Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4 and 10.1 Review
by Jarred Walton on March 22, 2014 9:30 PM ESTClosing Thoughts
Samsung is no stranger to the tablet market, and the latest refresh of the Galaxy Tab lineup shows their experience. The Galaxy Tab Pro 8.3 and Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1 are both good tablets, and the displays in particular are going to be worth the price of entry for some users. As with laptops and smartphones, it’s not just about any one item pushing a tablet over the top, though the reverse isn’t true – if any area is severely lacking, that might be enough to kill interest in a particular device. Basically, it’s more of a gestalt approach: the sum is greater than the parts, and Samsung delivers the goods with the Galaxy Pro tablets.
Of the two, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise now that we think the Pro 8.4 is the best one to buy. The more compact form factor coupled with a lower price and better performance gets the trifecta to win out over the Pro 10.1. There are areas where the 10.1 clearly wins out (color quality and battery life, specifically), but is it worth $100 more to get those, along with a bulkier, heavier device? I don’t think so; feel free to disagree however, as they’re both good tablets.
Unfortunately, as good as they are they’re also rather expensive – as usual, quality has a price, and so do the WQXGA displays. Compared to other offerings, obviously the iPad Air and iPad Mini Retina are right in the same price range. Really, the question over which to get is going to come down to your OS and app ecosystem preferences; I’m happy with Android, so for the price I’d be inclined to go with Samsung’s Galaxy Pro tablets, but iOS fans will have plenty of reasons to stick with Apple.
Android alternatives include the Nexus 7, which delivers slightly less performance in most cases than the Pro 8.4 and it “only” has a WUXGA display, but it has one big selling point: it costs $170 less than the Pro 8.4, and you could even pick up two for the price of a single Pro 10.1 – or you could grab the 32GB model and still only pay $269. The Pro 8.4 looks and feels nicer in my opinion, but it’s really difficult to argue with that sort of price competition. If you want two more options, the Kindle Fire HDX 7” ($200) and Kindle Fire HDX 8.9” ($379) pack similar performance with their Snapdragon 800 SoCs and have a lot to offer, but the lack of Google Play Services is a pretty massive drawback in my book. I really can’t find any other direct competition in the Android market for the Samsung Pro 8.4 right now, so it's an easy recommendation.
For larger tablets, there are a couple more contenders worth considering. The ASUS TF701T 10.1” ($424 with WQXGA LCD and 32GB, with a Tegra 4 SoC) and the Toshiba Excite Pro 10.1” ($471 and also Tegra 4, WQXGA, and 32GB) are 10.1-inch offerings with similar core features (Tegra 4), with both pros and cons relative to the Tab Pro 10.1. Slightly lower pricing is one benefit, more storage by default is another perk, and the lack of TouchWiz UI may be another, depending on how you feel about that. Performance goes back and forth depending on the benchmark you want to look at, though I'd still give the edge to the Snapdragon 800 overall. Plenty of other budget tablets can be found, but they’ll all come with slower SoCs, lower quality displays, and generally worse build quality.
Bottom line then is that if you’re looking for a high quality Android tablet, Samsung’s latest offerings should be at the top of your list. There are a few quirks at times (like physical buttons), but nothing that I’d consider a deal breaker. If you have the money and you want one of the best Android tablets I’ve had a chance to use, the Galaxy Pro tablet series likely has what you’re looking for. We’re still seeing pretty major jumps in performance with each new generation of SoCs, so these won’t be the “new hotness” for long, but right now this is about as good as it gets. If you have the necessary funds, I can definitely recommend both of these tablets. We'll likely see additional competition in the coming months, but until we get the next generation SoCs I don't think you'll see anything clearly faster/better than the Galaxy Pro line. Now if they could just reduce the price a bit, it would be a much easier recommendation.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
125 Comments
View All Comments
Wilco1 - Monday, March 24, 2014 - link
What is claimed this is CPU performance at maximum frequency, not a latency test of bursty workloads. It would be interesting to see Anand's browsing test reporting both power and performance/latency results as it seems a reasonable test of actual use. However SunSpider is not like a real mobile workload.The datasets for most of the benchmarks in Geekbench are actually quite large, into 20-30MBytes range. That certainly does not fit into the L2 on any SoC I know, let alone on L1. So I suggest that Geekbench gives a far better idea of mobile performance than a benchmark that only measures the set of JIT optimization tricks to get a good SunSpider score.
Intel doesn't have magic that makes frequency scaling 10-100 times faster - PLLs and voltage regulators all use the same physics (until recently Intel was using the same industry-standard voltage regulators as everybody else). The issue is one of software, the default governor is not recognizing repeated patterns of bursty behaviour and keeping clocks high for longer when necessary. Intel avoids the Linux governor issues by using a separate microcontroller. I have no doubt that it has been well tuned to the kind of bursty behaviour that SunSpider exhibits.
virtual void - Monday, March 24, 2014 - link
So you are suggesting that the performance counters in Sandy Bridge is reporting the wrong thing when it reports 97% L1D$-hit rate in Geekbench? They seem to work quite well on "real" programs.The performance counters also suggest that Geekbench contains trivial to predict branches, while program developed with dynamic languages and/or OOP languages usually contains a lot of indirect and even conditional indirect calls that is quite hard to predict. Only the most advanced CPU-designs keep history on conditional indirect calls, so a varying branch target on a indirect call will always result in a branch-prediction miss on mobile CPUs.
The sampling frequency of CPU-load and the aggressiveness the Linux kernel switches P-state is based on the reported P-state switch latency. All modern Intel CPUs report a switching latency of 10µs while I haven't seem any ARM SoC report anything lower than 0.1ms. The _real_ effect of this is that Intel platforms will react about ten times as fast to a sudden burst in CPU-load when running Linux-kernel.
Wilco1 - Monday, March 24, 2014 - link
SPEC2006 has ~96% average L1D hit rate, so do you also claim SPEC has a small working set and runs almost entirely out of L1? The issue is not about the correctness of the performance counters but your interpretation of them. The fact that modern CPUs can run at multiple GHz despite DRAM internally running at ~50MHz still is precisely because caches and branch predictors work pretty well.C++ and GUI code typically only has a limited number of distinct targets, which are easy to predict on modern mobile CPUs (pretty much any ARM CPU since Cortex-A8 has had indirect predictors, and since A15 they support multiple targets). I've never seen conditional indirect calls being emitted by compilers, so I can imagine some CPUs may ignore this case, but it's not in any way hard to predict. The conditional indirect branches you do get in real code are conditional return (trivial to predict) and switch statements on some ARM compilers.
Well if there is such a large difference then there must be a bug - I did once glance over the Samsung cpufreq drivers and they seemed quite a mess. It is essential to sample activity at a high resolution, if you sample at Nx slower rate then you do indeed react N times slower to a burst of activity - irrespectively of how fast the actual frequency/voltage scaling is done.
Egg - Monday, March 24, 2014 - link
Alright, I'll admit I didn't actually read the article. It just seemed you were unaware of what Brian had said previously.UltraWide - Saturday, March 22, 2014 - link
The Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 has 3GB of RAM.JarredWalton - Sunday, March 23, 2014 - link
It's not clear if all 10.1 Note 2014 come with 3GB, or just the 32GB models, but I'm going to go with 3GB (and hopefully that's correct, considering the cost increase for the Note). I had the Samsung specs pages open when putting together that table, and unfortunately they didn't list RAM on the 10.1 16GB I was looking at. Weird.Reflex - Saturday, March 22, 2014 - link
" If you want another option, the Kindle Fire HDX 7” ($200) and Kindle Fire HDX 8.9” ($379) pack similar performance with their Snapdragon 800 SoCs, but the lack of Google Play Services is a pretty massive drawback in my book."For many of us that's actually the Kindle line's largest advantage. Android and a good chunk of its app ecosystem, without compromising our privacy and exposing ourselves to all the malware. Plus we got these specs six months ago with the HDX line, and for a lower price in a better package.
A5 - Saturday, March 22, 2014 - link
Yeah, because the best way to avoid malware is to bypass the Play Store and install an APK from a random website to get Youtube to work.And you're only fooling yourself if you think Amazon is any better for your privacy than Google.
Reflex - Saturday, March 22, 2014 - link
Have you actually read their privacy policies and compared? Or taken a look at their profit models? There is a significant difference between the two for their approaches to privacy.And no, if I really care to get an app like that I can get it from a third party market if I must. There are some that mirror the Play store. But that said, there are very few needs that are not met via apps already available in the Amazon store.
R0H1T - Sunday, March 23, 2014 - link
So you're saying that Amazon has no record of you in their database whatsoever OR that they don't track your browsing history through their Silk browser, using Amazon's own servers, & never target (ads/promos) you based on your buying/browsing history ?I'd say you're deluding yourself if you think that Yahoo, twitter, FB, bing or even Amazon are any different than Google when it comes to tracking their users or targeting them with specific ads/promos based on their (recorded) history ):