The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus

Pros
Fast. Makes it easier to find Honeycomb apps. Attractive UI adds useful features.

Cons
Remote app doesn't work well. Honeycomb still lacks tablet-oriented apps.

Bottom Line
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus is as good as a midrange Honeycomb tablet can get nowadays.If anything can save the Honeycomb tablet field, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus ($399 list, 16GB) can. Slim, elegant, and entertainment-focused, this is about as good as a 7-inch Google Android Honeycomb tablet gets. But while Samsung manages to solve one of Honeycomb's most critical problems with a custom app store, this product line is still slightly uncomfortably wedged between budget and high-end tablets.

Physical Design and Connectivity

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus looks like a shrunken-down version of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 ($469, 3.5 stars) and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 ($499, 3.5 stars.) These are the best-looking, best-built Android tablets on the market, slim black and gray slabs (in this case, 7.6 by 4.8 by .39 inches and 12.1 ounces) clearly made of quality materials. The Galaxy Tab 7.0 will slip unnoticeably into a coat pocket. It's lovely.

The Tab 7.0 Plus has its Power and Volume buttons, as well as its MicroSD card slot, on the side. The 2-megapixel front camera is at the top of the bezel, to the right of the speaker, which also faces the user. The 1024-by-600 pixel TFT LCD is pretty standard for tablets of this size.

This is a Wi-Fi-only tablet, connecting to 802.11b/g/n networks. It also has Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth and wireless syncing, so you can connect it directly to a Wi-Fi-Direct-capable PC to transfer files.

Performance and Apps

The Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus runs Android Honeycomb 3.2 on a dual-core Samsung Exynos 1.2GHz processor. It benchmarked blazingly fast, and the tablet runs very smoothly even with Samsung's many complex TouchWiz extensions over standard Android.

Samsung has heavily skinned this tablet. It comes with a whole bunch of custom widgets. You can pop up a "quick action" bar from the bottom of the screen to give you speedy access to a task manager, calendar, world clock, memo pad, calculator, or music player. Samsung added custom e-book reader, magazine subscription and photo editing apps, none deletable, to Google's standard trove.

The big win here, though, is Samsung's custom app store, Samsung Apps. In the past Samsung Apps has been a lackluster collection of about two dozen apps Samsung delivers as sweeteners for their products, but it's blossomed into a good-looking storefront of several hundred tablet-oriented apps; the links all take you to the Android Market, so you don't have to sign up for another account. This is the best approach I've seen so far towards solving the Android Market's problems with discovering tablet apps. Fortunately, as a 7-inch tablet running Android 3.2, the Tab 7.0 Plus can also run Android phone apps in zoomed mode, which isn't a panacea but doesn't look that bad.

The 4000mAh nonremovable battery delivered 6 hours, 33 minutes of continuous video playback, a very good result for a 7-inch tablet.

Entertainment and Peel Remote

Samsung pitches this as an "entertainment tablet" whose flagship app is Peel Smart Remote, a potentially awesome TV companion which would be far more awesome if it worked.

Peel's idea is compelling: it shows all the programs playing on your TV as graphical "cards" which you can sort by genre, drilling down to see program details or flipping over to watch similar shows. When you select a card, it should set your TV to watch the show, although it can't set your DVR to record a show in the future.

But I had serious trouble with the actual remote parts of Peel Smart Remote, which use the tablet's weak IR emitter. I tried the remote with three Insignia and Sharp TVs and Roku, AppleTV and Dish Networks set-top boxes. Setup was always a problem. The Peel had trouble detecting and switching the TVs' inputs. Trying to move the cursor on the AppleTV caused the TV to switch off. Operating the TiVo, there was a serious lag between sliding the fast-forward button on the remote and having the TiVo respond, which made the device difficult to operate. Aiming it at the Dish receiver, parts of channel selections were sometimes cut off, sending the device to the wrong channel. The app also threw up various errors pretty frequently, such as "No content available at this time, please check back later!" As a result, I can't recommend this app.

I had much better luck playing video on this tablet. The Tab comes with Media Hub, Samsung's elegant but pricey video store ($2.99-$3.99 to rent movies, $9.99 and up to buy movies, $1.99 to buy TV shows) as well as Google's own video rental service. H.264, MPEG4, XVID and DIVX videos all played smoothly at up to 1080p resolution, with audio coming through clearly over wired or Bluetooth headphones. If you want to play your video on a TV, you'll have to shell out for a $34.99 Multimedia Dock which provides HDMI output.

The tablet is also a dandy music player, running all the usual Android music services including Google Music. Samsung's TouchWiz hacks include quick access to the music player popping up from the bottom status bar, and the tablet played all the usual music formats.

The two cameras aren't very high-res, but they're high quality. The 3-megapixel rear camera is very good indoors, taking sharp, clear images. The 2-megapixel front camera is unusually good in low light. Both cameras have somewhat slow shutter speeds; I found that passing cars, for instance, could get blurry.

Video recording indoors resulted in very noisy 720p movies at 24 frames per second; outdoors, I got cleaner 720p movies at 30 frames per second, but with blown-out bright areas.

The tablet comes in 16GB and 32GB ($499) models; the 16GB model, which we tested, had about 13GB user-accessible and worked fine with our 32GB SanDisk MicroSD card, which popped into a slot in the side.

Conclusions

There are a lot of very similar Android Honeycomb-based tablets on the market. The Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus is more expensive than the Acer Iconia Tab A100 ($349.99, 4 stars); it's also faster, slimmer and more elegant. (The Iconia got a higher rating because there was less competition when it was released back in August.) Compared with the T-Mobile Springboard ($429.99, 3.5 stars) it's less expensive and speedier, with more useful software, although it lacks 3G. The Archos 80 G9 ($299.99, unrated) costs less, but it's slower, feels cheaper and lacks Samsung's software extensions.

Our current Editors' Choice for small tablets is the completely different Amazon Kindle Fire ($199.99, 4 stars), which isn't nearly as flexible as the Galaxy Tab, but it's easier to use and half the price. For larger tablets, we prefer the Apple iPad 2 ($499.99, 4.5 stars) because of its far, far superior collection of tablet-focused apps.

This is a very good tablet, but here's the central problem: The Android Honeycomb app selection is stillborn, and industry interest is moving towards the next version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0. The good news is that the Tab 7.0 Plus is slated to get an ICS upgrade at some point. If you like the features on this tablet (other than the poorly working remote), by all means get it. But I'd wait to see if ICS brings a flourishing of tablet apps that could make Android tablets better able to compete with the app king, the Apple iPad 2.