There’s no doubt I’m a bit of a gad­get freak. Not many things make me hap­pier than new toys.

I saw the new 10″ Sam­sung Galaxy tablet in a shop­ping cen­tre dis­play in Krakow and got a bit hot and both­ered over it — not sur­pris­ing as in the last two or so years I’ve become a bit of an Android fanatic. I decided that IT WILL BE MINE and hatched an elab­o­rate plan to work 15 hours in the fol­low­ing week to pay for it (that’s how my life works now, when I want extra toys, I just do some work).

Prob­lem was they were kinda in short sup­ply so when I saw one in our local Media Markt I snapped it up — kinda advanced myself the cash, if you will. They only had one, and only the 16GB model — but it was 3G so I fig­ured that I’d be able to cope with the smaller capac­ity. It was either that or pos­si­bly not get one for weeks or months.

I took it home and if it had been love at first sight, my new gizmo and I quickly cemented the rela­tion­ship. Basi­cally it’s awe­some. Every­thing was peachy right out of the box. Wifi was going in 3 min­utes flat, I chucked in a SIM card and one reboot later we were surf­ing the net. A friend men­tioned that the one he’d played with in a store was slow and slug­gish -  but i guess that must have been the result of being messed about with in the shop because mine is quick and snappy. I down­loaded a few of my favourite Android apps and was very impressed with every­thing. Not all apps will scale up to tablet size but those that do look really cool.

Of course, if you live in Ger­many you are out of luck, at least for now — Apple won their court case and it’s blocked from sale per­ma­nently, although Sam­sung are counter-suing or some­thing so they might be back. There’s a tem­po­rary injunc­tion in Aus­tralia at the moment. They’re still avail­able in other EU coun­tries so as the guy sit­ting next to me on the train between Han­nover and Berlin the other morn­ing said, it’s easy enough to pop over the bor­der to get one (and after play­ing with mine and bitch­ing about  how much he hates iTunes, I sus­pect he might just do that).

This is less of a review and more of a pool­ing of drool on the screen, I know. But I’m keen to fin­ish writ­ing and get back to read­ing RSS feeds and watch­ing YouTube on the couch with my gizmo.