I’ve been holding off on the tablet market, when the iPads first debuted I knew I’d like a tablet eventually but was not willing to pay $600-800 for one. After waiting about a year and a half tablets have now come down to a very resonable price. I had a look at the tablet line up before Christmas and spotted this one at $250 Canadian. Not bad, but I knew I could do better come Boxing Day. So on December 26th I strolled into Walmart and picked up a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 for only $150. Along with that I got a 32gb class 10 Micro SD for $13.88. That was a steal of a deal in my opinion.
Initial Impressions
The first thing I noticed and also the first thing my girlfriend noticed when she picked it up is that this tablet is heavy. It’s not super heavy at 300 grams (0.66 lbs) but it just feels heavy in your hand for some reason. I compared this online to the iPad Mini’s specs which says 308 grams (0.68 lbs) so the Galaxy Tab 3 actually beats the iPad Mini by 8 grams. Perhaps later I will do my own measurements and see if this tablet actually weighs what it claims to weigh.
A Few Snags
I’ve had a Samsung Galaxy SII phone for about two years now and this tablet is almost the same design so I did not expect to run into any difficulties operating it. However I had a few difficulties getting this tablet up and running in it’s first few days.
The first issue I encountered was when attempting to sync this device with my Sony ActionCam. I installed an app which allowed me to copy the videos over via WiFi and the program completely filled the drive on the tablet causing it to become unbearably slow. I went with the typical first IT step and rebooted it, except it would just endlessly flash the logo as it tried to boot. After much rebooting I determined that it couldn’t boot without enough storage space. After a bit of fudging around I was able to get the tablet running again by installing Kies and rebooting the tablet while plugged into the laptop that was running Kies. From there I was able to navigate through the file system and delete the large files I had copied over. I then rebooted the tablet again and it no longer ran at a crawl.
About two days later I ran into another issue which was quite frustrating. All of my Google apps stopped working. Initially I thought it was a WiFi issue in general but determined that any other app on my tablet could connect to the internet fine. Yet when I tried to use Google Now, Google Search or Play Store I would get connection errors. I ended up having to reinstall a bunch of Google apps in order to get it all going again, very frustrating.
A Few Weeks Later…
All in all I’ve found this tablet to be rather slow. Just doing simple things like browsing the internet in Chrome or reading Reddit in Reddit Sync is slow. It’s agrivating to use if I’m being honest.
A Few Years Later…
Well how do I feel about this tablet now in 2018? The truth is my girlfriend ended up taking it and she pretty much just used it for Netflix. It worked for that and about nothing else. The battery is still going fairly strong and she still uses it time to time but I’m about ready to upgrade again and will probably be giving her my Lenovo tablet to replace this one.
A seasoned Senior Solutions Architect with 18 years of experience in technology design and implementation. Renowned for innovative solutions and strategic insights, he excels in driving complex projects to success. Outside work, he is a passionate fisherman and fish keeper, specializing in planted tanks.