Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 or P310 or P3100 Review: Great power at a great price

Design and built

The Tab 2 7.0 won’t break any ground in terms of looks, but it sure deviates a little bit from the typical Galaxy Tab layout towards more Galaxy Smartphone looks – maybe the GSM radio is to blame here? Nonetheless, the Tab looks fresh out of the oven, with all premium tablet features (and not one laptop exclusive feature) in a very premium looking package that does not look very rugged. Having said that, it’ll surely sustain small falls from the table, but don’t try to throw it from your 3^rd floor balcony or it might break open.

The front is dominated by the 7-inch LCD screen. On top of it towards the right sits the VGA front camera. No hotkeys below – only the Sammy logo. The right side houses the volume rocker and the power button, the top – the 3.5mm jack, the left – the SIM and MicroSD slot and at the bottom resides the 30-pin port along with two speakers on both sides.

The back is plastic with a very premium metallic silver greyish look that Samsung calls Titanium Silver. There is the 3.15MP camera on the back.

Also the preferred orientation of the tab is portrait and not landscape like in case of the 10.1-inchers.

Overall we like the look of the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0, even as a fashion statement.

Display

The 7-inch LCD display is bright and crisp with the 1024 x 600 pixels resolution that used to be on 10-inch netbooks. There is no darkening towards the edges and the screen pixels holds just fine throughout the spread. The viewing angle is up to about 30% from the same plane but it’s mostly your eyes’ viewing angle and not the display’s. The only problem is that the blacks are not dark enough, so when you’re viewing a movie and there’s a dark scene, you’ll find the black becoming kind of greyish. This, mind you, you might not get it anywhere in this price point though.

Interface

The Tab 2 7.0 runs on Ice Cream Sandwich aka Android 4.0.3. This adds a lot of new features as far as Android is concerned. The TouchWiz UX UI on top is not the latest i.e. 5.0 but UX is reserved for only the tablets. By updated we meant it is not being updated at the same pace as the Smartphone TouchWiz. Still as usual the TouchWiz UX on the Tab 2 7.0 is light and stable but bland. The icons are usual Samsung icons which we expected to change, it being released at the same time as the latest phone counterparts. Moving around the interface is very smooth and fast with absolutely no lag, thanks to the dual-core baby. It lags a bit, just a bit mind you, when the homepages are laden with widgets but that’s expected from Android.

Adding and removing widgets are usual. However you can’t add or delete home-screens. The soft hotkeys are placed at the bottom left – back, home, recent and screenshot taker; and the settings on the right. The top right shows the menu key. Note that Android 4.0 only places contextual menu buttons.