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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skrewler2 - Friday, March 28, 2014 - link
You mentioned the Note 2014 having the same specs on the first page, but didn't include these in any of the benchmarks to confirm they are indeed the same tablet with just the inclusion of the S-Pen?Also, you didn't include a comparison between the Note / Note pro / Galaxy / Galaxy pro in your closing thoughts.
I got my Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition on special for $400 back in Jan (also w/ a bunch of goodies.. Google store credit, Samsung store credit, Dropbox, evernote pro, a bunch of other stuff). I was kinda bummed that shortly after I purchased it that the Note Pros came out, but other than 10" vs 12" it's hard to tell what exactly is different between them. I remember coming to the conclusion that the Pro model adds some features for businesses / BYOD, notably for compliance and security.
Does it just come down to Note 10.1 2014 being 10" and Note Pro 12 being 12"? Doesn't seem worth the $300 price premium. I also just ran the Sunspider benchmark on my Note 2014 and consistently get scores around 500ms.
flamingspartan3 - Saturday, March 29, 2014 - link
"That’s sort of the way of Android though – it can be buttery smooth and then suddenly it’s not." What an idiot. My Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 are ALWAYS buttery smooth. The Nexus 7 sometimes lags when I use a WebKit browser but I use Chrome Beta so I'm fine. They are definitely smoother than my iPad 4 and Surface RT.R. Hunt - Sunday, March 30, 2014 - link
I like Android but it's almost impossible to get a device running real, pure Android. Google doesn't care and the Nexus 10 is outdated now in terms of size and weight so the laggy Touchwiz-ridden Samsung tablets are what we're left with when it comes to large upper-range Android tablets.etre - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Please just STOP with the complains for software buttons.Understand that there are people quite happy with the layout Samsung is using and are buying Samsung specifically for this reason and for sd-card slot.
This is my only alternative. Others have choices, Asus, Sony, etc. I don't.
In fact, I own an Asus tablet and the only major drawback for me are the software buttons. Between notification and navigation bar, in landscape, there isn't much screen left. I won't ever understand why every tech site is so demanding in this regard. Maybe because Google can be quite persuasive, but please again, don't ruin my only option.
james.jwb - Monday, April 28, 2014 - link
LG G 8.3 review anytime soon?