Samsung Galaxy Tab S6
Tablet or placebo?
Android tablet takes on Apple’s core values
Samsung was once seen as such a close rival to Apple that the two ended up in court over the suspiciously high level of similarity between their products. In smartphones, it doesn’t make sense any more to talk about a head-to-head contest – there are dozens of Android hardware makers, each innovating in their own ways. In tablets, however, Apple’s ipad still rules, and Samsung’s job with the Galaxy Tab is to work out how to compete with it.
The S6 clearly targets not the current basic 10.2in ipad (£349 from Apple www. snipca.com/24022), but the ipad Pro (from £769, www.snipca.com/33643, see issue 542 page 25). It even looks similar, but California’s judges can rest easy: Samsung adopted a narrow, even bezel around all the sides of its tablets long before Apple, and it’s still a great look here, with just enough border to hold on to. At 5.7mm, it’s a fraction slimmer than the 11in ipad Pro, and although its screen is bigger than the 10.2in ipad, the case is smaller. If there’s a flaw in the design, it’s that the indent in the aluminium back, which magnetically holds the included S Pen, doesn’t serve that purpose very well
– the stylus easily gets knocked off.ff.
While Apple did substantially improvemprove the rear camera in the ipad Pro, thehe S6 has two, giving a choice of regularr and super-wide framing. It also competesetes very credibly with the quality of Apple’s Retina displays. Using Samsung’s favoured AMOLED technology, the screen has extremelymely sharp resolution and accurately covers the full SRGB colour space, only falling behind the 10.2in ipadd in brightness, which is noticeablyy limited, though still decent. Multi-touch operation is smooth both with fingers and the S Pen, which creates more friction than Apple’s Pencil stylus to give an arguably better feel for what you’re scribbling.
What Samsung has produced here,ere in short, is a tablet that, at first glance, gives every appearance of beating the ipad Pro 11in – which, when you add the Apple Pencil 2 and increase the storage from the default 64GB (half of the S6’s, and with no microsd slot for upgrades), costs over a grand. That’s a bargain, right?
Sadly, wrong. The screen may equal the basic ipad, but the Pro has professional DCI-P3 wide colour and gets much closer to the brightness that would be required for true HDR video. It also uses a higher refresh rate to make the picture feel more real and responsive (Apple calls this Promotion). Inside is a processor that’s more than twice as fast as the S6’s in both general and graphics tasks. The new ipados operating system adapts Apple’s macos to the touchscreen with a range of multitasking and file-handling features that are widely supported by apps. The S6’s DEX software adds comparable enhancements to Android, but it’s unique
SPECIFICATIONS
Snapdragon 855 8-core processor • 128GB flash storage • 10.5in 2560x1600-pixel screen • 13and 5-megapixel rear cameras • 8-megapixel webcam • USB Type-c port • microsd card slot • 802.11ac Wi-fi • Bluetooth 5.0 • Android 9 with DEX • 245x160x5.7mm (HXWXD) • 420g • Two-year warranty www.snipca.com/33644
A good, well-priced tablet, but ipads still come out ahead
to Samsung, and not all Android apps work as expected with it.
So it would really be more appropriate to compare the Galaxy Tab S6 to the 10.2in ipad, which costs £538 with 128GB of storage and the Pencil. Both have good optional keyboard cases; Samsung’s corrals the S Pen and adds a small touchpad. But the range of serious Android apps that properly support large screens is more limited than for ipados, leaving Apple the clear winner for jobs like photo and video editing and music production. Add the smoother all-round experience and the lower price, and Samsung is still struggling to match up.