Samsung Galaxy Tab S Review (10.5 & 8.4-inch)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 24, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Samsung
- Mobile
- Galaxy Tab S
Battery Life
Both Galaxy Tab Ses feature somewhat small batteries, a downside to pursuing a very thin chassis. The 10.5-inch model gets a 30Wh battery compared to 32.4Wh in the iPad Air, while the 8.4-inch model only has an 18.6Wh battery compared to 23.8Wh for the iPad mini with Retina Display.
For our web browsing workload, the battery size and power requirements of displaying mostly white web pages on a high resolution AMOLED display result in substandard battery life. Both devices deliver around 8 hours on a single charge, which isn’t bad in a vacuum - it’s just a regression compared to the Galaxy Tab Pro and far behind the other competition.
The story changes dramatically however once we look at video playback battery life:
Our video playback test is perfect for an AMOLED display as the final Harry Potter movie ends up having a lot of dark scenes in it. With only a small percentage of the display showing white, display power is reduced substantially, resulting in the best video playback battery life of any tablet we’ve ever tested. Even the tiny 8.4-inch Galaxy Tab S can last over 15 hours on a single charge.
Charge time isn’t particularly fast on any of the devices, but the 10.5-inch model in particular takes a while to make it to a full charge. The 10.5 will reach a 90% charge in just under 4 hours, but to make it to 97% takes another hour and the last 3% takes another 42 minutes on top of that. Usable charge time is competitive, but if you’re obsessive about always charging to 100% the 10.5-inch model does take a while to get there.
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theduckofdeath - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
The freebies are downloadable. Not pre-installed.Lavkesh - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
It is not hard to see. My Galaxy S3 with a supposedly quad core cpu crawls most of the times, the phone hangs and crashes all the time and application uninstall at times takes minutes. It is for the same reason that Motorola took a jibe at Samsung when launching Moto E saying that doing basic tasks, it is faster than Samsung's Galaxy S4!There is no denying that their hardware is good, but their software just isn't good enough.
basroil - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
That video playback life is a best case scenario because they don't have a dedicated testing video... the web browsing one is more realistic for most people (mostly white), and it's frankly pathetic.marytattoo - Sunday, June 29, 2014 - link
still, cheaper to get the tab 8.4 pro. almost all of the same stuff and cheaper. i love mine. and no where have i seen a comparison between the s 8.4 and the pro 8.4.basroil - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
Can Samsung legally call those screens 2560x1600? At best the chroma resolution is a quarter, maybe less depending on the screen controller. With the same train of thought, Microsoft's ClearType produces beyond 4K of resolution on their SP3...GC2:CS - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
Yeah those subpixel origami makes a lot of mess but samsung is a marketing company and as they are unable to make an RGB AMOLED of ~300 ppi they have to "cheat" in some way. So they shouldn't call these 2560 by 1600 but they can and they do.Penti - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
S-stripe is full-res RGB and not pentile. Only a few Samsung AMOLED-panels have been using uniform subpixels.basroil - Wednesday, June 25, 2014 - link
Normal S-Stripe displays from Samsung are indeed full resolution (RGB of 1:1:1), but if you look at the image of the new S-Stripe, you can see that it clearly has some sort of odd offset resulting in black space between every two-blue group. The count is the same 1:1:1, but are there actually 2560x1600 of those dots or only two thirds and the rest just imaginary subpixels?The 8.4 inch version though is 100% pentile and only has 1:2:1 and subpixel doubling (meaning the actual resolution is not much more than 720p). That's not to say that the pentile display will look bad, rather that calling it a fixed resolution above 1280x800 is a marketing gimmick and not a fact.
theduckofdeath - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
I'm honestly starting to wonder if you at all did read the review, or if you went directly to the comments section for the trolling, GG2:CS.dwade123 - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
No one buys tablets for specs. Where's the software? Oh right. It uses Android.