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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Death666Angel - Wednesday, March 26, 2014 - link
True, Apple devices sell for more on the 2nd market. But considering that they also cost usually 600€ or more (I remember a time when non-contract iPhones were 800€), you also pay a lot more up front. I've paid 500€ for a Galaxy S2 because I imported it from the UK and got it as one of the first in Europe. I ended up selling it for 180€ 18 months later. An iPhone would have cost me about the same (320€, taking the upfront price and subtracting the resell price). But that is a rubbish deal either way. I'm not going to spend more than 350€ for a phone these days. Resell value or not. And I also know a lot of people who have rubbish iPhones (mostly 4 and 4s) that keep rebooting randomly, have bad battery life, weird issues. They can't resell those for more than 50€. And they are all out of warranty of course. So really, you are making an anecdotal argument, that will only be true for some people and for a lot of others it won't.ESC2000 - Friday, March 28, 2014 - link
See my post below - just checked what the iPad 4 and the nexus 7 2013 would command on amazon and in both cases it was 65% of the MSRP. It makes sense that apple products from three years ago command more than android products from three years ago bc all apple products were better then but they aren't anymore so expect to see the resale values gap closing. There is still some downward pressure on the resale value of Android (and Windows) products bc there are more models and more devices period.Also anyone who would pay $350 for an iPhone 4 is just stupid, I'm sorry. I get platform dedication blah blah blah but when you could have a new nexus 5 for the same price it's time to let go of brand allegiance.
ESC2000 - Friday, March 28, 2014 - link
Btw I just went and checked amazon and either your price aren't representative or you're lying. Both devices on there are going for about $200 used (assuming the iPhone didn't have like 64 GB storage while the note had 16 or something). NEW iPhone 4s were going for $350. Nice try LOL. Here it is for everyone to see:http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Galaxy-Note-SGH-i717...
http://www.amazon.com/Apple-iPhone-4S-16GB-White/d...
StrangerGuy - Saturday, March 22, 2014 - link
The only performance benchmark that only matters these days is the eMMC speed. Who cares about how much bazillion FPS in 3D when everything else stutters everywhere.UltraWide - Sunday, March 23, 2014 - link
So very true!jasonelmore - Monday, March 24, 2014 - link
and RAM. RAM dictates how long the device will be servicable and recieve updates. Apple's ipad line is gimped by their 1GB of RAM. They did it on purpose. 2 years from now, the device will start going slow because apple's 2014-2015 devices will all have 2GB or even 4GB of ram, which in turn, makes app developers use more of it. My ipad air's keyboard is stupidly slow to react to typing thanks to its horrible memory bandwidth on a almost 3 MP screen.akdj - Monday, March 24, 2014 - link
May wanna get it checked out. 7.1 made MASSIVE leaps forward with a 'brand new' rewrite of OS7. I've got three Airs and four iPad 4s. All are incredibly responsive, no crashing and fast as hell (we run an audio/video production company.ESC2000 - Tuesday, March 25, 2014 - link
Well then you are in the minority bc the three ipad air /retina ipad minis in my house regularly crash, a couple times a week, usually in safari. They also randomly reboot. I've teased my family about it bc my $230 nexus 7 (2013) is more reliable than their $400+ ipads. I've also sat them down next to each other and the screen and responsiveness of the nexus 7 matches the ipads despite being so much cheaper.I think the low amount of RAM in the ipads is contributing to the crashing. When I had an iPhone I was limited to eight tabs in safari which I assumed was bc it didn't have the internal memory to handle more. I've heard that the new ios update fixes the crashing and rebooting problem (which we know is real btw bc apple copped to it and claimed to be fixing it).
And the person who was claiming that all apple products have better resale value - that was true in the apple's edge is eroding. Three years ago apple products were objectively ahead of Android products so, fast fwd a few years to last year or this year when you're reselling them, and you see that apple products command a higher amount of money. But if you're talking about products released a year ago, Apple was no longer decisively the best phone or tablet manufacturer, so the gap has started to close. I just compared the price a used nexus 7 2013 and a used ipad 4 were going for on amazon and they were both going for around 65% of their original price.
Vigneshj - Sunday, March 23, 2014 - link
Will Samsung be releasing AMOLED display on tablet..? Watching movies/netflix can be a treat in AMOLED in large displays.StrangerGuy - Sunday, March 23, 2014 - link
Screw AMOLED? I'm far more concerned about the Pentile 2 subpixels per pixel shenanigans invading the LCD space here, from Samsung no less. I'm surprised the reviewer didn't even touch upon this.