History lesson. First there was the (awful) Froyo-running Galaxy Tab 7. Then came the Honeycomb-running Galaxy Tab 10.1. Then the 8.9, then the 7.0-Plus. Done, right? Wait! How’s about a 7.7? Sure, why the hell not!
It’s a decent tablet, but it’s a baby-step. Samsungers shrunk the bezel so they could make the screen 0.7 inches bigger, without noticeably increasing the tab’s dimensions. Over on the z-axis, this cutie spans just 7.9mm; that’s thinner than the Galaxy Tab 8.9 (8.6mm). Actually, it’s the thinnest 4G LTE tablet out there. The LTE is courtesy of Verizon, where this thing is an exclusive.
It’s also the first tablet that has a Super AMOLED Plus display (1280×800 resolution), which is bright and crisp. TProcessor speed is up to 1.4GHz from 1.2GHz, and there’s a Micro SD card slot too. And an IR blaster (from the Galaxy Tab 7 Plus), which is a feature I’ve actually come to really like. Couches and tablets go well together, and being able to choose a show from the guide on the tablet, then have it tune me right to it is awesome.
Unfortunately, this thing is outdated out of the gate. Its dual-core processor can’t hang with a quad-core beast like the Tegra 3 which drives the Asus Transformer Prime. Mr 7.7 is also running Honeycomb (Android 3.2) with Samsung’s blindingly-bright TouchWiz UI on top. Its a safe bet that TouchWiz will provide a significant speed-bump to its upgrade Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), because they have to figure out how to adapt it to the new software. It’s a damn shame because ICS is just a much, much better user experience, which is, y’know, kinda the most important thing.
The Galaxy Tab 7.7 will be available in the nebulous timeframe of “soon”. Tune in next time for the Galaxy Tab 7.4, 8.6, 6.4 and -3.infinity. And hopefully some Australian release news. We’ll let you know.