The Galaxy Tab's fatal flaw: it makes the iPad look cheap
What's it made of - diamonds?
Some bad ideas are so amazingly, excruciatingly bad that they're painful to think about.
Angelina Jolie getting a tattoo of a spider's web across her face, for example. Letting David Cameron and Nick Clegg run the country. Pouring Nitro-Mors on your naughty bits.
Making an iPad rival that costs more than the most expensive iPad. That sort of thing.
Yes, in news that apparently comes from the "we've eaten an entire field of magic mushrooms" department, that's exactly what Samsung's doing. Not the Nitro-Mors. The iPad pricing thing.
Amazon wants an incredible £799 for the Samsung Galaxy Tab, possibly because it believes it's made of diamonds, cures cancer and brings your ancestors back from the dead.
To be fair, other sites list the Tab for much less, but it's still pricey: when we asked about a £615 price we'd seen another retailer offering, Samsung coughed and agreed that the Tab would certainly cost more than £600. That was a shocker, and we didn't think it meant nearly two hundred quid more than £600.
Perspective
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Let's get some perspective here. Apple is hardly the Poundstretcher of technology, but its cheapest iPad is £429, just over half the price of Amazon's Galaxy Tab.
The 64GB one is £599 - £200 less than Amazon wants for the Galaxy Tab - and even the 3G 64GB model is £100 cheaper at £699. Maybe Samsung looked at Apple's "magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price" and shouted "Unbelievable price! Yes! We can do that! Eight hundred pounds of unbelievable! Take that, Ninja Steve!"
Or maybe I'm right about the mushrooms and the entire company is completely off its face.
So what do you get for the price of an exceptionally powerful laptop, one and a half iPhones or nearly two entry level iPads?
You get a tablet that's quite good but far too expensive. When TechRadar's Gareth Beavis wrote our hands on: Samsung Galaxy Tab review he described it as "pretty darn neat" but noted that "now we just need to find out the price to see if it's going to be really popular".
If Amazon's price is right, this is one Tab I can't imagine many people rushing to pick up.
Contributor
Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than twenty books. Her latest, a love letter to music titled Small Town Joy, is on sale now. She is the singer in spectacularly obscure Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.