SAMSUNG GALAXY TAB PRO 10.1

Thin and light design. Refreshing Content Home interface. Plastic build. Micro lags at times.

Samsung tried to give the Tab Pro 10.1 a premium look by including a metal trim between the front panel and the back, and replaced the cheap-looking glossy rear with a faux-leather material that we first saw on the Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition. It is still plastic though, but it does makes the tablet look slightly more professional and less susceptible to fingerprints and smudges.

Samsung’s engineering team seems hell-bent on beating Apple on any front possible with the Tab Pro 10.1; the tablet is 1mm thinner (7.3mm) and 1g lighter (477g) than the Air. Honestly, these figures look good on paper, but do not in any way make the Samsung slate better in handling.

The Tab Pro 10.1 joins the league of Android tablets (ASUS Transformer Pad TF701T and Google Nexus 10) with an ultra-high resolution (2,560 x 1,600 pixels) display. As expected, the display is crisp and bright with vivid colors. However, a side by side comparison with the Air and Surface 2 revealed that the display on the Tab Pro 10.1 has a slightly yellowish white tone when viewing HardwareZone’s new portal and Google’s home page.

The LTE model runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core 2.3GHz processor and 2GB RAM. During our time with the device, interface navigation was a breeze though you will begin to notice micro lags when jumping between tabs.

With its new generation products, Samsung introduced a new interface, Content Home that is built on top of Android 4.4 KitKat. Powered by Flipboard, it is a dashboard that aggregates your apps, news and social feeds. You can have up to five “magazine” pages with up to six widgets, and offers a refreshing take on the typical app-based home screen.

Samsung also bundles a suite of productivity apps with the Tab Pro 10.1; users are entitled to a free subscription of Hancom Office, an office program for users to create, edit and share documents. Due to its Officelike interface and experience, Hancom for Android is suitable for all types of productivity users from beginners to power users.

The Tab Pro 10.1 is available in 16GB only in Singapore, but does come with a microSD memory card to expand storage capacity by up to 64GB.