I couldn’t resist.
This morning I was in New York City, near Union Square Park, which is known for its excellent farmer’s market.
And temporarily, the Best Buy on the south end of the park is one of the few places you can see and touch Samsung’s stunning Android tablet.
So I took the subway uptown and then made a beeline for the store
According to the headlines on a few tech sites, Samsung will make its great tablet hope available to the general public tomorrow through multiple retailers.
This dual-cored, thin slab of Samsung tech prowess instantly cast a spell over me. According to one of the Best Buy employees, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is selling quite nicely at the Union Square store. I’ve no doubt its first month sales numbers nationwide will be on the level of an iPad, which scored about a million in its first 30 days last May.
Factoring in the economy, how about 800,00 Galaxy Tab 10.1s sold by the end of July? I think Samsung sold around 600K of the less powerful Tab 7.
Back to my quick test. I learned that to take full advantage of many of the Google apps on the Tab, you need to log into your Gmail account.
I tried instead apps that had been already installed on the device. The ebook reader was great, and I found myself flipping through Alice in Wonderland and gazing at the simulated curled pages—it felt the same to me as when I first tried the iPad .
I also experienced Pulse, the online news sampler. I’m beginning to feel now that the tablet is the perfect instrument for viewing our online abbreviated literary forms: blog posts, tweets, Facebook, RSS feeds, etc.
Back to old media.The Samsung tech at the store gave me a peek at an Android-style magazine viewer. I still can’t see myself giving up ink on wood pulp, but Galaxy Tab 10.1 is persuasive.
And I enjoyed triggering Honeycomb OS’s multi-tasking button, and seeing all the active apps crisply lined up on the side and ready to be switched into.
Conclusion: it will be very hard for me now to go back to my 7″, Android 2.2 Archos tablet.
Alice in Wonderland on the Galaxy Tab 10.1