Samsung Galaxy Tab 620 (P6200) Review

Media

All those little niggles with TouchWiz fly right out the window when you see what the Tab 620 can do in the media department. The music and video player has been restored to its former glory, as it now has full support for FLAC files and is DivX HD certified. The audio quality through good in-earphones is brilliant and you can further tweak that with enhancements and custom 8-band graphic equalizer. You also have the option to enable the 5.1 channel effect, although it best works with movies.

Excellent multimedia features

You don’t need any third party video player, here as, unlike the Tab 750 and 730, the Tab 620 will playback almost all video formats with ease. Got some 1080p MKVs? Simply dump it in and watch it. There’s even a folder vie,w which lets you sort your videos more easily. We’re glad that Samsung brought back this amazing feature in the Tab 620, which we sorely missed in their other offerings. If you find you’re running out of space, simply add a microSD card and expand the storage, another feature that’s missing in the bigger tablets. Both music and videos can be streamed anytime to DLNA compatible TV at the push of a button.

Connectivity

The Tab 620 is a quad-band GSM tablet with support for voice calls as well. Simply pair it with a Bluetooth headset or use the bundled wired headset and you’re all set to make calls. There’s even an option for video calling in the dialer. It also supports 3G with full HSDPA (21Mbps) and HSUPA (5.74Mbps) support. Along with Wi-Fi ‘n’, we also have dual-band support, which means the Tab 620 can connect to either a 2.4GHz band or the much faster 5GHz band. Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth 3.0, DLNA, and TV-out complete the set of connectivity options.

No dearth of connectivity options

The onscreen keyboard is comfortable to use and there’s also Swype built-in should you need it. The stock browser is quick in rendering web pages. Zooming in and out is fluid, thanks to the quick CPU and ample RAM. The tablet will only connect in MTP mode to your PC and you can’t seem to change that to Mass Storage. This is not a big deal really, but a word of caution; if you have DivX codec installed on your PC and you try to copy a video file to the tablet, it will crash.

Misc. Features

Miscellaneous apps, include All Share, eBook reader, Memo, Pen Memo, Polaris Ofice, Task Manager, and Pulse. Thankfully, there aren’t too many of them cluttering the tablet, just the essentials.

Camera

The camera sensor is only 3.1MP, but you do get auto-focus, touch-to-focus, smile detection and panorama modes to play around with. Unfortunately, the sensor cannot pick up good amount of detail unless the subject is very well lit so indoor shots are quite poor.

Plenty of options to fiddle around with

However, macro shots are a lot better, especially with the flash on. The panorama mode stitches together 8 pictures but there’s a lot of blurring as you sweep across, resulting in a very hazy picture.

Macro shots are the only ones that look good

Samsung have managed to squeeze in 720p video recording at 30fps and it seems to capture it quite well. But, there’s a lot of noise that creeps into the video as well. Touch-to-focus is present, while recording, which is good. Overall, the camera is pretty average and we wished they would have used a 5MP sensor instead.

Battery Life

In our video drain test, the 4000mAh battery managed to last just shy of 8hrs. This is with the brightness set to 75 percent, Wi-Fi turned off and without a SIM card. This is not too bad considering it’s a 7-inch screen with a decently high resolution. If you’ll be using 3G, then expect this number to drop a little.

Verdict

With a street price of Rs.26,000, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 620 is a real catch, considering that it’s currently the best feature packed tablet in the market that also supports voice calls over GSM networks. Other worthy adversaries are the HTC Flyer and the Milagrow TabTop (MGPT01-16GB), which falls in the same price bracket (actually, they’re a tiny bit cheaper). The Milagrow comes the closest to the Tab 620, in terms of features, as it also has voice calling capabilities, but since we haven’t reviewed it, we can’t comment on how good or bad it is.

The HTC Flyer is another attractive option here, now that it’s priced sensibly, but you’ll be sacrificing voice call functions and high bit-rate HD video playback. So you see, the Tab 620 is an all rounder, but we still feel it’s expensive. You can now find the Motorola Xoom Wi-Fi version for as little as 20K online, so the ideal price of the Tab 620 should have been around 20K-21K, which would have killed the competition. In the end, we feel Samsung has a sure shot winner on their hands, as they’ve incorporated the best bits from all their leading products into one stellar device.