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.

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.

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.

Samsung Galaxy E-Mail Alerts Are Too Single-Minded

Your only option is to open the e-mail. You should be able to trash it. What a time-saver that would be!

Samsung Galaxy Discriminates Against Password Unlock

Use a PIN or pattern? Fine. When you activate your tablet, just go ahead and swipe or type it in. But if you want to use a password, the keyboard won't appear right away. You have to click inside the password box first.

Samsung Galaxy Doesn't Know Which Way Is Up

Just when you're using it horizontally, which is most of the time for me so far.