Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus still stuck using a PC app for updating?!
When I got my Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus yesterday I played around with everything in it. The menu had a feature to check for updates, so naturally I checked to see if there were any. Nope. Therefore you can imagine my surprise when I was looking through the 7.0 Plus thread on XDA and someone mentioned an update that came out mere days ago. My Galaxy Tab was in transit then, and I’m fairly certain that the postal workers didn’t open the package, update my Tab and then send it on its way.
In the post, Kies is mentioned. A quick Google search taught me that Kies is Samsung’s iTunes. It’s scary similar, actually. I thought the Tab was supposed to update over the air, but whatever – I installed it and connected my Tab. Sure enough, it wanted to update it. I updated it and it booted back up. This whole process confuses me a bit since I taught Apple was the last one to jump on the Over The Air update wagon. Having to install a program to update an Android device seems….well, let’s call it “ironic”. I guess Samsung’s wish to compete with the iPad has taken a couple of wrong turns somewhere. Not good, Samsung.
Anyways, the update seems to have a done a lot for the thing and my first impressions of Honeycomb. It seems that it’s now running a completely different version of Market, one that has a fancier look and can be used in portrait mode. The bug that I had (bit didn’t mention) where apps I tried to download from Market would say “waiting to download” forever also seems gone, but it might be too early to say. The screenshot button now acts completely differently, opening the screenshot taken in an editor where you can do all sorts of things to it before saving it. I’m sure there are other changes as well that I haven’t found yet, but even those three things alone makes me happy.
