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by Michael Fisher | March 13, 2014 11:59 AMRead OnThere's a certain minimum threshold that a product should be required to meet before it can rightfully wear the "pro" label. It should offer high-end specifications and enhanced capabilities over its more mundane, "non-pro" counterparts. Ideally, it should appeal to the consumer looking for a more versatile, more capable product. Above all, it should offer a top-notch customer experience. With the Galaxy TabPRO 10.1, Samsung gets some of that right. This Galaxy Tab is far and away the most powerful yet produced, with capabilities never before offered on the company's midrange tablet line. ...
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by Michael Fisher | March 10, 2014 4:04 PMRead OnI've had some wonderful experiences with Android tablets. Loading CyanogenMod on the HP TouchPad, an activity I documented in my first-ever video for Pocketnow, filled in some crucial capability gaps left open by the TouchPad's native OS. Carrying a first-gen Nexus 7 for a week in 2012 taught me just how compelling Jelly Bean in the 7-inch form factor could be. And spending some time last year with the Sony Xperia Tablet Z convinced me that "elegance" and "Android tablet" were no longer mutually-exclusive terms. We've come a long way from the days of Honeycomb and the XYBOARD. But five ...
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by Michael Fisher | March 5, 2014 8:40 PMRead OnWhen we first went hands-on with the Galaxy TabPRO 10.1 at CES 2014, it wasn't always easy to tell it apart from its immediate neighbors in the Galaxy Note line. Down to the stitched leatherette and chromed-out accents, the new Tabs were doing their utmost to ape the higher-end Notes, making a meaningful comparison much tougher than in generations past – particularly in the bustling atmosphere of the show floor. Fortunately, Samsung has since graced us with demo copies of both the Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1 and the Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4. The latter has been dispatched to the offices of the ...
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by Stephen Schenck | January 29, 2014 2:59 PMRead OnSamsung users are only all too aware that the software Samsung delivers on its Android devices can be a bit “heavy.” On top of the TouchWiz changes, you've got all of Samsung's custom apps – and together, this adds up to a ton of stuff; just look at how Samsung fared in that phone-free-space breakdown we examined last week. But could this soon be changing? Word arrives today that Google may have convinced Samsung to tone things down, following the CES launch of its Magazine UX on the new TabPRO and NotePRO tablets. Reportedly, Google was dismayed about how Samsung's vision for what ...
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by Stephen Schenck | January 23, 2014 6:24 PMRead OnSamsung's cooking-up a new look for its smartphone user interface; we've already seen the new Magazine UX debut on the company's tablet at CES, and leaks have been teasing us with a similar new look for Samsung's phones. As we look forward to the day when we might be able to give the latter a spin for ourselves, we've been made aware of some patent applications Samsung filed in South Korea, which just might provide some insight into what the company's working on. Specifically, this work involves the introduction of “hot corners,” assigning special behaviors to interaction with the ...
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by Michael Fisher | January 23, 2014 7:01 AMRead On"Our revels now are ended, Kirk." That's a quote from Star Trek VI, paraphrasing a line from Shakespeare's The Tempest. In the latter instance (minus the "Kirk" bit) it's a conceit of sorts, an admission that the play is a falsehood - and an observation that so, perhaps, is life. In the former example it's a wisecrack from a Klingon bent on shooting our favorite captain's ship out from under him. In both cases, it's a kind of farewell. And in today's example, it's also a goodbye - to the old times. That's a pretty dramatic way of saying that we're finally, officially past the post-CES ...
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by Taylor Martin | January 15, 2014 4:39 PMRead OnIt's easy to be overly critical of Samsung. The company is larger than some of its biggest competitors several times over, and it has the man power, resources, and know-how to not make some pretty obvious mistakes over and over again. We've reamed Samsung more than once for shipping substandard products with laughably awful software and performance optimization. TouchWiz UX, for example, has shipped on dozens of Samsung products over the years. It's not only long in the tooth, cluttered, and … ugly, it is some of the most poorly optimized Android software we've ever dealt with time and ...
