Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 review: Take two

Organizer has you fully covered

A good set of organizer apps are available on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0, including the Polaris Office with both viewing and editing documents enabled. It has a nice user interface and solid file management. It supports both internal and web storage (via Box.net).

Polaris Office

Viewing and editing word documents, spreadsheets and Power Point files is hassle-free. There's a PDF reader in the bundle as well.

Printing options are also available.

The calendar has five different types of view: daily, weekly and monthly.

Calendar app

Adding a new event is quite straightforward and you can also set an alarm to serve as a reminder.

Creating an appointment

The calculator app is nicely touch optimized with huge, easy to hit buttons.

Calculator app

The Alarm app is optimized for big-screen use and is pretty intuitive. You can set multiple alarms.

The clock app

The World Clock app is full of eye-candy. You get an animated globe where you can pick time zones or cities, there are country flags, day and night animations, etc.

World Clock app

Applications

There's a bundle of custom apps provided by Samsung on the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0: My files, S Memo and Photo editor.

The S-Memo is a pretty simple application for taking notes with sticky-note-like interface. In addition to the text it allows you to draw pictures and offers some extra options such as color, background, etc.

My Files is a familiar app - it's the nicely functional Samsung file manager.

My Files file manager

Finally, the Photo Editor offers some basic picture edition tools - selections, rotate, resize, crop, color effects and adjustments, etc.

The Photo Editor

There is a video editor app as well. It covers all the basics - trimming, merging, transitions and effects.

The Video Editor

Google Maps and unlimited navigation, in supported countries

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 comes with a GPS receiver, which got a satellite lock in under two minutes with A-GPS turned off. A-GPS can speed this up quite a bit, but requires Internet access. We didn't experience any issues with signal reception.

The Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 comes with Google Maps and Navigation. Voice-guided navigation has become a viable solution since the v5.0 update. Vector maps are smaller and way easier on your data plan and 3rd party SatNav apps are in danger.

For now though, turn-by-turn voice guidance using Google Maps Navigation is only available in select countries and unless you live in one of them, the best you can do is plan a route in advance and keep an eye on your current location during travel.

Google Maps with vector maps does a bit of 3D

Quite naturally, the app also supports the Street View mode. If it's available in the area you're interested in, you can enjoy a 360-degree view of the surroundings. When the digital compass is turned on it feels like making a virtual tour of the location.

If Google Maps Navigation doesn't do it for you, you can grab an alternative app from the Android Market - there are both free and paid ones.

Google Play has the apps, the Hubs have the books and the music

The Android market, now called Google Play, is the fastest growing app repository around, so you can be sure that you won't be having a shortage of software to install on your Galaxy Tab 2 7.0. True, some apps aren't designed to work on a WXGA screen, but most scale well, so the only thing you have to worry about is finding enough time to enjoy all those apps.

Google Play store

The new design makes it easier for you to find the quality apps. There are featured apps, editors' picks and staff-recommended apps in addition to the usual top free and top paid.

The top new paid and top new free lists are worth checking out too and you shouldn't forget the trending apps. Naturally, there is a built-in search and categories for the different types of apps so you don't get lost. Recommendations are also based on your location to make it even easier to spot a quality app in the new Android market.

And if by some reason, this app repository on the market isn't enough for you, you might want to check out some of the alternatives. Amazon has set up its own appstore and so has Opera, plus a few more minor app stores here and there. The available choice is one of the best parts of the open platform.

Samsung's own store called SamsungApps is also on board. There you can get some select free apps for your tablet.

SamsungApps store

Music Hub is here too. It has quite the music collection and the prices are pretty much the same as on the iTunes Store.

The Music Hub

Another interesting store is the Readers Hub. There you can purchase subscriptions (or single issues) of newspapers (PressDisplay service), magazines (Zinio service) and e-Books (Kobo service). It's really comfy to have this entire functionality in a single reading app - good job, Samsung!

The Readers Hub