Galaxy Tab for Enterprise? I don't think so.

This past week I had the privilege of getting a Samsung Galaxy Tab to evaluate for work as an alternative to the Apple iPad.  We have only recently been using the iPad for some of the sales force and it’s been working pretty well.  The two drawbacks that the iPad has for us is that the buggy way it navigates in a Windows domain environment and that the connectivity is dependent on AT&T and their 3G network (Click here to see the latest bunch of AT&T laughable claims).

So I got a Galaxy Tab through U.S. Cellular and to anyone familiar with either an Android phone or an iPad, the basic transition takes all of about five minutes.  I quite literally had mail, contacts, and calendar synchronized with my exchange server within three minutes of opening the box.  So for ease of use, the Galaxy Tab gets high marks.

Before going any further with my short review, I want to say that as one who has drunk the Apple kool-aid, my perspective was certainly a bit jaded from the onset, but I also sincerely wanted to like the Galaxy Tab and hoped it would be a good substitute for the iPad.

The Galaxy Tab’s smaller size still lends itself well to viewing documents and video but is more compact than the iPad and lighter so it travels a bit better.  And the variety of carriers the Tab can use is a huge bonus, especially for a company that is geographically dispersed and has a number of carriers they use.  The Tab I got was normally $599 but the price dropped to $199 through U.S. Cellular with a two-year data contract (clocking in at about $50/month.)  The data contact is capped at 5 GB, which may or may not seem limiting.  In my case, it seems more than enough.  After a week, I have only used 0.2% of the 5 GB.

The Galaxy Tab also allows the use of widgets on the desktop and is far more customizable that the iPad.  The U.S. Cellular version also comes with an app/widget called “Daily Briefing” that allow you to quickly see the weather, news, stock market and schedule in one simple page.  It would be even better if they allowed this widget to be customized a bit more.

The U.S. Cellular version also allows the Galaxy Tab to be used as mobile wi-fi hotspot.  In my limited test, this seemed to work very well with good throughput speeds and easy configuration.

On the down side, the Android platform seems less stable that Apple’s IOS.  The past week I have experienced four complete crashes (with data loss) of the Galaxy Tab and several application crashes.  While app crashes do occur, and with some frequency, on the iPad I don’t think I’ve ever had the entire device crash on me.

Another black mark against the Galaxy Tab is the lack of a method to connect to a Cisco VPN without rooting the OS.  I understand this omission may not be the fault of Google and/or Android, but given the market saturation of the Cisco VPN solution, this seems like a pretty big omission.

A minor issue is the power button, which seems to be at the exact proper location to be accidentally pressed and the Galaxy Tab put to sleep at exactly the wrong moment.  It is also right above the volume switch adding to the frequency that the switch is accidentally pressed.  Quite frustrating, indeed.

The final strike against the Galaxy Tab and the Android platform is that the application that can be downloaded can contain unsafe code.  While I would agree as a consumer that responsibility of knowing what an application does before installing it falls to the user, my position as a network administrator prevents me from recommending and/or implementing the android platform company-wide.  To do so would be equivalent to handing network security over to the end user, which is unacceptable.

As much as I would like to implement both the Galaxy Tab and android phones in my enterprise environment, the risks are to great.

References:

 http://threatcenter.smobilesystems.com/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20008518-245.html