Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4 and 10.1 Review
by Jarred Walton on March 22, 2014 9:30 PM ESTBattery Life
For battery life testing, we run the displays at 200 nits and test Internet surfing and H.264 720p video playback. In some cases the tablet OEMs have features built into the software that lock display brightness to a low (minimum) setting when battery life is less than 10%. The Galaxy Pro offerings appear to do this, though you can override the behavior in the power options. In real-world use, you can expect perhaps slightly better Internet battery life (as it's unlikely you'll be refreshing pages every 20 seconds) while the video playback results are exactly what you would do if watching a movie.
The Nexus 7 wins the WiFi testing result while the iPad Air and Mini Retina take the top two spots for the video playback (and silver and bronze in the Internet testing). It’s interesting that the two Galaxy Pro tablets are so close on the Internet results but the 10.1 does substantially better on the video playback. Either way, both tablets are at least capable of reaching their “up to 9/10 hours” advertised battery life, with perhaps a bit more if you’re willing to turn down the display brightness or shut off WiFi.
There are better tablets if you want as much battery life as possible, but given the ready availability of portable chargers and such I'm not sure it's all that critical. Gaming battery life is lower than the above results, of course, so plan on more like four to six hours of gaming (depending on the game) before needing to plug in.
Storage Performance
Having used several older Android tablets, the drop in storage performance over time can be extremely painful. With Android 4.3 and 4.4 now supporting TRIM, hopefully things will stay running a bit more smoothly over a long period of time. As it stands, we don’t have all that many results for our Android storage benchmarks (and no cross-platform test for iOS yet), but the Samsung eMMC looks to be better than most of what we’ve tested. The random write speeds in particular are nearly twice as fast as that of the Nexus 7, and we’re at least consistently beating typical hard drive performance with >1MBps random I/O. Hopefully we’ll see even faster NAND/controller solutions upcoming tablets.
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akdj - Monday, March 24, 2014 - link
You DO realize Window's Surface/Yog/da/HP 2 in 1, et al run on the third or fourth core 'i' chips right? And these tabs....Sammy, Apple, LG, etc are run on ARM SoCs correct? Huge discrepancy in performance measurement. Should be assumed as they've run BayTrail scores in interviews, conducted the 'Surface' interviews...and a quick peak in 'search' you'll be able to derive the performance differences yourself. They're not competitors right now. Intel is many times more powerful as are their iGPUs being used in the laptop form factor. Weight is a big differentiator as well. A pound or three? Keyboard (physical) or not? You get the idea. While the walls are closing in, totally different architecturesakdj - Monday, March 24, 2014 - link
Reviews. Not 'interviews'. Love spell check. And 'edit' ;)az_ - Monday, March 24, 2014 - link
Yes, I know they are different architectures but they serve the same purpose. They all have touch screens, web browsers and run applications and games. It would be interesting to see how they compare, even if it is in just a few of the benchmarks that can be run on all of the devices. Size, weight and battery life differ but I might be willing to sacrifice some portability for a couple of times more performance. And bay trail tablets should be pretty similar in performance, size/weight and battery life to arm ones.I can probably dig through different reviews and compare numbers but that is too much work, it is much better to just include them in the charts.
Golgatha - Monday, March 24, 2014 - link
You would think for a price range of $399-$849 they could include more than 16/32GB of storage on these things.RobertMontreal - Monday, March 24, 2014 - link
Will not load Words with Friends on Pro 10.1. I spent 15 minutes with two people on this and the problem could not be resolved. I found a review (5 stars on 5 stars) on the pre-Pro version that laments the same problem.hockey - Monday, March 24, 2014 - link
The Samsung Galaxy Tab is one of the most talked about new tablet devices to hit the market. With more and more companies joining the gold rush following the release of the iPad, Samsung has included many features which makes it stand out from the rest.juhatus - Tuesday, March 25, 2014 - link
If your not tied to a ecosystem, the director competitor is iPad mini2, which is cheaper and better built quality. I'm trying to choose between the two.. almost wanting to try android for a change. Maybe the droid is more educational for the son. Great article I would missed the Samsung tab all together.ESC2000 - Wednesday, March 26, 2014 - link
How is the iPad mini with retina cheaper? It also costs $400. I assume you're not referring to the first gen mini which was a mediocre tablet made out of 2010 parts.Rdmkr - Wednesday, March 26, 2014 - link
Isn't the solution to the whole "what does and doesn't constitute cheating" dilemma to always measure power consumption alongside performance so that whenever an OEM "cheats" by boosting the clock speed, they just shoot themselves in the foot by making the power consumption number look correspondingly worse.Death666Angel - Wednesday, March 26, 2014 - link
Having finished the review just now, wanted to say that I really liked your style. It's refreshing to see such a subjective take of tablets on Anandtech. And you are mentioning the right "it's personal preference" things which sometimes I think get lost here. Looking forward to more tablet reviews by you! :-)