Adventures with the Galaxy Tab – Going off the grid

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 (from O2, as you’ll recall here, here, and here) has been earning its place in my gadget bag now, and two recent trips around the UK have seen me carry the Tab into areas with poor mobile phone coverage, and rather limited access to Wi-Fi: namely a caravan holiday in the north of England with minimal GSM coverage and not a hope of punching a data signal through; and the recent Over the Air conference where the volume of devices, hackers and power users in such a confined space swamped both the Wi-Fi network and the cellular capacity. How did it cope? As well as it was designed to, which is unfortunate.

Android is very much built on the idea of always having a data connection available to the device, and while it is relatively frugal with the amount of data used, it does want to use the data. Opening up applications that use the cloud (for example DropBox or the Kindle app) and there’s an immediate reaching out to sync and check everything is okay.

Thankfully these apps will fall back gracefully to an offline position, and that’s the case for most of the code on the device (certainly for the built-in applications), but my issue isn’t that a lack of internet connectivity stops the device running, it’s that a lack of internet connectivity drops the productivity of the Tab by a significant factor.

The reason in my mind is simple – Android as an Operating System has been designed with the assumption that it will be online. When decisions were made, they were weighted to being a connected device. And that has percolated through the ecosystem. Where I’ve found the Tab to be a strong device has been talking to social networks like Facebook and Foursquare, when working with my various blogs to post and manage interaction, to get to and reply to my email, and (arguably) it’s the best way to consume Google+ content.

All of which are tools that ate suited to online work. Put that aside and start looking for more ‘computery’ tasks like a Word Processor and you start to struggle.

None of this makes the Tab wrong in any way, but it does bring in to focus the use cases that were considered both when making the Tab, but also Android. So much of the Tab is “stock” Android that you can’t help feeling that it’s a big phone, as opposed to a small tablet. And that means the vision of what Google feel Android is drives the Tab.

If you fit into that definition, then there;s every chance that the Tab works for you. I always maintain that you need to be able to ask yourself what you want a device to do before you can know which to get – it’s that or buy them all and see which one fits in after lots of experimenting.

The Tab 7 does have a place in the world, and it’s not the same place as the iPad (or even the Tab with the 10.1 inch screen). For me, it’s a great tool for reporting in situ. The large screen makes text input easy, and looking over the social media networks, blogs and websites is a breeze. It’s not something I would rely on to cover an event single-handed, but it could do the job in a push. But it does need that connection, so the event better be in a built up area. There’ll be no coverage of “One Man And His Dog” from this mobile device.

The Tab 7 is not an all-rounder, that much is clear from the travels. Think of it as a closing pitcher, when you need a certain job done, you know that you have this ready to go.