Samsung Galaxy Tab - The AnandTech Review
by Vivek Gowri on December 23, 2010 9:48 AM ESTSamsung Galaxy Tab - Battery Life
So the battery life test is an interesting one, in that we don’t have a comparable tablet result yet - Anand used a modified version of the battery test in his iPad review and I haven’t yet had a chance to run the Viewsonic through the battery testing yet. I’m running these tests on my iPad, so I’ll update this page as those results come in.
But overall, the battery life is pretty good. The Galaxy Tab’s 14.8 Wh (4000 mAh) battery managed 9.75 hours on our web browsing test over WiFi. That outdoes the Dell Streak by an hour and a half, the Droid X by an hour, and the EVO 4G by two. Unfortunately, here’s the rub: Anand got almost an exact time out of the iPad, but he ran the same test with music playing in the background and email fetching every 15 minutes. I’m still running the web-only battery life test on the iPad, but I can safely say that it should outlast the Galaxy Tab by a decent margin.
Lightcycles. I kid you not.
To get a feel for battery life during video playback, I timed a looping 2GB H.264 encode of the original Tron DVD. The Galaxy Tab made it through four times over before giving up the ghost, good for 6:42 of video playback. This looks pretty poor in comparison to the 13.6 hours Anand got from the iPad in his 720p h.264 battery life test, but that video file was encoded to a lower bitrate, so it isn’t directly comparable. I’ll be rerunning the iPad using the same Tron file that we used this time around, and it’ll be our standardized HD video file for tablet battery testing going forward.
So without focusing too much on direct numbers, there’s only a couple of takeaways. The Galaxy Tab has pretty good battery life, but there’s not really any directly competing 7” devices to compare it with. The Galaxy Tab is more power efficient than the iPad due to the smaller screen, but the iPad has an absolutely massive 25 Wh battery. That’s the mobile equivalent of stacking the deck, so Samsung shouldn’t feel bad for losing out to the iPad on the battery life front.
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sciwizam - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
Wikipedia has:Dimensions 190.09 mm (7.484 in) (h)
120.45 mm (4.742 in) (w)
11.98 mm (0.472 in) (d)
Weight 380 g (0.84 lb)
These make a lot more sense.
VivekGowri - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
Fixed, so sorry - it got pushed live before I had a chance to edit that part.medi01 - Friday, December 24, 2010 - link
"HD video recording is sadly not supported"Having in mind how "huge and powerfull" are the lens "HD resolution" would make sense, wouldn't it?
I understand, when this BS comes from usual customers, but when it comes from a reviewer, sigh...
VivekGowri - Friday, December 24, 2010 - link
Why Samsung decided to spec their bigger, better device with a lower end camera than the Galaxy S phones is an openly debatable question that I have no real answer to, but it doesn't support HD video recording. What else am I supposed to say?medi01 - Friday, December 24, 2010 - link
Obviously neither HD video nor 5+ megapixels photos make any sense on devices with tiny lens.Whether they upscale or produce "HD" noise is completely irrelevant, mentioning "lack of HD video" as a real disadvantage reiterates the myth and confuses the customers.
NesuD - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
You're getting things wrong on the other comparison units as well. Droid X Nand is 8GB integrated and a 16 GB micro SD. This is a well publicized spec of the Droid X from launch. Fact checking and verification is an essential part of Journalism that seems to be slipping here at Anandtech of late.VivekGowri - Saturday, December 25, 2010 - link
I copied that part of the table out of the Fascinate review, so I'll look into it. But I'd like to point out that this is literally just a spec table, don't call our journalistic integrity into question based on that alone.aniallator - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
You have posted the dimensions and weight values for the iphone 4 (well those values match) all other areas of the Samsung galaxy tab hardware information appear to be correct.veri745 - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
The posted dimensions have to be wrong.misterjohnnyt - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
Listing Proper Dimensions FAIL