Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.7: Now You See It, Now You Don’t
By Harry McCracken | Saturday, September 3, 2011 at 9:58 pm
On Friday morning here in Berlin, I headed to the IFA electronics show. My first stop was Samsung’ ginormous exhibition, where one of the biggest sections was devoted to the upcoming Galaxy Tab 7.7. I played with one, admired the amazingly vivid Super AMOLED Plus screen, and snapped the photo above. Then I left.
Turns out that I was lucky. Samsung later removed all the Tab 7.7s from the show, presumably for reasons relating to Apple’s ongoing patent case over the Galaxy Tab. Here’s FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller with some details. (In Germany, Apple has an injunction against Samsung that prevents it from selling the Tab 10.1 here.)
Samsung apparently doesn’t plan to sell the 7.7 in the U.S., a move that Mueller speculates could be spurred by the Galaxy Tab line’s legal woes. I’m not a patent lawyer and am not taking a stance on the case, but I’ll be sorry if the 7.7 can’t make it into the market. From a hardware standpoint, at least, it’s the nicest 7″ (or thereabouts) tablet I’ve seen. I’d like to see consumers get the chance to embrace it or reject it as they see fit.
[Full disclosure: I spoke on a panel at IFA, and the conference organizers covered my travel costs.]
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September 4th, 2011 at 12:54 am
Samsung have some of the best hardware engineers & designers in the world. Yet they choose to slavishly copy Apple and waste time & resources on lawyers. If anything, this will force them to trust their designers.
September 4th, 2011 at 2:54 pm
So? Apple slavishly copies MS. MS came out with the 1st tablet.
You REALLY need to get out and about more often…
September 4th, 2011 at 7:26 am
Glad to see Apple's not taking any crap from Samsung.
Like to see them take 50% or more of their business elsewhere and really put a hurting on Samsung.
LCD screens & A6 chip production alone would put a serious hurting on them.
September 4th, 2011 at 12:10 pm
Watchmakers find infinite ways to show 12 numbers on a flat surface with two hands that rotate around the center. You don’t see people looking at a Tag Hauer and confusing it for a Rolex.
Yep Samsung, for all their preening, can’t seem to design a tablet that 9 out of 10 consumers won’t instantly think is an iPad.
You can either accept Sammy’s lazy excuses or demand the company design like it’s worth a damn. Clearly, the direction from the executive team has been “Make it look like an iPad” rather than “See what you can do to make it look unlike an iPad so that Galaxy Tab can become a design icon too.”
No wonder Tabs are not selling. 20,000 sold out of a million shipped? That’s what you get for trying to market fake Rolexes instead of authentic Tag Hauers.
September 4th, 2011 at 2:17 pm
Apple must be getting seriously worried that they will be found out for producing style over substance rubbish. And cynically over-pricing for it too.
One of the most cynical businesses in the world, whereas other businesses in that field, on seeing technology they like attempt to buy it, Apple simply produce an inferior copy then spend more on marketing than development so they appear slicker. Then go on to freak whenever anyone attempts to copy them, largely because the copies are usually better technology. At the moment Samsung are making far better technology than apple, if they went for Apple's slick advertising spend Apple would be in big trouble
September 5th, 2011 at 1:23 pm
That is completely ridiculous. Even Apple's fiercest competitor admits Apple has better technology. if Apple announced iOS hardware licensing tomorrow, Samsung would be first in line. If Apple announced Mac OS X licensing tomorrow, what's left of HP and Dell would be first in line.
And if Apple were only copying, how is it they are always so far ahead? Why are they the oldest PC company? How did they do the first multitouch, first Web browser, first mouse, of they are copiers?
App Store is not just popular because it's slickly marketed … it also leads in technology. Apple has the only native C/C++ application environment on ARM … iPhone apps are real computer apps from Mac/PC/consoles, not baby Java apps like on all other phones. The user gets a much more sophisticated, faster application. I have many apps on my iPhone that I used to run on a Mac or a game console. Same exact app, not a baby version written in Java.
You can be in denial all you want, but you should realize this new consumer era of computing is just getting started.
September 4th, 2011 at 5:09 pm
I have an alternate theory… A variant of the 7.7 will be branded the Amazon Tablet in the US, hence no stateside Samsung plans and the device was hidden after the TechCrunch leak.
September 5th, 2011 at 7:45 am
Wah.. I want one please.. this is awesome, can't wait to see and atleast hold one..
September 5th, 2011 at 1:07 pm
> seen. I’d like to see consumers get the chance to embrace it or reject it as they see fit.
It's not an issue of consumers accepting or rejecting the device, it's about consumers being fooled by the device, because it is a counterfeit iPad.
There are millions of possible colors, finishes, border trims, corner radiuses, and other design choices for a product like this. The fact that this device "just happens" to have all of those things in common with an iPad strains credulity. It is made that way to fool customers who want iPads into buying it.
Lol at Samsung's pre-iPad tablets, they are radically different than this Galaxy line. Where is Samsung's work? We can say iPad is a "big iPhone" and iPhone is an "iPod crossed with a Mac," … what can we say Galaxy Tab is other than "KIRF iPad?"
September 6th, 2011 at 2:14 pm
AND, when Apple copies a whole product (tablet PC's) from Microsoft, that DOESN'T "strain credulity"
LMAO!
September 6th, 2011 at 2:13 pm
LOL! Anonymous Apple trolls downrating when truth is told.