This week, Samsung finally made the Galaxy View official. It’s their 18.4-inch Android-powered Tablet. Now this tablet isn’t your ordinary tablet, not just because of the weight and size, but it also has a custom UI, even more custom than Touchwiz on their other tablets. Samsung customized the UI to fit the much larger display. In some of the pictures that Samsung released with the announcement, you can see that there are much larger touch targets, and it almost reminds me of the UI that Roku uses on their players. And because of the customized software, we’ll need some apps customized for the Galaxy View.
On Saturday, CNN launched the first custom app for the Galaxy View. Aptly named “CNN for Samsung Galaxy View”. It’s available on the Google Play Store right now, and as you’d expect, it is only compatible with the Galaxy View tablet. CNN’s app uses a magazine style UI, more than likely to use up all of the extra space that is there on the Galaxy View screen. With the CNN app, you can watch all sorts of videos from CNN right there on your 18.4-inch tablet. With the app you can get alert notifications for breaking stories, Additionally, local news and weather are also included in the app. It’s a great app for keeping up with the latest news and weather.
Currently, there is no official price or release date for the Samsung Galaxy View Tablet. We’ve seen pre-orders open up at a few retailers here in the US, giving it a price of $599. But that’s still not 100% confirmed. However, it would seem to be around that price point. Samsung hasn’t announced a release date yet, but it should hopefully be pretty soon. The Galaxy View tablet isn’t quite a high-end tablet, especially with a 1920×1080 resolution display, but it’s more of an experiment from Samsung. To see if people will actually buy it. Some of their most successful smartphones and tablets, came from experiments like this. The original Galaxy Note was an experiment for Samsung, and it turned into a huge market and has sold millions and millions since.
