The tablet market is really hotting up. With Motorola stealing many of the headlines at CES with its Xoom tablet, Samsung's head honchos must have been itching to unveil their Galaxy Tab 10.1 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Certainly, running Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) means the two tech giants are going head-to-head in the operating system department and specs wise there's not much to separate them either.

The Tab 10.1 is the same size as the Motorola Xoom and also has resolution of 1280 x 800. It weighs in at 599g and is just 10.9mm thick so it felt light to hold but was certainly more substantial than the standard 7in version launched last year.

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is as slick as they come, with finger swipes instantly responsive and the clarity of the screen impressive. The 8-megapixel camera means Samsung is setting the bar high for whatever Apple sticks in the hotly-anticipated iPad 2, and trumping the Xoom's 5-megapixel effort.

However, the real interest lies with Honeycomb which is, somewhat surprisingly, not an easy OS to fathom. It's hard to intuitively understand the layout, while the core buttons for going back or returning to the home screen are hidden away.

We saw several other journalists getting exasperated with the device, struggling to work out how to return to the home screen or exit specific widgets, so it will be interesting to see how customers take to the new OS.

You'd imagine after a short time using the device continually you'd soon be using it as quickly as any other tablet but it seems strange it has managed to become harder to use at a time when easy, intuitive UIs are a must, especially for tablets.

No doubt this won't stop the device selling but it could give Apple another boost if users see the core rival as having gotten too clever for its own good. Time will tell.

Author: Dan Worth

14 Feb 2011