Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 311 Review

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab range of products have been immensely popular due to their successful marriage of price and specifications. While Samsung’s 7 inch tablet has been the highlight, 8 inches is fast becoming the sweet spot in terms of screen size. With that in mind, Samsung introduced their 8 inch tablet, the Galaxy Tab 3 311 in India sometime back. We’ve already brought you our first impressions.Check out the complete review of the Samsug Galaxy Tab 311, below

Video Review

Design

With dimensions that come in at 209.8 x 123.8 x 7.4 mm, the Samsung Tab 311 is a very svelte tablet. Weighing just 314grams, holding the tablet for long durations is a cinch

The front of the tablet is dominated by the large 8inch IPS LCD display. Above the display you’ll find the earpiece, 1.3 megapixel front facing camera and proximity sensors. Samsung has done an admirable job at keeping the bezels to a minimum. While this has helped to bring down the size of the tablet and looks very good, some users might find it hard to actually hold up the tablet. Given the light weight of the tablet, we found holding it up at the bottom to be the best solution. The lower half of the tablet below the display has a single hardware button in the center that acts as a home key. Long pressing it activates the multitasking switcher. Flanking it on either side are the back and menu keys

Over on the right side of the Tab 311 is the volume rocker and power key. An IR blaster can also be seen here that’ll let you use the tablet as a television remote. The left side houses the micro SIM card and micro SD card slots. A faux aluminum band runs along the rim of the tablet that gives it a premium two tone look. The 3.5mm audio jack is along the top edge of the tablet while the micro USB port lies between two speaker ports along the bottom edge

The back of the tablet is made of glossy white plastic. The material has the same hyper glazed finish that we’ve seen on several other Samsung products. The plastic has a pattern built into it which is an interesting design addition. It is major finger print magnet though and manages to feel a bit cheap as well. A 5 megapixel camera can be seen over at the left corner and the tablet lacks an LED flash. Overall the design is utilitarian and falls in line with other Samsung products

Software

The software onboard the Samsung Galaxy Tab 311 is Android 4.2 Jelly Bean with the Korean company’s TouchWiz UI layer slapped on top. A litany of Samsung specific applications and tweaks can hence be seen here

You’ll notice pre installed apps like ChatON, Game Hub, Group Play, S Voice, S Planner, Music Hub, WatchOn, Reader Hub in addition to others like Dropbox and Flipboard preinstalled on the tablet. Samsung has bundled in the Peel Smart Remote app to allow you to control your television via the built in IR blaster. A phone app is also included allowing to use the Tab 311 to make calls like a
regular over sized smartphone

Of the many new features introduced in TouchWiz with the Galaxy S4, Smart Stay tends to be the most relevant The tablet uses the front camera to sense when you are looking away from the screen and will automatically pause video. The feature works well enough in good light. There’s also multi window support which is pretty awesome to have on a screen this size. While it still works only with supported apps, the feature works very well

The interface is a curious amalgam of tablet and phone centric interface elements. The notification shade drops down to reveal a decidedly smartphone like panel. We maintain that TouchWiz is perhaps one of the more powerful interface layers out there that offers a lot of customization features to the user but still manages to look very unappealing. It is high time that the layer got a fresh coat of paint from the software team at Samsung.

Display

The Galaxy Tab 311 is equipped with an 8 inch WXGA panel. The screen has a resolution of 1280 x 800 which results in a pixel density of 189ppi. While far from the highest resolution, the display is perfectly serviceable

 We found to images and text to be reasonably crisp though it was easy to notice blurred edges along text on holding the tablet up close. Viewing angles were excellent and it is possible to view the tablet even in brightly lit areas though the highly reflective display may make it a bit hard. We found colors on the Tab 311′s display to be a bit muted

Performance

Under the hood of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 311 is a 1.5Ghz dual core Exynos 4212 processor that is paired with 1.5GB of RAM. The heavy customization of TouchWiz ensures that only around 442MB of free RAM is available on first boot. We were fairly disappointed to see the relatively hit or miss performance of the tablet. It wasn’t uncommon to see a delay in touch response. On occasion, the tablet would complete freeze and force closes were an extremely common occurrence. In particular, the gallery app causes the tablet to struggle. Running games or heavy duty apps would often cause the tablet to heat up. While the tablet is powerful enough to get the job done, the inconsistent behavior and all these issues add up, leading to a lot of frustration