Using Samsung’s New 8-inch Galaxy Tab E 8.0 As A Phone Looks Just As Ridiculous As It Sounds
At what point does a device become too big to use as a mobile phone? If you don't want to look silly to passersby, the cutoff point would be well before 8 inches, but that didn't stop Samsung from injecting support for voice calling into its new Galaxy Tab E 8.0, an 8-inch Android tablet that just launched in Taiwan.
To be fair, the Galaxy Tab E 8.0 is a tablet-first device, though not a very excitable one. It has an 8-inch TFT display with a ho-hum 1280x800 resolution powered by a 1.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor (quad-core), Adreno 306 GPU, and 1.5GB of RAM. There's a modest 16GB of storage packed into the thing, which you can expand via microSD.
For snapping photos, the Galaxy Tab E 8.0 features a 2-megapixel front shooter for selfies and a 5-megapixel rear camera for those times when you want to wield an 8-inch slate as a big-size point-n-shoot. Also big is the 5,000 mAh battery, so you should be able to frolic in the field taking pictures for quite some time before the tablet calls its quits (it's rated for up to 13 hours of web surfing).
As for connectivity, it has 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, a micro USB 2.0 port, and 4G LTE and 3G HSPA+ support. We don't suspect many people will use this thing as their primary handset, but for those who want to, the functionality is there.
For now, Samsung's limiting the release to Taiwan, where the Galaxy Tab E 8.0 sells for TWD 8,990 (around $270 in U.S. currency). Samsung didn't say if it plans on bringing the device to other markets or not.
To be fair, the Galaxy Tab E 8.0 is a tablet-first device, though not a very excitable one. It has an 8-inch TFT display with a ho-hum 1280x800 resolution powered by a 1.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor (quad-core), Adreno 306 GPU, and 1.5GB of RAM. There's a modest 16GB of storage packed into the thing, which you can expand via microSD.
For snapping photos, the Galaxy Tab E 8.0 features a 2-megapixel front shooter for selfies and a 5-megapixel rear camera for those times when you want to wield an 8-inch slate as a big-size point-n-shoot. Also big is the 5,000 mAh battery, so you should be able to frolic in the field taking pictures for quite some time before the tablet calls its quits (it's rated for up to 13 hours of web surfing).
As for connectivity, it has 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, a micro USB 2.0 port, and 4G LTE and 3G HSPA+ support. We don't suspect many people will use this thing as their primary handset, but for those who want to, the functionality is there.
For now, Samsung's limiting the release to Taiwan, where the Galaxy Tab E 8.0 sells for TWD 8,990 (around $270 in U.S. currency). Samsung didn't say if it plans on bringing the device to other markets or not.
