Physical Design and Networking
Samsung is currently making the best-looking Android tablets in the business, although its tablets look too much like the iPad for some Apple lawyers' comfort. The Galaxy Tab 8.9 is no exception; it's a black and silver slab with no physical buttons on the front, just a bright and somewhat-reflective 1280-by-800-pixel display; the same resolution as the larger panel on the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Since the 8.9 is a smaller screen, the pixels are denser, which is more pleasing to the eye.
The Tab 8.9 is very slim, and relatively light at 15.7 ounces and 9.1 by 6.2 by .33 inches. There are power and volume buttons on the top, along with a 3.2-megapixel camera on the back and a 2-megapixel camera on the front. The back is a smooth gray plastic; you can't open up the tablet to replace the battery. On the bottom, along with the stereo speakers, is the single port, a proprietary docking port.
A Wi-Fi-only tablet, there's no 3G/4G option for the Tab 8.9. You do get Bluetooth, which supports both mono and stereo audio, and built-in GPS. In my tests, the 6100 mAh battery powered the tablet for a very good 8 hours, 15 minutes hours of video playback.
Performance, OS, and Apps
Just like Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1—and a number of other current Android tablets—the 8.9 runs Honeycomb 3.1 on an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. Benchmark performance is identical to the 10.1 and to many other Tegra 2-based tablets. I didn't encounter any bugs, problems, or major slowdowns in my testing. But there's no schedule for an Android 3.2 update, according to Samsung, so you should treat this as an Android 3.1 device. The company has dressed up the interface with TouchWiz, a set of widgets and interface extensions that seem to slow the tablet down a bit, but make some activities more convenient.
Samsung throws a bunch of default widgets onto the seven home screens, which I like because it makes the tablet appear to be more than just a blank slate. Most of the built-in apps have had subtle aesthetic redesigns. The Mini Apps Tray is especially welcome: It's a set of six frequently used apps/widgets which can pop up from the bottom of the screen. For more on TouchWiz, check out our review of the Galaxy Tab 10.1.
Thus far, Google's Android Market for Honeycomb isn't a winner on tablet apps, showing too many apps that run poorly on tablets. So along with the standard Google stuff, Samsung has packed this slate with tablet-centric stores: its own 7digital-powered music store, both Samsung's and Google's video stores, and even Samsung's own app store. As an Nvidia Tegra 2 tablet, the Galaxy Tab also works with Nvidia's Tegra Zone game store.
Unfortunately, none of these stores solve Honeycomb tablets' most critical problem: not enough apps. Samsung's app store, for instance, only has from one to five apps in each of its categories. Samsung insists thousands of phone apps run well on its tablet, but thousands of others don't, and there's no guide to distinguish them. That makes all Honeycomb tablets far inferior to the iPad with its 90,000+ well-tailored, tablet-specific apps.
Seven-inch tablets running Honeycomb 3.2, such as the Acer Iconia Tab A100 ($329, 4 stars), get around this problem somewhat by presenting phone apps better than those with larger screens. But bigger tablets without Honeycomb 3.2's zoom mode give you ugly interfaces when you try to run many apps designed for Android phones.
The Galaxy Tab syncs contacts and calendars with Samsung's Kies software on PCs, and lets you drag and drop files in Windows Explorer onto the tablet. But Mac users should beware: There is no Mac USB compatibility here.
Multimedia
There are lots of media options to fill the Tab 8.9's 13.1GB of free storage. (You get no memory card slot.) Samsung provides the aforementioned 7digital-powered music store where songs average a dollar each, and a more promising video store where TV shows cost $1.99, but you can get a bunch of children's and reality programming for a penny. I downloaded an episode of "Avatar" (the kids' show, not the movie) and it looked sharp.
All of our sample files played on the Tab, both music and video, and sounded unusually good through the device's stereo speakers. The Tab also includes a pair of earbuds, but it has both a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack and Bluetooth, so you can use whatever headphones you have lying around.
There's one false note here, though: There's no video out, so you can't play your movies on a big screen. Samsung advertises a dock with HDMI out but it's not included with the tablet; the only port here is the unique dock port, and the only cable you get in the box ends in a male USB plug.
Streaming video options are mixed. The TV.com app is available, but Hulu and Netflix, notably, aren't.
The Tab's two cameras are both of very good quality. The 3.2-megapixel camera on the back takes razor-sharp, if not terribly quick photos at 1.1 seconds of shutter delay. The 2-megapixel camera on the front is similarly sharp. Both cameras record 720P HD video.
Conclusions
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 is really just a tweak of the existing 10.1-inch Tab, but that tweak makes it a bit more appealing. It's a little more portable and a little less expensive, without losing a pixel of screen resolution, a hertz of processor speed, or a byte of storage.
That said, we have the same problem with this tablet that we do with most high-end Android tablets this size: It's going up directly against the iPad, which has far more apps and a stronger ecosystem. Seven-inch Android 3.2 tablets at least have the benefits of being more portable and having phone apps look decent in zoomed mode. But it's hard to argue why the masses, when presented with this device and an iPad, should pick the Tab 8.9. If you're not an Apple fan, though, and you want the thinnest Android tablet you can get, the Tab 8.9 is a solid choice.
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