Other Than That, How Do You Like Your New Tablet, Mrs. Lincoln?

Ron Amadeo had such high hopes for the new 10″ Samsung Galaxy tablet. Alas:

The build quality. Terrible even by Samsung’s low standards. The back is actually squishy, and you can feel it deform while holding it. It’s noisy too, the plastic creaks, groans, and grinds when you pick it up. Regular, strong plastic would still be unacceptable when everyone else uses aluminum, but this… this is insulting for a $500 tablet.

An ugly two-tone “please don’t ever confuse this with an iPad” design. It’s not designed to look good, it’s only designed to not look like an iPad.

A 1280×800 resolution display on a flagship device is not ok. Asus does 1920×1200, and Samsung makes a 9.7 inch, 2048×1536 display for Apple. They seriously cheaped out here.

The pen feels cheap too. It’s a hollow plastic tube. It’s got a button that doesn’t do anything useful, and you can’t customize it.

No NFC on a device that is, by definition, a secondary device. Have a Galaxy S III and a Note 10.1? Well, guess what? You can’t tap to share because Samsung cheaped out. 2 months ago, NFC was all the rage at Samsung HQ. Now, all of a sudden, it’s not important enough to include in your flagship tablet. What happened?

The new multitasking features, floating apps and split screen, just aren’t any good. Compatibility is limited to a handful of not-very-useful TouchWiz apps, and split screen has terrible lag when switching between the two open apps.

He adds, “The build quality is so bad, I think it gave me cancer.”

But it has a stylus!