Samsung Galaxy Tab Ebooks and music

The Samsung Galaxy Tab has two music and two ebook applications that may seem a little confusing at first. One of each of the applications is for simply playing or reading the music and ebooks, while the other two applications are hubs for sampling and buying the music and ebooks.

Multi-tasking on the Samsung G-Tab

The Samsung Galaxy Tab supports multi-tasking so you can have music playing in the background while you carry out other tasks. The information of what’s currently playing will be shown at the top of the screen when other applications are being used. A finger swipe down from the top of the screen will provide access to the G-Tab’s music features allowing you to skip a track or rewind, for example.

The Music Hub is an application that allows you to buy music on the Galaxy Tab. It’s powered by 7digital and there’s a host of songs and albums that can be bought. 30 second snippets of songs are available to listen to before you decide to buy the song.

Readers Hub

A similar hub exists for ebooks, called the Readers Hub. Here you have access to over two million books and more than 100 UK newspaper and magazine titles. Once you have bought the newspaper, magazine or ebook it will appear on the virtual bookshelf in your ebook application.

You can change the font size and colour, as well as the page colour of your ebooks on the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Turning pages is done by swiping a finger across the screen. When held in the portrait mode you can see one page at a time, but when held in the landscape position you can see two pages at once – rather like you can with a real book.

Media Hub, coming to the Galaxy Tab soon

Alongside the Music and Readers Hub will sit a Media Hub. This service will provide access to streamed video and TV programmes. It is expected to arrive on the Samsung Galaxy Tab early in 2011.

Find out more about the Apple iPad here, or check out our lab-based laptop reviews.