Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 and new Galaxy Tab 10.1 hands-on: thinner than the iPad 2, dual-core power, TouchWiz 4.0
You know who took the iPad 2 launch pretty seriously? Samsung, that's who. Just as we had heard, the company's executives were impressed by Apple's ability to slim down its tablet and …
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung's February Galaxy Tab 10.1 announcement laid out a competent but conventional Honeycomb slate — Tegra 2, dual cameras — that was still thicker than what Apple would ship. Then came the iPad 2's launch on March 2, where thinness was the headline feature, and Engadget reports Samsung executives were visibly impressed enough to go back to the drawing board.
Three weeks after that launch, Samsung is showing revised hardware at CTIA: a new 8.9-inch model alongside a slimmed 10.1, both claimed thinner than the iPad 2, with TouchWiz 4.0 layered over Honeycomb. The speed of the turnaround is the story — Samsung treated the iPad 2 as a moving target and retooled mid-cycle.
First-order effects
- Apple's thinnest-tablet claim, the iPad 2's signature talking point since its March 2 launch, is contested within three weeks by Samsung's 8.9- and 10.1-inch redesigns.
- The original Galaxy Tab 10.1 spec sheet from February is effectively obsolete before retail shipment, forcing Samsung to reset marketing and carrier inventory plans around the new hardware.
Second-order effects
- Every other Honeycomb tablet maker — Motorola with the Xoom foremost among them — now competes against a Samsung device that matches or beats the iPad 2 on thickness while running Android, squeezing the differentiation space for slower-moving rivals.
- Apple faces pressure to treat industrial design as an annual refresh cadence rather than a generative leap, since competitors demonstrated a sub-one-month response to its key physical advantage.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, tablets settle into the same compressed hardware arms race that defined Android-versus-iPhone smartphones, with Samsung positioned as the fastest follower capable of matching each Apple design cycle.
- Hardware parity pushes differentiation toward software skins like TouchWiz 4.0 and ecosystem services, since physical specs alone no longer separate the top-tier slates from Apple's.
The trend: Tablets are entering a thickness-and-hardware arms race in which Apple sets the benchmark each spring and Samsung responds within a single product cycle.