Samsung Galaxy Tab in Use

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (WiFi, 16GB, Black) - UK Version

Review Page - Also see Brennan JB7 review

I've had my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 for nearly two months now so I thought I'd update my review. My Main Home Page has changed a bit. I've moved the games to the adjacent screen to make more room for frequently used apps.

Kies and USB

The Kies software from Samsung for syncing with a PC is slow, bloated and flaky despite a recent upgrade. (The update was corrupt and never stopped downloading, requiring a visit to the Samsung site.) Kies has problems connecting to the tablet even when Windows 7 reports its presence as a Portable Media Player as shown below.

When double-clicked on it reveals the Tablet folder.

The Tablet folder contains all the default folders as well as any you might drag there from your PC or laptop. Before plugging the USB cable into your PC make sure the tablet is on and you're logged on. If you have Windows sounds enabled for Device Connection and Disconnection then when first plugged in you should hear the standard Device Connected sound as you would with a flash drive or external hard disk. Assuming you're logged on to your tablet you should then hear the Device DISconnected sound because Windows realises this is an MTP device and not a Mass Storage Device and thus Windows invokes the Media Transfer Protocol.

Unfortunately it's not possible to allocate a drive letter to the GT-P7510 so you can't use Microsoft SyncToy as a substitute for Kies. Also the USB MTP drivers are embedded in the Kies software so you can't install the drivers without installing Kies unless you use software to extract the drivers.

Manual Synchronising

My Pictures folder is 8GB and contains nearly 27000 edited photos so to sync this manually I've adopted this method:

In Windows browse to the Pictures folder and under the View menu change to Sort by Date (Ascending)

Do a search for *.* or *.jpg. (Windows 7 has a Search dialogue at the top right of the screen.)

All folders and subfolders will open to display all contents. Click on any image and press the End key on the keyboard.

All the most recent photos are shown regardless of their location.

On the PC open a separate window on the tablet's Pictures folder.

It's now necessary to check the pictures (or other files) to see if they're already on the tablet. Right-click on individual recent files near the foot of the desktop PC's window and choose Properties to find the Location (sub-folder).

Browse to the corresponding sub-folder in the tablet's Pictures folder and use drag and drop to update the tablet.

Other Thoughts

The default web browser remains the best until Firefox and Chrome etc get their act together. The drop-down menus on my website Home Page don't work as expected on my tablet or my iPod Touch but the Main Menu serves the same purpose.

The Ice Cream Sandwich Operating System coming in the new year should hopefully resolve some glitches e.g. intermittent flickering black triangles when viewing BBC weather forecast (announcer and chart) full screen. I first noticed this when watching BBC Click.

Steve Jobs would be turning in his grave if he knew I'd read his biography on an Android tablet. It froze once or twice when I was reading but pressing the off button then on again restored page turns without losing my place.

Update January 2012

Since my last update I've installed more apps and games and the tablet has become less responsive. Even when WiFi is disabled, and I've turned off everything else possible (e.g. prevented apps from updating themselves) there are pauses of several seconds while the screen responds to nothing at all.

The default Task Manager may show one app running (the one I'm trying to use). Switching to its RAM Manager and selecting Clear Memory has been tried. An app called Android OS Monitor shows CPU% (processor time) but there's nothing listed that looks suspicious, e.g. Android System 1%, System UI 1%. AVG Antivirus Pro says everything is OK.

I am pretty well convinced this is purely an Operating System issue and I'm anxiously awaiting ICS. I haven't seen any likely date for its release other than second quarter of 2012, so it could be April 2012 at least - unless anyone knows better.

Meantime I'll switch back to the new Stephen King book called 11/22/63 and will try to time some periods when it refuses to turn the page...

Attempt 1 - 6 seconds passed before I could change page
Attempt 2 - 9 seconds passed before I could change page

There are other times when it responds immediately. It just wants me to hang around while it goes and does unknown stuff that it won't tell me about. Sometimes I get fed up sliding my finger about or tapping repetitively and waiting for some response - so I give the power button a quick press Off then On. It invariably lets me enter my security code, then I can go back to my ebook or Tweetdeck (whatever) and be afforded the privilege of taking control again for a few seconds.

Maybe I'll get an iPad 3 (if Samsung doesn't release the new OS soon)...

Evidently I'm not the only one noting performance deterioration. This external page has some interesting observations:
How CyanogenMod 9 saved my Galaxy Tab 10.1 Come on Samsung / Google / whoever, get the OS sorted!

Update 18th Jan 2012: I've downloaded firmware update P7510XXKL2 and installed it. The reboot took so long I thought I'd better connect the power supply. Not many striking innovations but at least the damn thing now seems to respond to my touches and doesn't ignore me for many seconds any more. It's not Ice Cream Sandwich but it seems reasonably cool so far, nonetheless...

Update 21st Jan 2012: For a day or two everything was fast and responsive. Today it became slow and clunky again even after forcing a reset or two. The Screen needs repeated attempts - and touches (and non-existent) touches seem to be stored in a buffer and acted on minutes later - if at all. Luckily my Kindle has a keyboard and I was able to do a text search to find my place in my book which I'd been reading on the Galaxy Tab recently.

I haven't been counting the days but since removing the Facebook app it's been much better... (29th Jan 2012)
Ditto (3rd Feb). The lesson to be learned here is DO NOT INSTALL THE FACEBOOK APP.

Syncing of photos has been a recent discussion on The Galaxy Tab Forum - Samsung Galaxy Tab Forum & Community! and this can be done using Windows Media Player on Windows 7. Read on...

Why I hate 'libraries' - WTF's wrong with folder FFS?

Text from Windows Media Player on Windows 7 (my emphasis)

If you delete a library, the library itself is moved to the Recycle Bin. The files and folders that were accessible in the library are stored elsewhere and therefore aren't deleted. If you accidentally delete one of the four default libraries (Documents, Music, Pictures, or Videos), you can restore it to its original state in the navigation pane by right-clicking Libraries and then clicking Restore default libraries.

If you delete files or folders from within a library, they're also deleted from their original locations. If you want to remove an item from a library but not delete it from the location it's stored in, you should remove the folder containing the item. When you remove a folder from a library, all the items in the folder will be removed (but not deleted). For more information, see Include folders in a library.

Quirky Behaviour

Before I started the following test I renamed the Pictures folder on my tablet to FoldersPictures so it wouldn't be confused with any new folders created. If all went well I could delete that folder which contained numerous subfolders all made by drag and drop.

My experiences when I gave Media Player a shot at syncing my pictures to my Galaxy Tab were rather as I expected. Before I even clicked on the Start Sync button in Media Player's GT-P7510 tab window there was furious activity on my PC as it searched for info about 'unknown albums'.

I then clicked the Start sync button which changed to a Stop sync button. I switched to the Sync status view and noticed that some pictures had been 'Synced to device' and others were marked 'Conversion required' which struck me as odd because they were already virtually all JPEGs. Furthermore, some filenames in the queue had numbers as names which isn't something I would do when editing and saving pictures.

Once the Sync was completed I disconnected the tablet and thought I'd better try the pre-installed Gallery app, guessing that it would sort the photos just as they'd appeared in Windows Media Player's view. After a minute it had loaded 1 album out of the 1990 created (either by itself or by Windows Media Player). After 30 minutes it had loaded (but not correctly named) 17 albums.

I let the Gallery app run in the background for a while and used ES File Explorer to look at the new Pictures folder created by Windows Media Player's syncing efforts. As I'd rather expected there were masses of subfolders and files missing. There should have been 26909 files in 289 folders totalling 7.79GB. To see what it actually contained click on the thumbnail on the left.

Having given up this entire procedure I then deleted the new Pictures folder and renamed my FoldersPictures folder back to Pictures. This confused Windows Explorer. I browsed to the Pictures folder on the tablet and saw that most of my files appeared to have vanished. I right-clicked on the the tablet's folder in Windows Explorer and selected Properties. It said there were only 88 files instead of the nearly 27000 I'd been expecting.

Back on the tablet I used ES File Explorer and saw that all my files were still there; it was just Windows that needed to sort out its metadata (data about data). I actually downloaded an update for Kies by googling for it, not by Check for Updates and let it loose for a while. Some of the bugs seem to be removed.

USB SD Card Adaptor

Before the above failed method at syncing files, I thought I'd be smart and use an SD card as an intermediary. I got the Samsung adaptor kit from Amazon as well as a 32GB SD card. I connected the card to my PC and copied my Pictures folder to it. This took about an hour. Because Windows Explorer gave the card a drive letter I knew I'd be able to use SyncToy to update it later.

Because the Galaxy Tab mounted the SD card I thought it would be easy to sync it to my Pictures folder on the tablet. I'd imagined that when it mounted the card onto its own file system, a friendly prompt would appear saying something like 'new storage found' but I had to search to find it was actually at /mnt/sdcard/Storages/usb/sda/Pictures. Furthernore the original (intended destination) folder is confusingly filed as /sdcard/Pictures too.

I had to give up trying to find any apps which would sync from the real SD card to the incorrectly named virtual version in the tablet's storage memory. All the apps which 'sync' are no good at syncing from one folder to another locally.

The conclusion meantime is that I have to continue to sync manually. There's no software I can find that'll do it.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (WiFi, 16GB, Black) - UK Version

Also see Brennan JB7 review