Capsule review: Samsung Galaxy Tab A6 10.1-inch tablet

A capsule review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab A6 10.1-inch tablet…

(a.k.a. “The Curious Case of the Braindead Buttons”)

i’ve had mine for 5 or 6 days now and am in a position to offer some thoughts:

Pros:

• performance: fantastic. Zen Pinball does not lag at all (which is really saying something! That is the only app i use which lags to some degree or other on all my other devices. Even the slightest lag in pinball is quickly fatal!)
• screen: resolution, color, and feel are all fantastic.
• battery life: my first charge ran for over 4 days, with over 9 hours of screen-on time, several hours of music streaming, at least an hour of Netflix, and lots of copying files around my LAN. It was plugged into USB briefly a few times while trying to flash a new recovery image on it (maybe for 30–45 minutes, total), but it otherwise was not actively charged it during that time. (Flashing successfully required 3 different machines before one of the approaches worked.) As far as i’m concerned, the battery lasts longer than i would personally expect for the performance this device delivers.
• overall UI experience: great, with one major, potentially fatal, exception listed below.
• price: at 200 Euros, a tablet this size is practically an impulse-buy item. i went into the store planning on buying an 8-inch tablet and expecting to pay 150–200 for it. My jaw quite literally dropped when i saw this one for 200. Based on highly positive prior experience with a Samsung Galaxy S2 phone (2 years of continual use) and a friend’s first-generation Galaxy Tablet, i didn’t hesitate for nearly as long as prudence would normally dictate.

In short: it’s a lovely device, with an awesome price point for a 10-inch tablet, suffering only from moderate (but manageable) storage limitations one completely braindeaded design decision which severely impacts everyday usability (and clearly demonstrates that at least one manager at Samsung with product sign-off privileges is a complete and utter jackass (if you’ll please pardon my French))…

Cons:

• So much preinstalled crapware installed as “system apps,” meaning they cannot be removed without rooting the device. This is of course conventional on all Android devices which are themselves not shipped directly by Google (indeed, it’s par for the course in the entire consumer computing device industry), but it’s still _highly unfortunate_ marketing-department bull$h!t. This is exacerbated by the next point…
• Storage of 16GB is really tight. There is no option to install apps on the MicroSD by default: the user has to manually use the app manager to move them (when possible — not all apps can be moved). A surprising number apps/games cannot be moved to the MicroSD storage. Android itself cannot do so with apps which provide widgets or are needed at system boot, but many third-party apps simply cannot be moved to MicroSD for unknown reasons. e.g. i installed 4 games this morning, two of which can be moved and two of which (totaling almost 2GB of space) cannot. The inability to set an “install to SD by default” option (as some devices/configurations offer) means that apps must always first land on internal storage, and there might not be enough space to do so (some Android games nowadays are 3+GB in size). Less tech-savvy users will not know about this, or be unaware of how to properly juggle it, and will certainly continually run out of space while wondering why their MicroSD is completely empty. Summary judgement: i can live with this (given the device’s price), but i’d have gladly paid 50–100 Euros more for a 32GB model.
• Last, and certainly worst, are the BRAINDEAD buttons. The globally standard Android buttons (Home, Back, Recent Apps) are hard-wired along one edge of the device and have no backlight. Both of these factors absolutely suck for usability. e.g. when holding the tablet in portrait orientation, the thumb or palm (depending on the direction) continually bumps against the Back button. The lack of a backlight on those buttons means that using the tab in any but good lighting requires fumbling around and trying to tap the right thing (keeping in mind to mentally swap the left/right position of each button, if needed, depending on the orientation). It also means that the user has to explicitly know which side of the device the buttons are currently on. (When using a tablet in the dark, that isn’t always obvious!) This is different than every single tablet i have used in the past 4.5 years (i own 3 other tablets), and my hands still always reach for the bottom of the screen for these buttons (independent of the current screen rotation). With this tablet series, one has to be consciously aware of where the buttons physically are (left, right, top, bottom), and then adjust hand movements accordingly. The hard-wired placement and lack of backlight is a boneheaded, Bonehead, BONEHEADED combination of design decisions. Summary judgement: had i known about this, and understood its usability implications, i would most certainly have reconsidered buying this tablet. i won’t return it to the store just for this reason (well… maybe i will!), but i will certainly curse and swear about/at/around it and start looking for a replacement tablet sooner than i otherwise would have (e.g. after 1–2 years instead of the 4.5 i waited since getting my last 10" tablet). This combined pair of decisions was a total, utter failure on Samsung’s part.

Research eventually revealed a partial workaround for the braindeaded buttons buried in a post on that black hole of a website known as XDA Developers: there is an “accessibility” option which enables an on-screen mini-menu with configurable buttons, but this overlays anything else on the screen, potentially blocking access to any given part of any given app. It can be dragged around the screen to get it out of the way, but that is (of course) annoying. Nonetheless, it may be a halfway viable option for making the system buttons visible all the time (since they don’t have a backlight). This option is under: Settings ==> Accessibility ==> Assistant Menu. Turn that on and use the Edit option to pick the order of the buttons (it supports many more options than just the 3 standard buttons, but its popup menu/mini-window only shows 4 on the screen at once). The configured buttons will appear on the screen as a single Microsoft Windows-looking button which can be dragged around the screen. Tapping that pops up a mini-window with the configured soft buttons. The config options also allow the user to resize this button to make it less (or more!) obtrusive, but it always overlays the screen and will be in the way of some other app at some point. This option does not affect the hardware buttons in any way, which means that the thumb or palm will still be frequently tapping the Back button by accident.

Facepalm and aarrgghh and all that. To paraphrase the late Terry Pratchett: It’s almost as if whoever designed (plus whoever signed off on) the buttons had heard of such buttons before but had never actually seen, nor tried to use, them. When average users have to enable “accessibility options” (intended specifically to enable/simplify/empower usage for those with physical disabilities) to work around the poor accessibility of the device, the situation can, at best, be categorized as an Utter Usability Fail.

Other than the inexplicable massacre of the buttons concept, to be honest, i am exceptionally pleased with this device. The buttons thing, though… completely… Sigh.