Hey Browser! Don’t Assume One Day Is Typical

The Samsung Galaxy Tab’s browser app presents you with a graphical grid of your “most visited” pages when it launches. But this grid is useless, because it’s your most-visited pages for the past 24 hours. How exactly is this a time-saver, considering how rarely anyone ever visits single pages more than once in a given day? The grid usually winds up just being the last eight pages you happened to visit, even if they’re all from the same site.

Facebook App Notifications out of Sync

Okay, so if you, like, tap on a Facebook notification in Android, it takes you to the Facebook App in like the News Feed. But, like, your notification isn't there! So you totally can't see who just, like, Liked your status. It takes like 15 minutes for the app's News Feed to catch up to the notifications. OMG too bummerrrrrr

Samsung Galaxy Tab Memos App Google Docs Desync

Don’t press us about this app, a more troubled one than most we know. This particular problem is just the most fun to highlight. The Memos app that comes pre-installed on the Samsung Galaxy tablet seems to synchronize up to Google Docs okay. But then when it syncs back down—let’s say you didn’t change any memos, or even touch them—it doesn’t normalize newline character sequences, so it thinks all the memos changed in Google Docs. That causes it to update all the memos (which you didn’t change, as noted) down to the character. This removes all the newlines, no doubt discarded as unallowed, so say good-bye to any paragraphs you created; they’re all run-ons now.

Swype’s Tablet .com Key Not So Much of a Time-Saver

Say you’re logging in somewhere and your user name is an e-mail address that ends with “.com.” If you use the Swype .com key, at least on the Samsung Galaxy tablet, a space is added before the dot.

Last we checked, most domains don't have space characters in them. In fact last we checked, most every dot ever written in English was not preceded by a space. This fault is not exclusive to entering e-mail addresses—that was only an example. It appears to occur everywhere spaces are automatically placed between words.

Samsung Galaxy Likes It Too Loud

The audio volume sliders provided aren’t smooth, even though they’re sliders, so you have no fine-grained control. The lowest setting you can get for the notifications volume without muting them entirely is loud already. Maybe Android Assistant can come to the rescue.

UPDATE: Amazingly, Android Assistant can’t help. The sound system for the tablet is what’s ultimately to blame. It more-or-less rounds whatever arbitrary value you set, to whatever discrete values it allows. For example, set it low but above zero, and the sound system rounds it to zero. Mute! Not low-volume. At the lowest value that works, it’s already too loud.

SECOND update: Android Assistant isn’t to blame. It seems that Android (Gingerbread, anyway) will only set the volume at 14-percentage-point increments, because an HTC phone “ratchets” the volume similarly. This doesn’t absolve Samsung, though, because the phone in question has a useful volume range—the whole point of this post.

HTC Sense Can't Find Tweets

Touch a tweet in the Friend Stream widget and it takes you to the full Twitter stream. Now try and find that tweet you touched!

You Can't Mute the Galaxy with the (Physical) Volume Buttons

No, putting the volume to zero doesn't do it. It still makes many sounds anyway. In fact, it makes a special sound to indicate it's on mute! Is that stupid, or what? To tell you it's on mute (which it isn't really anyway!), the Galaxy makes a sound!

Settings allows you to mute some, if maybe not all, sounds.