Latest Samsung Galaxy 10.1 tablet

Following the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Tab with its 7-inch display late last year, Samsung has now announced the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, the newest member to the company’s tablet lineup. The device, as its name implies, was unveiled at Mobile World Congress with a 10.1-inch 1280 X 800 WXGA display and features Google’s Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system, like the Motorola Xoom which was announced at the beginning of the year at CES.

The Galaxy Tab 10.1, however, is a little bit lighter than both the 9.7-inch iPad and the 10.1-inch Xoom at 1.3 pounds, compared to 1.5 and 1.6 pounds. The device will have a proprietary charging cable and no USB support.

Unlike the 7-inch Tab, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 will not be utilizing Samsung’s internal processor and will use an NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core 1.0 GHz CPU; the 7-inch Tab came with a single-core 1.0 GHz Hummingbird CPU that was made by Samsung based on ARM design.

Like the new Galaxy S II smartphones, also unveiled at MWC, the new Galaxy Tab 10.1 will feature both a front- and rear-facing camera. The rear camera has an 8-megapixel resolution with LED flash while the front camera is capable of 2-megapixel resolution, which would mostly be used for self-portraits and video calling.

Unlike the Galaxy S II smartphones, however, there was no mention that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 will utilize the same Super AMOLED Plus displays. In the past, while the Galaxy S smartphones made use of the company’s Super AMOLED screens, the original 7-inch Tab shipped with an LCD display.

The device supports WiFi a/b/g/n and also HSPA+ up to 21 Mbps, making it a 4G-capable device according to the marketing lingo employed by U.S. GSM carriers. However, to take advantage of the maximum theoretical download speeds, the carrier and network must be optimized to support it–in the U.S., T-Mobile USA can support up to 21 Mbps in 4G areas while AT&T’s HSPA+ network will be capped at 14.4 Mbps and the carrier is expected to migrate to LTE after.

Additionally, the device will be a Google Experience tablet, meaning that Samsung won’t pre-load its proprietary TouchWiz user interface on top of Android 3.0 Honeycomb, which was the first version of Android designed for tablets.

The tablet will start shipping in some markets in June for an undisclosed price. With the early summer release date, the tablet will probable debut after the iPad 2 and the Xoom, and will ship around the same time that Apple will begin pushing out the next-generation iPhone 5 if the company’s historical launch dates hold true.

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Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

As you can see from the gallery, both the 10.1 and the 8.9 look extremely similar, and boy are they thin. They measure just .33-inches thick, and as you can glean from this picture, they absolutely give the .34-inch iPad some real competition in terms of dimensions. The models we saw weren't final -- in fact, they didn't even power on -- but Samsung says the 10.1 will weigh 1.31 pounds and the 8.9 just 1.03 pounds. Both tablets have microSD slots, 3.5mm headphone jacks, and SIM slots, although there will be WiFi versions of both of them. The two tablets have the same array of cameras, which includes a 3 megapixel shooter with an LED flash on the back and a 2 megapixel lens on the front.

Internally, the Tabs will pack 1GHz dual-core processors. We're assuming it will be Tegra 2 since all the Honeycomb tablets thus far have used NVIDIA's silicon, but that's unconfirmed at this point. The 8.9 will be available with 16GB of storage and a 6000mAH battery, and the 10.1 will come in both 16GB and 32GB varieties and with a 6860mAH cell. Both are said to provide 10 hours of video playback. There are full specs of both of these in the press release below.