response. The ability to sync with Exchange servers is just one of enterprise-level functions supported by the Galaxy Tab 8.9. The tablet can encrypt Exchange data during the sync operation, keeping it secure. The tablet also comes with Cisco's WebEx conferencing app, allowing you to attend electronic meetings right from your tablet. In addition, if you lose your Galaxy Tab 8.9, the FindMyMobile app tracks it and displays its whereabouts on a map. You can also use FindMyMobile to lock the device from afar, which will prevent unauthorized access while your tablet is out of your possession. You can also delete information stored on the tablet remotely—yet another way to keep critical personal or business information safe from prying eyes. Several other apps on the tablet are worth mentioning. One, Samsung's Media Hub, provides access to thousands of popular movies, while the parallel Music Hub lets you download music from a catalog consisting of millions of songs. Likewise, the Readers Hub lets you purchase and read electronic books, newspapers, and magazines from Samsung's online library. You can share this content with other devices without paying additional download fees, so long as the other device is made by Samsung. On the getting-things-done side, Samsung pre-installs Polaris Office on the Galaxy Tab 8.9. This "app suite" allows you to view, edit, and create Microsoft Office Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations in Office 97, 2003, or 2007 formats. This is a full version—you don't have to pay to make it fully functional. Samsung also includes many other apps and utilities to get you started, such as an Amazon Kindle reader, a YouTube app, and a nifty Photo Editor app. The last comes in very handy in concert with the good onboard cameras. It lets you make image corrections, such as adjusting color saturation, brightness, and contrast, as well as crop and resize images. You can also apply special-effect filters, such as Blur, Motion, and Frames. Photo Editor is no Photoshop, but we think the ability to make these kinds of edits to images right from your tablet is a handy feature. If you need additional apps, you can always download them from Google's Android Market, which contains hundreds of thousands of free and low-cost ones. You can also find apps at the Samsung Apps market site. According to Samsung, Samsung Apps is “a marketplace designed to provide a variety of mobile applications especially developed and carefully selected for Samsung mobile devices." As of this writing (early October 2011), this service was fairly new and not yet fully developed. All the apps were free when we looked, but Samsung says it will be adding paid apps soon. Performance The Galaxy Tab 8.9 runs version 3.1 of the Android operating system (a.k.a. Honeycomb) on a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor (a dual-core ARM Cortex chip). Graphics are handled by an 8.9-inch capacitive-touch screen, with a native resolution of 1,280x800. Our test unit performed on a par with other Android devices we've tested with similar configurations. Interestingly, it outperformed the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (which has the same resolution) on many of our tests. For example, on our An3DBench test, which measures 3D-graphics capabilities, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 scored 7,740, while the Galaxy Tab 10.1 scored slightly lower (7,585). Both tablets beat the Android-tablet average on this test (7,120) handily. The Galaxy Tab 8.9's score of 31.3 on the CPU-intensive single-thread Linpack for Android test was also above the Android average of 28.3, but well behind the Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101's score of 42.8, and the Acer Iconia Tab A500's 42.6. Both of those tablets use the same processor that the Galaxy Tab 8.9 does. On the other hand, we often see tablets with this processor drop below 30, as well, such as the Sony Tablet S, which scored 29.4. On the multi-threaded version of the Linpack for Android test, which taxes multiple cores of a processor, our test unit scored 54.6—again, middle of the road. The Galaxy Tab 8.9 also ran with the pack on our SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, which measures JavaScript processing speed inside the tablet's native browser. Its score of 2,039 was slightly ahead of most other Android tablets, but not by much. (On this test, a lower score is better.) By comparison, the Sony Tablet S scored 2,202 on this test. We also ran our game-simulation test, GUIMark 2. Here, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 scored 32 frames per second (fps), which was 2fps to 5fps faster than most Android tablets running the same processor and OS. (Among all of the tablets we've tested, only the Acer Iconia Tab A500 and its score of 39.1fps was faster.) Our test unit also performed well on our SpeedTest.net test, which measures Wi-Fi download and upload speeds. It consistently downloaded at over 20,000Kbps and uploaded at over 5,000Kbps. Very few tablets we've tested performed this well, especially Android-based ones. We then ran our Boot Time Test, which measures the time from when we push the power button to when the tablet becomes usable. Our test unit's score of 31 seconds placed it roughly smack-dab in the middle of the tablets-we've-tested pack. TheToshiba Thrive 10 Tablet's 24-second time was the best we've seen on this test. The Galaxy Tab 8.9's score was indeed better than the Android-tablet average (36 seconds), but most Android tablets we've tested haven't come close to the Apple iPad 2's field-leading boot time of 22 seconds. The iPad 2 also consistently lasts nearly twice as long (14 hours and 22 minutes) as Android slates do on our Battery Rundown Test. (In this test, we play a movie on repeat until the tablet dies.) The Galaxy Tab 8.9 lasted 7:32 on this trial, a quarter-hour longer than the Android-tablet average (7:17). Interestingly, Android tablets based on the same processor and OS score all over the board on this test. The Galaxy Tab 10.1's 9:26 beat out its smaller sibling by nearly two hours, and Motorola's Xoom lasted 9:40. All of these numbers aside, the bottom line is that the Galaxy Tab 8.9 performs as expected for a tablet running its hardware and operating system. More important than small differences in benchmark-test scores is the overall user experience, such as how fast pages load and how responsive the screen is to touch gestures—the things that make a tablet pleasant to use. From that perspective, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 is winner on all accounts. We liked using this slate. Conclusion As we noted at the start of this review, we're drowning in a sea of new Android tablets, with new models often topping each other in features in rapid succession. Plus, Amazon's upcoming tablet, the Kindle Fire, could be a market disruptor at the low end when it debuts later this fall. (See our preview of the Amazon Kindle Fire.) The fact that the Galaxy Tab 8.9 still manages to stand out is to Samsung's credit. This tablet is attractive, powerful, and portable, and its slightly smaller form makes it easier to carry around and more comfortable to use than most 10-inch tablets. Since it has the same 1,200x800 native resolution as the larger slates, you don’t really give up much by going with its slightly smaller screen. We're not thrilled with some of Samsung's connectivity compromises, however. Leaving out the HDMI port, for example, prohibits many users from displaying content on HDTVs (without the optional multimedia dock, that is). And the lack of a flash-card slot makes getting high-quality images onto the tablet a bit cumbersome. However, without these design choices, this tablet might not have been as thin, attractive, or comfortable to use as it is. On the flip side, you get plenty of versatility with this device, thanks to its support for both the Android Market and Samsung’s App Store, not to mention the very useful apps that Samsung includes for free. Overall, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 is another tablet winner from Samsung, delivering a fine balance of size, aesthetics, features, and performance.