SAMSUNG GALAXY TAB 620

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amsung entered the tablet space with the galaxy tab P1000 back in 2010 but it did not have an easy childhood. It was a bit bulky and glitchy, due to Froyo and simply too expensive to even consider, especially when you had the iPad selling for around the same price. Today we have the newly launched Samsung Galaxy Tab 620 or 7.0 Plus (in international markets), a successor to the not so successful P1000.

Design and Build

The Tab 620 borrows a lot of its features from its elder siblings- the Tab 750 and 730. The chunkiness of the old one has been shaved down for a more streamlined and curvy design. It’s slimmer at 9.9mm and lighter as well, at just 345g. In order to achieve this Samsung have used a lot of plastic for the classis but despite this it feels sturdy and durable. There are not any creaking parts and every thing feels put together well. The power and volume rocker has been placed on the right, while the SIM and microSD  card is placed on the left.

                Quite frankly, we hate the proprietary charging/data port, since it means you have to be extra careful with the bundled cable. The connector looks very similar to Apple’s connector and here we thought they were trying to avoid any more lawsuits. The stereo speakers are placed at the bottom , but they are not very loud. Also, when viewing video in landscape mode, you don’t get the left-right stereo effect. This being a Honeycomb tablet, there aren’t any physical , capacitive shortcut buttons on the screen. All you get is the front facing camera and a bunch of sensors (proximity, ambient light). Samsung bundles the Tab 620 with a charger and a headset. Other accessories, like the USB host adapter that comes with the Tab 750 should be compatible with this as well, since they are pretty much identical.

Features

A familiar looking interface greets us when you power it on the fast boot takes a while, but after that the boot up time is quite less. This is the only 7 inch tablet in the Indian market right now that runs Honeycomb (v3.2) and while we are not big fans of this tablet OS, it seems to suit a smaller screen better. For first time, we didn’t mind that the shortcut access to various settings where scattered all over the screen, simply because, it’s much easier to reach, so less effort.

                Samsung have given their TouchWiz UX UI treatment to the 620 making it colorful and vibrant. The new PLS LCD screen that has been used here has a decent resolution of 1024*600, but we could not help but notice that the brightness levels were a tad low. Even on full brightness, it’s not blindingly bright, so you could run into problems under direct sunlight. Also, the ambient light sensor tends to dim the screen a little too much when indoors making the pictures appear a bit dull.

                The processor is lifted straight from sammy’s galaxy S II; the dual core Exynos 4210 chipset with the mail 400 mp graphics chip. Couple this with 1GB of RAM and 16 GB of on board storage and you have a recipe for an amazing multimedia experience the interface is quite fluid except for moments when TouchWiz raises its ugly head overall it is a very pleasant experience and with ICS update due in Q2 it should be even better Samsung have thrown in some of their own wallpapers and widgets like Buddisnow pulse socialhub etc. They have also included pen Memo yhat lets you draw stuff with a digital pen or your finger. In order to compete with the HTC Flyer we have a screenshot button which lets you take a screen and then you can edit it. Add some notes and send it via mail Bluetooth etc. performance wise it’s on par with the Galaxy S II and only slightly behind the Galaxy note. In AnTuTu we logged a score of 6123 points, Whereas linpack returned a single Thread score of 41.9 and Multi-tthread score of 75.1.

Media

All those little niggles with touchWiz fly right out the window when you see what the tab 620 can do in the media department the audio and video player has been restored to its former glory as it now has full support for FLAC files and is DivX HD certified you don’t need any third party video player here as unlike the tab 750 and 730 the tab 620 will playback almost all video formats with ease got some 1080p MKVs ? simply dump it in and watch it. There’s even a folder view which lets you sort your videos more easily we are glad that Samsung brought back this amazing feature in the tab 620 which we sorely missed in their other offerings if you find you are running out of apace simply add a microSD card and expand the storage another feature that’s missing in the bigger tablets both music and videos can be streamed anytime to DLNA compatible TV at the push of a button.

Connectivity

The tab 620 is a quad-band GSM tablet with support for voice calls well. Simply pair it with a Bluetooth headset or use the bundled wired headset and you are all set to make calls. There’s even an option for video calling in the dialer. It also supports 3G with full HSDPA (21Mbps) and HSUPA (5.74Mbps) support. Along with wi-fi ‘n’ we also have dual band support which means the tab 620 can connect to either a 2.4 GHz band or the fastest 5GHz band. Wi-fi direct Bluetooth 3.0 DLNA and TV-out wind up the connectivity options.

                The onscreen keyboard is also Swype built-in should you need it. The stock browser is quick in rendering web pages. Zooming in and out is fluid.This is not a big deal really but a word of caution if you have DivX codec installed on your PC and you try to copy a video file to the tablet it crash.

Camera

The camera sensor is only 3.1 megapixel but you do get auto focus smile detection and panorama modes to play around with unfortunately the sensor can not pick up good amount of detail unless the subject is very well lit micro shots are a lot better especially with the flash on the panorama mode stitches together eight pictures but there’s a lot of blurring. Overall the camera is pretty average and we wished they would have used a 5 megapixel sensor instade.