The Next Galaxy Tab

While we keep hearing that Samsung may design the rumored Nexus Tablet coming possibly this fall, Samsung released their 2nd iteration of their popular Galaxy 10.1 tablet.  Of course we needed to get a couple to test.  While the specs remained pretty much the same, it does possess some upgrades:

• a removable micro SD slot-one of the negatives to the original 10.1.  Removable storage, while not totally necessary these days, does help.
• Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.  While the 10.1 was to upgrade, it looks more and more like it will not get an upgrade.  Does it need it?  For the 10.1 2 with ICS, you do not really receive too much more.  A few little upgrades, but as others say, it seems a little more sluggish.  Not sure that it is truly ICS or Samsung’s Touchwiz UI layer.
• Speakers moved to the front.  So with the battle with Apple in the copy of their design (I guess you can copyright a color now), Samsung first started stamping Samsung on the front of their later 10.1s.  Now with the 10.1 2 they moved the speakers to the front of the tablet.  I really did not test sound yet, but I guess that would help as opposed to side speakers.

So definitely a valid tablet.  After using it for a week, I did turn in my 10.1 original to use it exclusively.  The sluggishness does not interfere too much, but if the 10.1 2 was our first choice when considering tablets, we may not have went with Samsung.  Will be interested to see if any new updates help address it.