Not to be overshadowed by the release of it’s faster, Honeycomb-having younger brother, the original Samsung Galaxy Tab is starting to receive an OTA update to Android 2.3 Gingerbread. There is one pretty significant catch here, as this update is only occurring for owners of the Sprint-branded Galaxy Tab.

Over the next week or so, owners of the Sprint branded Tab should receive a prompt to update their devices to Gingerbread. Though most tablets being released today sport Google’s tablet-specific Honeycomb OS, Gingerbread brought significant performance upgrades over Android 2.2 Froyo, and owners of the OG Tab will likely experience a much faster tablet upon completion of the upgrade.

If you simply cannot wait to get your hands on Gingerbread, you can manually check for an update by going to settings -> About -> Software Update  and see if you can access the update a bit early.

Hopefully we’ll see other carriers follow suit and offer the Gingerbread update in July. But, due our experiences with the Galaxy S update, we’re still a bit skeptical.

Anyone out there own a Sprint Galaxy Tab? Were you able to update successfully? How are you liking the performance enhancements?  Sound off in the comments.