Samsung has announced the latest addition to the Galaxy Tab family, and this time it’s a refresh of its original Galaxy Tab 7” model. The new tablet, named the Galaxy Tab 7 Plus, sports a 7” 1024 x 600 (WSVGA) display, 1.2 GHz dual core processor, 1 GB of memory and runs Android Honeycomb. The original ran Android 2.2 (Froyo) and was upgradeable to Android 2.3 (Gingerbread).

Additional changes that earn it to the plus moniker come in the form of a reduced weight of 345 g (35 g lighter than the original) and a slimmer profile of 9.96 mm,down from the original’s 12 mm.  

Feature additions

Along with a few standard features, such as a two megapixel front-facing camera and a three megapixel camera on the back, and Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, the Honeycomb OS brings a few additions to the Tab’s capabilities.  

These include a Mini Apps tray, which consolidates seven applications into a bottom tray on the main screen. This enables users to launch favourite features such as music player or calendar as pop-ups over full screen applications. Wi-Fi Channel Bonding, which bonds two channels into one for improved network connection and data transfer at up to twice the speed, is also included.

The device further offers voice and video call support, with no need for a headset, an improved virtual clipboard, which stores text and images for easy copy and paste, and Readers Hub and Music Hub services. The Social Hub, which  aggregates the user's contacts, calendar and email along with instant messaging and social networking connections into one interface, also makes an appearance on the new 7” tablet.

The new Galaxy Tab Plus is almost 3 mm thinner than the original.

International rollout

According to Samsung, the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus will be available starting in Indonesia and Austria from the end of October and gradually rolled out globally to Southeast and Southwest Asia, US, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, Africa, Japan and China. This should put it on track for meeting the November launch date locally that was alluded to in a recent interview with Samsung’s Paulo Ferreira, the head of Mobile Product and Business Solutions at Samsung South Africa.

In related news, Microsoft and Samsung concluded a patent agreement, in which Microsoft has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement with Samsung Electronics to cross-license the patent portfolios of both companies.