Samsung Galaxy Tab-3

Samsung Galaxy Tab-3 

As a brand, the Tab has been around for almost three years now. Ever since the slightly bulky, very first Tab by Samsung, the company has steadily upgraded this line-up of products. Some updates have been interesting enough, while others have gone by without having made any waves. The latest in this line-up is the new Galaxy Tab 3, which we had on our test bench for a couple of weeks. Here’s how it fares. 

The 8-inch might turn out to be a decent size for some people to read on. Except, when you are reading stuff on it in the portrait mode, the buttons end up being a bit out of reach for you. The power and volume buttons are on the top right. The only physical button on the fascia is the home button, flanked by two virtual ones – Settings and Return.  

Running on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, the Galaxy Tab 3 311 has a heavy overlay of Samsung’s proprietary user interface. Usually the first thing we do is get rid of the bulky widgets placed on the homescreen by default. But if you’re considering this as your first tablet, you might want to give the widgets a try to see if they are to your liking.

Like the previous-gen Note, the Tab 3 supports multi-tasking with features like Dual View. It basically lets you view two apps in a split-mode on the screen simultaneously. However, there are a certain number of apps which are not compatible with this mode. 

Now, despite the 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, we could see the Tab visibly slow down every once in a while. Sometime, you would have to wait just those 2-3 seconds longer for an application to launch. At times pulling down the notification bar to check for updates would take a couple of seconds more than it should. Apart from this, the device never really froze during usage. But neither was it lightning fast during the process of our review.