Lets review this then shall we?
The build quality is good, it is sturdy and solid, has a great feel to it, but it might be a tad bit on the heavier side. It is not uncomfortable but it is not super light either.
You get the tablet with charger, headphones, USB cable, (for charging from the wall plug, USB charging, and data transfer), battery and manual.
The USB cable is one of the weirdest I have ever seen, best read up on what is used for what. The only downside to USB charging is that you either need to turn of the phone or kill the backlight while charging rendering it useless when charging from a PC.
On first boot you see the MTN splash screen and you think to yourself, "Hmmmm, that's got to go!"
The device is pretty fast, I have no idea what speeds other get on the Samsungs but is no slouch either. It comes with 4GB internal SD storage and 512Mb ram.
The users interface you can look over yourself or go play with it at a CellC, pretty nice looking, especially the home screen.
Not much is included by default, it is pretty much a stock Android with almost no extra apps, you need to install what you need.
Handling is a bit awkward at first, you need to decide how you are going to place your hands on the device. I found that the palm of my right hand constantly touched the UI buttons on the right of the screen when holding it in both hands. This is a bit frustrating and you have to reprogram yourself to be extra tentative of this when holding it.
Now to the meaty part!
I got this to make my life a little easier and to downgrade on the netbook, for this it has to perform various tasks that I need done:
1) Accomplish networking tasks, like file sharing, ssh and the occasional ftp
2) Must be able to stream media
3) Must do simple office tasks (read, write and print documents)
4) Something that comes to mind along the way
Networking:
Lets start here since this is very important to me.
After playing with it for at least 15min I downloaded the necessary tools to get going.
Connectbot for ssh
Hacker's keyboard for a fully functioning keyboard (tab, up down left and right, etc.)
File expert to browse network shares
SSH was handled beautifully, and the extra keys made it a pleasure to use, tab completion and scrolling through history, it was so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes! Something that was a complete frustration on the Android phone is now a huge pleasure and already I have a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.
Browsing network shares is a breeze with File Expert, it is as simple as setting up the share and clicking the icon. I had no problems here. Now to the streaming. There are only a handful of apps that can handle streaming media on Android.
I installed
RockPlayer Lite, used File Expert to browse to the file I wanted to play, choose "Open With". Once it starts downloading it will present you with another dialogue, just choose "Open" and RockPlayer should take over.
So, media streaming, check!
Now for a real world test, office applications!
I'm using
Open Office Viewer since I use the open document format exclusively and
King Office for creating documents.
It is not easy, a tablet was not meant as a word processing platform but if you are in a bind it will do. The other alternative is to get either a USB/BlueTooth keyboard if you are serious about this. I'll have to investigate the keyboard option at some stage.
If anyone knows of a better Office Suite that can handle the Open Document Format then I'll appreciate it if you could mention it.
Games.
I did not get this for the games, so if someone else could add to this then so be it.
All that is left is to test battery drain, hand on for this a bit longer.
Overall I'm happy, especially since it is such a breeze to do network tasks. Happy I got it.
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