SINGAPORE — Over the past few years, Samsung has offered its customers tablets in almost every size possible to ensure they have every gap in the market covered. Still, the Korean company has struggled to get its tablets to emulate the successes of its smartphones, and the Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 won’t reverse that trend.

Design wise, the Tab 3 10.1 looks like a larger version of Samsung’s popular smartphones, with its shiny plastic back. It is also quite compact for a 10-inch tablet — measuring 243.1mm wide, 176.1mm tall, 8mm thick, and tipping the scales at 510g — and yet it feels solid and it does not scratch easily even when dropped a couple of times, thanks to its build quality.

However the positioning of its buttons is not ideal. Samsung decided to place them on the bottom bezel, which makes it almost impossible to use the device in portrait mode without accidentally hitting a button. The touch-sensitive areas for the Menu and Back buttons also extend to about an inch to either side of the buttons so there is more room for you to make mistakes.

As its name suggests, the Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 features a 10.1-inch TFT LCD at a resolution of 1280 x 800. The display is not as great as the Nexus 10’s 2560 x 1600 screen or the iPad’s retina display, but it does offer a nice amount of detail in images, videos and text.

Its dual-core, 1.6GHz Intel processor is reasonably fast and the device’s 6,800 mAh battery lasts for about two days. Unfortunately scrolling on the device can be slow and jittery at times, and apps take longer than they should to open. Thankfully the Tab 3 10.1 performs smoothly when watching videos, using email and news articles or playing high-definition games.

Another flaw of the Tab 3 10.1 was the absence of the Multi-Window feature, which makes multi-tasking on the device almost impossible. On hindsight, removing it may be a good thing as the tablet already struggles to perform without lag on the single window mode.

The tablet’s 3.15-megapixel camera at the back is also nothing to shout about, but should do the job should you be need to snap a quick photo.

The Tab 3 is a decent device despite the lack of ground-breaking specs and performance. But it will not reach the heights Samsung’s smartphones have achieved simply because there are many other Android tablets on the market now, including the Nexus 10 and Sony’s Xperia Tablet Z, that are better looking, more powerful and offer better value for money.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 is now available in white for the retail price of S$748 (without contract).