Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 review: Middle of everywhere

Organizer and apps

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 comes with a good selection of preinstalled apps. A lot of them are centered on the S Pen, but there are some other nice additions as well.

First comes the Polaris Office 4.0 document viewer and editor. It lets you open word files, pdf's, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations, as well as connect to various cloud services such as Box, Dropbox, and Google Docs. Creating and editing documents, sheets and presentations is available as well.

The Polaris Office document viewer

S Planner is really powerful calendar app part of the TouchWiz UI. The tabbed interface lets you easily toggle between year, month, week, day list and task views.

Creating event is very easy and you can add reminders, location, people, images, repeat intervals. All events automatically sync with your Google account.

S Planner can sync with multiple calendar and you can switch off individual ones to reduce the clutter.

S Planner

Samsung has enabled their new S Cloud service on the Galaxy Tab 3 8.0. It can sync contacts, calendar and notes and back up logs, messages (SMS and MMS) and the wallpaper. You can choose not to back up some of those things and you can set up automatic backups.

S Cloud can also hook up to Dropbox. If you do this, photos and videos from your Dropbox account will be synced with the tablet's gallery. You can have the Tab 3 8.0 sync those photos and videos only over Wi-Fi to save on data usage.

S Cloud options

Alarm lets you create alarms which can be set to go off not only at various times, but during certain days of the week as well. The World Clock pops up the various cities on a globe, letting you select them for a quick overview the local time zone.

The Clock app handles many duties

The Calculator features big buttons, the text size is adjustable and if you flip the Tab 3 8.0 horizontally, you get some advanced math functions too.

Calculator has adjustable font size and advanced math functions

Naturally, Notes app is also available.

Notes

The My Files app has an interface similar to that of the gallery, though that one is available only in landscape mode. The app is launched automatically when you hook up a USB mass storage device (a USB drive, another phone an SD card etc), which we find to be a nice touch.

The updated My files app

Paper Artist imports a photo and runs a filter over it (there are plenty to choose from).

Paper Artist

S Translator will help travelers - it can translate between two languages with either typed text or speech recognition. It can read out the resulting translation too, if you don't think your Korean accent can cut it. S Translator supports all the widely-spoken languages - English, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese and, of course, Korean.

S Translator can be invaluable when traveling

Story Album can be really helpful in organizing your photos. After a shooting session it will prompt you to group all the new photos into an album. Albums can be created based on location, the people in the photo and when the shot was taken.

Story Album

Finally, the Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 comes preloaded with a special "Samsung edition" of the TripAdvisor app. Besides the ability to have rotating lockscreen images, the Samsung-specific version of the app allows you to login with your Samsung account, use the S Travel widget for a quick peek at certain popular travel destinations, as well as automatically add relevant travel information to your photos.

Otherwise, the app lets you find interesting things to do if you're in a new city, as well as hotels, restaurants and even flight information. Most locations have reviews posted by other TripAdvisor users, so you can quickly see if a place is worth it or not.

The "Samsung edition" of the TripAdvisor app

Google Maps

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 comes with a GPS receiver, which took about two minutes to get satellite lock upon a cold start. You can use the A-GPS functionality to get near instantaneous locks. Alternatively, network positioning will also do if you only need an estimate of your location.

Google Maps is a standard part of the Android package and we've covered it many times before. It offers voice-guided navigation in certain countries and falls back to a list of instructions elsewhere.

3D buildings are shown for some of the bigger cities and you can use two-finger camera tilt and rotate to get a better view of the area.

Google Maps • Street view

Google Maps uses vector maps, which are very data efficient. The latest version has an easy to use interface for caching maps - you just choose "Make available offline" from the menu and pan/zoom around until the desired area is in view (there's an indicator showing how much storage caching that area will take). You can later view cached areas and delete ones you no longer need.

Note that there's a limit to the size of the area you can cache - you can't just make all of Europe available offline, not even a whole country. We managed to cache London and some surrounding regions before Maps told us the area is too big. Also, there's no address search in the cached maps and you can only cache map data in supported regions of the world.

Making all of New York available offline

You can also plan routes, search for nearby POI and go into the always cool Street View. The app will reroute you if you get off course, even without a data connection.

Play Store

Running Android Jelly Bean, the Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 has access to the latest apps and the microSD-expandable memory guarantees you won't have trouble with storage space.

The Store is organized in a few scrollable tabs - categories, featured, top paid, top free, top grossing, top new paid, top new free and trending. The in-app section is untouched though and it's very informative - a description, latest changes, number of downloads and comments with rating. There is usually a demo video and several screenshots for most apps too.

The Google Play Store

Samsung Apps features largely the same type of interface as Google Play, except here you'll find a far lower number of apps. The good news is Samsung uses this repository to distribute some exclusive titles and some promotional offers, available only to its customers.

Samsung Apps