We Tried Out the World’s Most Ridiculously Oversized Tablet
Netflix and Chill just got an upgrade.
The Samsung Galaxy View is big. That’s its main selling point. It’s the biggest tablet you can get by a factor of holy fucking shit. It’s a tablet with a pituitary imbalance. It’s like your iPad went on an HGH bender while sunbathing in a grow room. It’s the double-XXL, Big and Tall shop, Ron Jeremy of personal digital devices.
To be precise, it measures 18.4” diagonally, which is just about the size of four iPads arranged in a rectangle.
You can do just about anything with the View that you can do with any other Android-based tablet, except throw it in your backpack. That includes surfing the web, reading recipes, and yes, gentlemen: playing Crossy Road.
Or hey, here’s a crazy idea: lay it down flat (or almost flat, since the adjustable stand pivots between just two positions). Then load up a porno clip, cut a few lines of primo Cartagena wonder-flake right on the device’s beautiful screen, hoover ’em up, and go immediately into cardiac arrest.
(Note: This is not recommended.)
Mostly you can watch Netflix on it. In fact, watching Netflix seems to be what the device was built for. The View is a cord-cutter’s friend — preloaded with apps for Netflix, Hulu, Showtime, ESPN and other web-based TV offerings. As the television landscape shifts inexorably away from cable (note the recent announcement of YouTube Red, or the other recent announcement of the NewsOn app for local news broadcasts), Samsung appears to be betting that a device like the View will soon replace televisions altogether.
It’s not a bad bet, either. After all, with the View, you can watchThe Walking Deadin your kitchen. Or your bedroom. Or your bathroom (without dropping it into the toilet! — thanks, Samsung!). Or even the back of a taxi. The model I tested was WiFi only, but Samsung will be offering a version with LTE as well, via a major phone carrier yet to be named.
It may be simpler though to just use your phone as a WiFi hotspot, as I did a few days ago when I hauled the View up to the roof of my building to watch Bojack Horseman.
While the device’s speaker is more than adequate for indoor usage, I wound up needing to add a Bluetooth-enabled Shoqbox to really hear the program outside. As for seeing it, well, the sun was kind of bright, so no. Not at all. (In fact, that picture above was taken while the program was playing.)
To be fair, watching the View indoors, under normal conditions, is a very impressive experience. I haven’t tried a densely wooded area or a dark alley or the champagne room at Scores or the catacombs of Paris, but the point is this: I can if I want to.
And yes, it takes the biggest selfies the world has ever seen.
The View retails for $599. Is it worth it? Not for most people. Then again, Samsung was roundly mocked when it came out with those massive Galaxy Note smartphones, and shortly thereafter Apple cried uncle and pumped up the iPhone 6 Plus to nearly the same size. Maybe the big-ass View really is the tablet of tomorrow.
Photos by Maxim
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