SAMSUNG GALAXY TAB S 10.5 Review

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S 10.5 draws the eye right away with a stunning 10.5in, 2,560 x 1,600-resolution Super AMOLED screen.

Design


The new samsung galaxy tab S just looks amazing. Samsung have done a great job in designing the new galaxy tab S. The main problems we face with the samsung phones and tablets is it's build material which feals very cheap,but you cannot say this for this amazing tab. It feels as premium or even more than the ipad for sure. You will love to hold it, as it is very slim and light. Apart from that the the screen display is just amazing. With sporting the new IPS display. Graphics and images jump out of the screen in a way that IPS displays don’t.  However, we had to tinker with the settings to get it looking its best. Watching movies and TV shows in the default “adaptive” mode produced uncomfortably lurid skin tones. Switching to the “basic” setting yielded much better colour accuracy without sacrificing punch and presence. 


Although the Tab S’s screen is easy to fall in love with, it isn’t as bright as the best IPS displays. According to our colorimeter, the Tab S 10.5 goes up to 276cd/m2; IPS screens can hit 400cd/ m2 or more. This won’t normally be a problem for indoor use, but in bright sunlight the Tab S will be less readable than, for example, the iPad Air. What’s more, AMOLED displays are susceptible to screen burn – depending on how you use it, the Tab S may not look so good a few years from now.

 Regardless of the display, the Tab S is a beautiful device. It measures only 6.6mm thick and, at 465g, you’ll barely notice it in your bag; holding it up to watch a movie or read isn’t tiring at all. It isn’t quite as light as the Xperia Z2  Tablet, and lacks that device’s waterresistant sealing, but we found its  rounded design more comfortable to  hold for long periods. Our only minor  moan is that the bronze-framed bezels  – which, admittedly, look great – are  so narrow that it’s tricky to pick up the  tablet without accidentally activating  the touchscreen. On the plus side, the Tab S offers plenty of connectivity. 

There’s a microSD slot that will take cards up to 128GB in size; the micro-USB socket supports MHL, for HDMI video output; wireless stretches to dual-band 802.11ac; and an infrared transceiver means you can put the tablet to use as a giant universal remote control.  Disappointingly, you don’t get a stylus with this tablet, but a fingerprint scanner is built into the home button. This works in the same way as the scanner on the Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone.

Performance

The new Samsung galaxy tab S beats a powerful Samsung Exynos 5 Octa SoC with eight cores (four running at 1.9GHz, four at 1.3GHz), alongside 3GB of RAM, a base storage allocation of 16GB and Mali-T628 MP6 graphics. 

This is the same specification as the larger Samsung Galaxy NotePRO 12.2; not surprisingly, it delivered similar benchmark results. The Tab S completed the SunSpider test in 478ms and recorded single- and multi-core scores of 741 and 1,769 in Geekbench 3.  Inevitably, the Tab S’s high resolution holds back gaming performance. In the GFXBench gaming test, it averaged only 14fps; the iPad Air scored 21fps and the 1080p Xperia Z2 Tablet managed 28fps. In everyday use, however, everything is perfectly responsive. In our testing, we almost never saw the tablet slow significantly, and the fussy Magazine UX newsfeed was as smooth as butter. Battery life was impressive, too, with the power-efficient AMOLED screen paying dividends. In flight mode, with the display set to 120cd/ m2, the Tab S 10.5 played 13hrs 26mins of video before hitting 5% capacity; the screen then dimmed automatically and the movie continued for a further 31 minutes. That’s a strong showing, beaten only by the Xperia Z2 Tablet’s 14hrs 38mins and the 16hrs 3mins of Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX 8.9in. 

Camera

The Tab S’s 8-megapixel rear camera, which is accompanied by a single LED flash, captures clean, clear stills and decent 1080p video as well. There’s also a front-facing 2.1-megapixel camera, but this isn’t as good. We weren’t impressed with the sideways-facing speakers, either, which aren’t particularly loud or full-bodied. 

As usual, Samsung has skinned Android 4.4 with its TouchWiz frontend and preinstalled a long list of  proprietary apps. Whether you approve  of this is a matter of taste, but some  of the bundled software is undeniably  useful. Smart Stay, for example, keeps  the screen on while you’re looking at it;  Multi Window lets you line up two apps  side by side; and the new SideSync  feature allows you to drag files back  and forth between the tablet and a  Samsung Galaxy smartphone. 

Conclusion

All in all, the Galaxy Tab S 10.5 is  an excellent tablet. The screen is  fabulous, performance and battery life  are more than respectable, and the  design is the very definition of svelte. This tab is really amazing just misses the Sony xperia z 2 tablet in terms of performance and battery life. But on this budget this is the best tablet you can get with a stylish eye catchy look and blazing fast performance.