Edible Apple

With the holidays fast approaching, iPad competitors will coming out of the woodwork and flooding malls across the land with tablet devices sporting second rate software and sometimes clunky hardware. The Samsung Galaxy Tab, however, was supposed to be different. A true iPad competitor, it was dubbed. And now it appears that such assertions were not only premature, but gross exaggerations to say the least.

Writing for Gizmodo, Matt Buchanan pulls no punchesin his review of Samsung’s 7-inch tablet device, which he calls a “grab bag of neglect, good intentions and poor execution.”

This thing is just a mess. It’s like a tablet drunkenly hooked up with a phone, and then took the fetus swimming in a Superfund cleanup site. The browser is miserable, at least when Flash is enabled. It goes catatonic, scrolling is laggy, and it can get laughably bad. When better browsing is half the reason to go for a larger screen, that’s insanity. Not only does it use a stupid proprietary charging/syncing cable, it won’t charge when you plug it into a laptop. Neither of the cameras are anything to write home about. Costing $699 off-contract is embarrassing when the iPad is $499.

While Buchanan notes some positive features of the device, like it’s sturdy design and crisp screen, the negatives appear to outweigh the positives by a large margin. “Typically, the point of a compromise is to bring together the best of both sides,” Buchanan writes, “The Tab is like a compromise’s evil twin, merging the worst of a tablet and the worst of a phone. It has all of the input problems of a tablet, with almost none of the consumption benefits.”

And remember, the Tab is not only more expensive than the base model iPad but comes with a smaller screen to boot. Jobs noted during last month’s “Back to the Mac” event that 7-inch form factors are essentially dead on arrival and that competitors only pick that screensize because it’s cheaper.

And so the latest and most promising iPad killer bites the dust.

Who got next?