Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 hands-on

We received our Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 review unit on Tuesday, and we’ve spent the better part of this afternoon tooling around and getting a feel for the smaller cousin of the Galaxy Tab 10.1. The tablet has an 8.9-inch screen with 1280 x 800-pixel resolution, and it is also equipped with a dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor clocked at 1GHz, 16GB of storage (a 32GB model will also be available), a 6,100 mAh battery and a 3-megapixel camera capable of recording HD video. We definitely appreciate the smaller screen size of the Galaxy Tab 8.9; it feels much more portable and yet does not sacrifice any of the power that was offered by the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Android 3.2 (Honeycomb) runs smoothly and Samsung’s TouchWiz user interface adds plenty of useful widgets without slowing the system down. We think Honeycomb still needs a lot of work before we really get excited for Android on a tablet, however, but the Galaxy Tab 8.9 is shaping up to be our favorite Android tablet yet. Of course, we’ll have to wait to see what Amazon has in store on Wednesday before before we jump to any conclusions. We’ll get started on our full review shortly but in the meantime, be sure to check out our photo gallery below.