Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 And Galaxy Player: Visual Tour

Apple lawsuits haven't stopped Samsung from forging ahead with new additions to its lineup of Galaxy devices: the Galaxy Tab 8.9, a scaled-down version of the existing Galaxy Tab; and the Galaxy Player 4.0 and 5.0 media devices, which are essentially versions of the Galaxy S phones minus the phone components. The Player devices are powered by Android 2.35 ("Gingerbread"), and the Tab by Android 3.1 ("Honeycomb"). That said, the real buzzword for tablets these days no longer starts with an "A" (Android), but an "E" (ecosystem). Apple's iPad has an ecosystem that speaks for itself and more or less set the stage for how such things would work. Amazon's forthcoming tablet will most likely be a portal into Amazon's own ecosystems of content: its Kindle e-book library, or its Amazon Prime directory of instant video. Likewise, Samsung has put together the Music Hub, Media Hub, and Readers Hub to give Samsung device users access to 13 million tunes, 5,000 videos, and over 2.2 million books, newspapers, and magazines. It's a long shot that they'll be able to make a dent in either Apple's iTunes or Amazon as a whole, but it's becoming harder to introduce a tablet without a corresponding ecosystem of some kind--even if that ecosystem ultimately loses out to very entrenched, very vigorous competition.

The Samsung press event in New York City was held in a newly-opened showcase in Time Warner Center off Columbus Circle--a space that apparently belonged to a Borders outlet before its demise, surrounded by everything from a Williams-Sonoma store to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.