Samsungs Galaxy tab 7 inch was the firs serious Android tablet and despite its shortcomings in the O/S department its still a very decent device to use as a daily driver, in fact its more usable in most situations than any of the latest Honeycomb 10 inch devices.
7 inches of screen is a sweet spot really, i know Steve Jobs says the reverse but just try it, the mk1 galaxy tab is usable as a tablet and has brilliant browsing abilities and its small enough to use as your mobile phone which is exactly what i do with my tab every day, its taken over the spot previously occupied by the HTC HD2.
Back to the O/S now and the mk1 Galaxy Tab was originally shipped with ‘Froyo’ and to be honest it worked very well but needed a little polish, custom roms poped up on the dev scene that ironed out much of the glitchyness but still it was obvious the little tab could benefit from more, ill go so far as to say that if this thing was ever re-released with honeycomb it could be the tablet hit that Google are looking for but for now at least we do have a working build of Gingerbread.
Other builds of gingerbread have been available for a couple of months now but this is the first proper Gingerbread build custom worked for the Galaxy Tab and has all the tablet features and apps that the tab was designed for like the twin panel calendar, contacts and email applications.
So who can we say thanks to for making this lovely Gingerbread rom ? well its the ‘Over-Come-Experience’ team that bring us this rom and the full workings and downloads can be found HERE at the legendary XDA-DEVS forum – big thanks to member ‘Alterbridge86′ for the work done and work in progress, thanks also to ‘Chainfire’ .
Performance from this rom seems good despite a poorer than expected quadrant benchmark score, this was also the case with the original galaxy tab stock rom and to be honest it shows how miss leading benchmark scores can be, in actual real time use the tab performs with a natural fluid feel and never seems to lag, the browser is just as good as it gets with flash working and page load speed about doubled compared to the stock Froyo Rom.
So all in all the transition from Froyo to Gingerbread was worth while, i did have to re-install over 150 apps but other than that Google did the rest as is the case with all Androids content from email and contacts etc was just rained down on me from the cloud and once the shower passed my device was fully loaded once more, the Galaxy Tab is most definitely a long term device now and has stood the test of time very well indeed, no doubt it will be my daily driver for a very long time to come. As for the whole Android Tablets arent selling thing i think Google need to stop trying to play Apples game and consider a whole new approach – the 7 inch phone tablet, it goes everywhere with you and still makes itself useful at home.
Gingerbread in the shape of a galaxy tab, thanks to the Over-Come Team.
