A running list of notes about a 1st generation Samsung Galaxy Tab purchased 2010-11-26.  Please feel free to leave comments about this document at http://kgadgets.blogspot.com/2010/11/samsung-galaxy-tab-review.html

Despite being a technologist, this is my first time I've been a "early adopter".

This is my second Android device, coming off a reasonably good experience with the Motorola Droid.

It does not  have a trackpad or arrow keys.  This makes my favorite app, ConnectBot, mostly unusable.  My ambitious plan is to create a Unix shell oriented keyboard for the open source Any Soft Keyboard project.  Update: swype-sym pulls up an arrow keyboard, but the tab button does not work with ConnectBot.  This may be a side effect of their remapping the right shift key to tab. Hitting Control and Escape are still pretty annoying on a virtual keyboard.

Navigating through a paragraph of typed text requires my chubby fingers hitting the right spot.  There is however a little blue moveable pointer that pops up which helps mitigate some of the difficulty.  Though not for Google Docs.

It comes bundled with Swype, which is an interesting new experience.

Best Buy sold me a Sprint branded Tab for $549 without a contract and it works fine on WiFi other than the constant notification "Activation Not Completed".

Activation also attempts to happen on reboot.

The Verizon version of the Tab is unusable without a contract.  Cannot get past the first screen.

The power connector is some proprietary Samsung wide connector to USB.  I wish it were regular USB.  The 4 foot power cable is annoyingly short compared to a laptop power cable, which is what this tablet is trying to replace.

It is very hard to hold with one hand and type with the other.  The holding hand touches the touchscreen.

It only has three home screens instead of five.  Update: this can be changed with Edit in  the menu of the Home screen.

There is not a (+ -) plus minus buttons that pops up to let you zoom on a  webpage.  Double tapping works once, but you cannot zoom further  (The next double tap zooms back out).  Pinch to zoom multitouch works, but does not reflow the text.

I'm pleased to see it has a Gorilla Glass screen like the Droid which has served me well.

The four lighted control buttons at the bottom turn off much quicker than the screen timeout.  When battery is below 10%, they turn off and refuse to turn back on, making the device unusable in the dark.

The pre-installed ThinkFree Office app for viewing pdf mysteriously asks for activation the first time I use it 12/8.  Is it crippleware?  What personal information did it just collect and call home?

The camera cannot do macro photography.

The most unexpectedly exciting application so far has been jwtc chess.  The large screen compared to a phone make it easy to unambiguously select a square.

The back quote character cannot be typed with Swype.  An internet forum suggests this has been fixed, so I an stuck waiting for an update.

The application I use the most recently has been Google Reader.

 There is no LED notification light.

There is also no notification, neither light nor popup, that you are about to run out of battery.  It just powers down suddenly.

It cannot pair with a Bluetooth mono headset.

The default camera app has a maximum video recording length of 1 hour, even if you have disk space for longer.