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
Final Words
The Galaxy Tab S is easily the most compelling tablet family Samsung has ever released. The devices are incredibly thin, very light and boast displays that can be easily configured to be among the most accurate in the industry. In the Android tablet space it’s often a stretch charging $399 or $499, even for a flagship, given how good the Nexus line ends up being. With the Tab S, I think Samsung has something that’s worthy of a price premium over the more cost effective Android tablets.
The Galaxy Tab S, regardless of size, is easy to hold and has a screen that’s great to look at. These are two of the most important things to get right when building a tablet and the Tab S delivers on both.
The features around the edges are nice additions. The integrated fingerprint scanner works better on the tablet than it does on the phone, and is a decent time saver if you’ve got a long passcode. Having 2-stream 802.11ac support is nice as well, although the implementation isn’t as good as it is on the Galaxy S5. If you do have a Galaxy S5, having the ability to answer calls directly from your tablet is a neat feature.
The devices aren't perfect however. The Exynos 5420 SoC in both tablets is no longer class leading. CPU performance is reasonable but the GPU does seem to have issues keeping up with the high resolution display. If anything, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 would probably have been a better fit for the tablets across the board. I suspect Exynos 5420 won out due to pricing, but as a result we end up with a tablet that has the dimensions and display of a flagship and an SoC that is simply good enough.
Battery life is either going to be amazing or below par depending on your usage model. If you spend a lot of time looking at web pages, you’ll find the high resolution AMOLED display to be a power liability. If however you mainly use your tablet to watch TV and movies, there’s literally no better option on the market today when it comes to battery life. Even the tiny 8.4-inch Galaxy Tab S managed to best all of the other tablets we’ve tested in video playback battery life, delivering over 15 hours on a single charge. Start browsing the web however and you’re looking at roughly half of that. It’s an interesting tradeoff for sure.
Overall the Galaxy Tab S feels like a solid reboot for Samsung’s tablet ambitions. The trick from here on out will be to continue to iterate the design without losing focus. A successor with a better SoC might be a good start. Perhaps Snapdragon 808/810 might be a good option next year, or an 805 based solution by the end of this year depending on how aggressive of a schedule Samsung sticks to for tablet releases going forward.
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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.