Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

In August, I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

The product itself pretty much rocks.  HOWEVER, I cannot recommend one to anyone because of the support.  More precisely, the incompetence of what little there is.

A few weeks after I bought it, it stopped being able to connect to my pc and transfer files.  It says it’s connected, but the pc just tries to install a driver update, and fails to do so.

So I did some research online, and found that there’s an updated driver to install.  Finding it on the Samsung page was a major pain.  There are drop-downs in the page that simply don’t work, for one thing.

Finally found the driver, downloaded, and it won’t install.  It goes into a loop “Do you want to upgrade?” click Yes, “Must uninstall the prior version in order to update.  Do you want to uninstall the prior version?” click Yes, animations indicate it is uninstalling, “Do you want to upgrade?” (same window as the first one) click Yes, “Must uninstall…”  No matter how many times I click Yes, restart my computer, et al, it just keeps looping through that.

Found out there’s an uninstall utility that can be downloaded.  Downloaded it, ran it, got a message that it was Done.  Tried again.

Same loop.

Manually deleted every folder with Samsung in the name in both Program Files and Program Files (x86).  Tried again.  Same loop.

Manually went through the Windows Registry (after backing it up, of course) and deleted everything I could that had the string “samsung” in it.  Tried again.  Same loop.

Searched their support pages several times during this process.  No help there.  They seem to recognize that their software is complete junk, but all of their offered solutions result in the same loop.

Can’t request support through their online form, because one of the drop-downs is empty, and the form won’t let you submit it unless you select something from that drop-down.  Nothing to select, so it’s a complete dead end.

Tried calling their support line a few times.  No matter when I call, I get “all lines are busy, please try again later”.

Tried e-mailing them for support, but that didn’t work either.

Tried asking for help in their support forums.  No replies.

So, I can only transfer files back and forth by uploading them to a cloud drive of one sort of another, or (for small files) by e-mailing them to myself.

The lack of file transfer is annoying. I can live with it, but it’s certainly a drawback.  The misleading, false, unworkable, incomplete, and just plain junk support, and the software that gets into a loop and can’t even exit gracefully, makes me say I can’t recommend this product, nor anything else by this company.

Rating: Product 9 of 10

Service: –5 on scale of 1 to 10.