Samsung Galaxy Tab S Review (10.5 & 8.4-inch)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 24, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Samsung
- Mobile
- Galaxy Tab S
Final Words
The Galaxy Tab S is easily the most compelling tablet family Samsung has ever released. The devices are incredibly thin, very light and boast displays that can be easily configured to be among the most accurate in the industry. In the Android tablet space it’s often a stretch charging $399 or $499, even for a flagship, given how good the Nexus line ends up being. With the Tab S, I think Samsung has something that’s worthy of a price premium over the more cost effective Android tablets.
The Galaxy Tab S, regardless of size, is easy to hold and has a screen that’s great to look at. These are two of the most important things to get right when building a tablet and the Tab S delivers on both.
The features around the edges are nice additions. The integrated fingerprint scanner works better on the tablet than it does on the phone, and is a decent time saver if you’ve got a long passcode. Having 2-stream 802.11ac support is nice as well, although the implementation isn’t as good as it is on the Galaxy S5. If you do have a Galaxy S5, having the ability to answer calls directly from your tablet is a neat feature.
The devices aren't perfect however. The Exynos 5420 SoC in both tablets is no longer class leading. CPU performance is reasonable but the GPU does seem to have issues keeping up with the high resolution display. If anything, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 would probably have been a better fit for the tablets across the board. I suspect Exynos 5420 won out due to pricing, but as a result we end up with a tablet that has the dimensions and display of a flagship and an SoC that is simply good enough.
Battery life is either going to be amazing or below par depending on your usage model. If you spend a lot of time looking at web pages, you’ll find the high resolution AMOLED display to be a power liability. If however you mainly use your tablet to watch TV and movies, there’s literally no better option on the market today when it comes to battery life. Even the tiny 8.4-inch Galaxy Tab S managed to best all of the other tablets we’ve tested in video playback battery life, delivering over 15 hours on a single charge. Start browsing the web however and you’re looking at roughly half of that. It’s an interesting tradeoff for sure.
Overall the Galaxy Tab S feels like a solid reboot for Samsung’s tablet ambitions. The trick from here on out will be to continue to iterate the design without losing focus. A successor with a better SoC might be a good start. Perhaps Snapdragon 808/810 might be a good option next year, or an 805 based solution by the end of this year depending on how aggressive of a schedule Samsung sticks to for tablet releases going forward.
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name99 - Wednesday, June 25, 2014 - link
If you don't like sunspider for whatever reason, look at one of the other values. No-one is forcing you to base your opinions on one number.But for many of us sun spider most accurately captures the snappiness of a browser in real use, which is something we care about. Kraken and Octane are too much biased towards JS performance and multithreaded JS. That's fine if that's what you're interested in, but it's silly to pretend that that's a better measure of how the device feels in normal use.
the_ether - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
lilo777's comment seems to be an important one. Perhaps a generalist tech site like Anandtech isn't the most knowledgeable about testing screens. How were the tests conducted? Perhaps the method that was used to display an image on the screen was sub-optimal. For example, an image normally has a profile associated with it and some programs will use that profile in order to determine the correct way of displaying that image - eg whether sRGB or Adobe RGB colour spaces are appropriate.There seems to be an important discrepancy here.
marytattoo - Sunday, June 29, 2014 - link
still wondering about the overall value and performance of the s 8.4 and the pro 8.4 ?????mhannigan - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
You are obviously uninformed. If you do not understand why an OLED display is a more pleasant experience, then it really cannot be explained to you.ddriver - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
It has better contrast, better white point, better grayscale accuracy, gamut and saturation accuracy are so close to the Air display you won't be able to tell without measuring equipment. I'd say it is a match to the Air display and significantly better than anything else. It's pretty great, considering Samsung don't have fanatical devotees to exploit and must sell much more balanced products at lower profit margins.Anders CT - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
The display in the samsung tablet has better contrast, a wider gamut, better resolution and a much faster response than the display in the ipad Air.Sasmung makes display panels for both ipads and Galaxy tablets, so it is only natural that Samsung would reserve the superior panel for their own tablets.
Lavkesh - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
That's assuming Apple is willing to compromise on their display's?ESC2000 - Sunday, July 6, 2014 - link
Sorry to burst your bubble but Apple compromises on many things to preserve their profit margins... See eg skimpy RAM that means that webpage tabs always face to reload when you switch between them, causing info to be lost... Low RAM also caused the iPad Airs and minis with retina to crash and freeze frequently. The one I bought for my sister froze all the time - a $500 product at that! Similar issue with their highway robbery pricing for storage... $500 device with only 16 GB and no micro SD is an insult and a ripoff. (That goes for all brands but we are starting to see some change... More companies bundling 32 GB into the base model).Another example would be the (again insulting) ugly TN panel in the MacBook Air - $1000+ computer with a low rez TN display. Only Apple could get away with it.
akdj - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
The display in the Sammy is nine months newer than the Air/Mini and 5s. Those products are coming down the pipe in the next quarter. How about we compare current to current versions enforced deciding? And with those results, it's pretty apparent Apple's 2013 design was pretty damn good and holding it's own almost a year later (keep in mind it's dominance at release in comparison to AMOLED tablets). Hold your reservations. The Air's display is beyond outstanding and if the Sammy is this good, neither is 'bad' nor will the majority be able to discern any difference at these resolutionsalthaz - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
Contrast is the single-most important part of subjective (ie: what peoples eyes say) display quality - according to every study ever done on it - and AMOLED displays have infinite contrast. Not sure why it wasn't tested here, but the ludicrous contrast makes this screen many-times superior to the iPad screen, IMO.That said, there are plenty of folks that (for some reason) prefer LCD to AMOLED, so who am I to judge.