Video: Samsung Galaxy Tab, for the prisoner who has everything

With the tablet/pad market hotting up in the run up to Christmas, Samsung has decided to go down the comedy video route to help sell its big Christmas contender, the Galaxy Tab.

While I'd much rather have some giggles than watch the kind of patronising short films apple comes out with to advertise its products ("Hi, we're Apple, and we've single-handedly invented video chat, even though it's been around for 10 years!"), 'comedy' is both subjective and often, well, not very funny, especially in this kind of format. But no worries this time - as you'll see below, Samsung has hit the nail squarely on the head with a Spaced-style short that hits the spot.

As is so often the case with these promotional clips, what it fails to do is tell you anything about ther device itself. So, for the uninitiated, you'll get a nice seven-inch TFT LCD screen compared to the iPad's 10-inch offering - both are great to look at, so it's really horses for courses here.

It has a camera, comes in Wi-Fi only and 3G flavours, has 16 or 32GB of onboard storage (plus microSD card slot for adding extra capacity) and runs on the Android 'Froyo' 2.2 operating system. Generally, reviews have shown its performance to be a little below that of the Apple iPad, while it also seems to eat up the battery much faster than its rival.

While Android seems to behind Apple in optimising its OS for tablet devices, you can be sure Google will come through in time - and of course, you'll get Flash support from the Galaxy - sadly lacking on the iPad. And the Android user interface really is lovely to use, in both smartphone and pad form, while Android Market is starting to give Apple's iStore a run for its money. If you're after a smaller device than the iPad, this is well worth a look - even if it is a little pricey.