Ahead of the Android pack: hands on with the Galaxy Tab 8.9

As Samsung keeps adding models to its Galaxy lineup, the Tab 8.9 sounds like little more than a grab for real estate on the number line. However, the tablet’s performance and weight are significantly improved from Samsung’s last entry with the Tab 10.1. The Tab 8.9 is well worth the sacrifice of a diagonal inch or so of screen real estate, and is a standout among the current crop of Android tablets.

The first thing you notice is how light the Tab 8.9 is. At 0.98 pounds, we could hold this thing all day, at length, in one hand. This is due in part to the the fact that the back of the tablet is made of plastic patterned to look like brushed aluminum, but neither the design nor the weight make the tablet feel cheap.

The body is curved on all edges, making it comfortable to hold at any angle. The bezel is a little thinner than on the iPad, which can start to make tablets hard to grip if they’re too heavy, but this isn’t a problem with the Tab 8.9. The tablet is a little on the thicker side at 0.46 inches, but doesn’t feel as bloated in hand as tablets of a similar size often do.

The tablet is oriented for landscape use, like the Tab 10.1: on one long side are the sleep button, volume rocker, headphone jack, and microphone, and on the other long side are two speakers flanking a dock connector (no microUSB) for charging. The two cameras are embedded on opposite sides of the same long edge, with a 2-megapixel one on the front and a 3.2-megapixel one with LED flash on the back. When using the tablet, I cottoned automatically to these orientation cues and used it in portrait orientation only when forced.

The Tab 8.9’s rear camera takes middling pictures, better outside than indoors. Indoors at low light, we noticed some graininess, and outside the camera captured better detail, but struggled with too much brightness. At 3.2-megapixel resolution, you don’t get a ton of detail, though the colors are accurate enough. The camera can also capture serviceable 720p video. This is a better setup than on the iPad, but the Tab 10.1 released in February has a superior camera in many respects.

The1280x800 screen on the Tab 8.9 has nice colors without the yellow cast of the Galaxy S II. The screen is bright, though movies in direct sunlight are tough to see and there is noticeable dimness when viewing at some angles. Likewise, the speakers are loud and clear, but their angle means we get the best mileage out of them if the tablet is propped up on a table so the sound can bounce off the surface.

The Tab 8.9 comes running Android 3.1 Honeycomb skinned with Samsung’s TouchWiz UI, so the app icons are extra candy-colored and the tablet comes with a bunch of “hubs” (Music Hub, Social Hub, Media Hub) that you can run your life through, if you so choose. The best thing about TouchWiz, in our view, is that it adds a screen shot button to the menu bar at the bottom of the screen. Screenshots on Android usually require many steps and an extra computer, or require you to root the device, so this is a very welcome addition. What we didn’t like is that TouchWiz’s default alert sound is a very realistic-sounding whistling person, which is downright creepy to hear coming from another room of a quiet, empty house.

Typing on the Tab 8.9 is as smooth as it can be given the size of the keyboard, which is constrained vertically due to how narrow the tablet’s screen is. Trying to strike the keys was similar in difficulty to typing on a shrunken netbook keyboard—it’s not impossible to get some speed up, but you have to be careful not to move your fingers too much. The keyboard also has a built-in handwriting recognition interface, if you have a compatible stylus or feel like scrubbing the tip of your finger on the screen for a while.

Performance-wise, the Tab 8.9 isn’t lapping the rest of the gadget world like some mobile phones (again, Galaxy S II), though it performs well enough its benchmarks. With 1GB of RAM and a dual-core 1GHz Cortex A9 processor, it scores around 2,400 on Quadrant Standard and 30.585 MFLOPS single-threaded/55.373 multi-threaded. Statistically, the tablet bests the Droid Bionic smartphone, tears its 10-inch cousin to shreds, and is on par with the ThinkPad tablet we recently reviewed, but the Tab 8.9 feels much snappier when we use it than the ThinkPad did. In regular use, the Tab 8.9 isn’t laggy at all, even when playing videos or games, and has felt unfailingly responsive during our entire time with it.