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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JarredWalton - Sunday, March 23, 2014 - link
I lack the hardware to properly see whether this is Pentile or not... I hope to have the necessary tools "soon". As I noted, the pixels on these are so small that I'm not sure the arrangement really matters. I can literally press my nose against the tablets and I still couldn't say with certainty whether they're RGB stripe or Pentile. If I need a microscope to say what type of arrangement they use, does it really matter in the real world?themossie - Sunday, March 23, 2014 - link
Jarred,If you need a microscope to tell the difference it doesn't matter in the real world :-) That may not be true for everyone.
My problem with Pentile is that lines looked blurry and caused eyestrain (headaches after a few minutes of use) because vertical/horizontal lines weren't 'straight' without RGB striping. This can be somewhat mitigated by different subpixel arrangements, but doesn't go away entirely. If these are pentile, this would probably be an issue for me at this resolution and screensize.
This problem is somewhat explained in the second paragraph of http://www.anandtech.com/show/7743/the-pixel-densi... -
"For example, human vision systems are able to determine whether two lines are aligned extremely well, with a resolution around two arcseconds. This translates into an effective 1800 PPD. For reference, a 5” display with a 2560x1440 resolution would only have 123 PPD."
themossie - Sunday, March 23, 2014 - link
*If you need a microscope to tell the difference, it doesn't matter for you :-Pakdj - Monday, March 24, 2014 - link
But it does for you? WTF are you doing with your tablet to need a microscope to see the 'pixel arrangement'? Other than 'fatigue'....if that's real or not, up for debate, these HiDPI displays are beyond the point of 'mattering' to anyone other than the most anal of display dorksthemossie - Monday, March 24, 2014 - link
Huh? I don't care about high resolution (or high DPI), I just want RGB stripe so I don't get headaches :-Pdarkich - Tuesday, March 25, 2014 - link
Your argument seems incredibly ridiculous.By your definition we would need like 32K resolutions on a 5" screen for our vision to stop being bothered by pen tile!!
I could bet a house that your headache isn't caused by freaking micro missalingment of lines on a 380ppi screen.
I use my Note 3 for hours at a time and wow, I don't have headaches. It must be a natural phenomenon!
How about you try things like lowering the brightness?? Lol.
Get reasonable, man
StrangerGuy - Tuesday, March 25, 2014 - link
Right, so after gutting 1/3 effective PPI with pentile, how much would these Note Pros left? 9000 or number so high it doesn't matter like the Note 3 ? Nope, a measly 200 for the 10.1 and an absymal 150 for the 12.2. And we thought the first iPhone was bad at 160 by current standards, and now we don't even get AMOLED at all as a tradeoff for pentile?Hey let's just give a free pass Samsung on gutting the most important aspect of mobile device, why the hell not? The Android PPI flip-floppers are funny: "lol Apple still stuck at 300 ppi" but "150 ppi on uber expensive 12.2 Pro? It doesn't matter because I can't see it"
darkich - Tuesday, March 25, 2014 - link
Well sorry but that's crazy.The Note 8.4 has 360ppi and I can assure you the sharpness looks exactly the same as on the LCD with the similar ppi.
End of discussion.
As for the note 12.2..comparing it with the forst iPhone shows no one should take you seriously.
Do you have a laptop, or desktop?
If so, tell me their respective pixel densities
ESC2000 - Friday, March 28, 2014 - link
Yes it matters to the people who use ipads and will never consider buying this tablet who are trying to avoid the cognitive dissonance of having bought an equally or more expensive device with fewer features. And possibly to one guy who gets headaches from penile.davidgoscinny - Sunday, March 23, 2014 - link
I hope they've worked on the Flipboard app team to develop this Magazine UX "hence keeping the Flipboard) otherwise they should've at least changed the name.