Samsung recently announced they were releasing the Samsung Galaxy Tab in a Wifi-only version for a rock bottom $349. Tablet purchasers everywhere were pleasantly surprised, and the sales were instantly a nice little boost for Samsung. Now there seems to be reason for the drop in price. What they evidently did not tell prospective buyers of the 7 inch tablet was that wholesale hardware changes were made as well, and many features that drew buyers to the Galaxy Tab were missing on the Wifi model.
Posts over at the XDA forums from some unhappy Galaxy Tab customers pointed out that Samsung removed more than just the 3G radio from the new Wifi model. One has to think that these changes will not effect the 8.9 and 10.1 inch versions due out, but nothing is known yet. Hardware changes are not uncommon from mobile PC manufacturers, but they are usually very upfront about it, especially when it accompanies a retail price change.
The worst news is the dumbed-down GPU, which definitely has a negative effect on game play, according to the users griping on the XDA forums. HDMI features are missing as well. The original Galaxy Tab used the Samsung Hummingbird CPU that was packed with the PowerVR SGX540 GPU. This new Wifi model employs the SGX530 version of the PowerVU GPU. It may look similar in name, but the 540 to 530 downgrade has actually made the Galaxy Tab Wifi much weaker.
Video playback is even suffering, as well as video game play. YouTube vids played great on the original Tab in HD, and now look much worse. The Galaxy Tab still has awesome resolution at 1024 x 600, and the weaker GPU on that resolution is causing the problems. GPS was removed, and Bluetooth has been downgraded to 2.1 from 3.0. As mentioned previously, HDMI out is not supported.
Samsung has said they are preparing a statement, but no one at Samsung would say why they would not mention these changes at the time of the Galaxy Tab Wifi release. Galaxy Tab Wifi owners are hoping for a software workaround, but that simply will no address the problems with the slower GPU hardware.
