I’m sitting on the couch, typing this on my new Samsung Galaxy Tab 2–a 10 inch tablet computer. I have had this machine in my hot little hands for approximately 4 hours.

My first impressions are mostly favorable. Initial setup was no problem. I’m still trying to understand the logic (?) behind the home screen, though. Pressing the “home” button doesn’t always take me to my home screen. There are six different screens on which I can place icons and widgets, and pressing “home” will take me to the proper one most of the time. Infrequently, with no apparent reason, it will take me to one of the others–sometimes one of the blank pages. Odd.

It would have been nice to get a manual wih this thing. I found several on Samsung’s site, but haven’t yet figured out which is the right one.

My only real complaint at the moment is that the tablet keeps losing its WiFi connection. I thought it was because I’m in the other room, with a couple of walls between me and the router, but it was losing the connection when I was in the same dang room, earlier. I’ll find out tomorrow if it’s my connection, or if there’s something screwy with this tablet.

I also got a faux leather case wih a Bluetooth keyboad. Typing on this litle keyboard is better than trying to type on the tablet’s screen, but it’s going to take some practice. There is only one shift key, some of the keys (like the apostrophe/quote) are in odd places, the shift has a maddening tendency to remain engaged for a little longer than necessary, resulting in things like “HEllo.” And the keys are so dang close together! That said, I think I can learn to write on this thing.

Which is one of the reasons I bought it. I’ve long wanted the ability to blog and to write things when I’m away. A laptop works okay, but it’s kind of clunky to cart around. This tablet, with the keyboad and a good writing application, just might do the trick. And there are any number of reading applications available. I do a lot of online reading as it is. With this thing, I can download PDFs and other files, and read them at my leisure, wherever I am. Or so I think.

By the way, I’m writing this in the free WordPress application for Android. Seems to work well. Let’s see if it posts.