GALAXY TAB S4
Can Samsung’s £599 tablet usurp the iPad Pro?
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Looking for a tablet that can convert into a quasi-laptop for working on the go? The iPad Pro and Microsoft’s various Surface devices have shown how the idea does work, but Android users have been left out in the cold. Enter Samsung, with a plan to revive Android’s professional aspirations.
It’s clear that Samsung has the 10.5in iPad Pro in its sights, even opting for the same distinctive screen size – albeit in a slightly taller, thinner shape. It also has some obvious advantages. The package includes a bundled stylus, and the tablet is Samsung’s first to feature DeX mode – a desktop-style interface that’s designed to work with a keyboard and mouse, and can even be displayed on an external monitor.
If you’re already invested in Android, therefore, the Galaxy Tab S4 is a promising proposition. You get the flexibility of an iPad Pro or Surface, while keeping your familiar apps and easy synchronisation with your phone. But “promise” and “delivery” are two very different things.
Design and display
The Galaxy Tab S4 looks and feels expensive. It’s covered in glass on both the front and back, and when you pick it up there’s a certain heft to it; it’s not unwieldy, but at 482g it feels like a serious bit of kit. That impression is confirmed by the choice of only two colour schemes, named simply “black” and “grey” – no frivolous adjectives here.
So far the design is quite similar to the old Galaxy Tab S3, but there’s one visible difference. The bezels at the top and bottom have been shrunk (resulting in the ditching of the home button), so they’re now exactly as narrow as those at the sides, creating something closer to an edge-to-edge feel.
The gives the S4 a smaller footprint than the iPad Pro (it measures 164 x 249mm versus 174 x 251mm), although the difference is too small to register in everyday use. At any rate, it’s offset by the Tab S4’s extra millimetre of thickness. Also note that, while the Tab S4 looks stunning when you first take it out of the box, the glass on the front and back doesn’t seem to be oleophobic. In use it quickly gets covered in fingerprints, which cheapen the impression.
The good news? You can’t see them when the screen is on, and as we’ve come to expect from Samsung the display is one of the Galaxy Tab S4’s best features. The Super AMOLED panel delivers gloriously rich, bold colours, even at extreme viewing angles, and supports HDR colour in apps such as Netflix and YouTube. It’s superbly sharp too, with a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600, equivalent to a pixel density of 287ppi (just beating the iPad Pro’s 264ppi).
Even with all these strengths, it’s not quite a best-in-class display. It lacks the 120Hz refresh rate of the iPad Pro, and while you can manually adjust the colour balance, there’s nothing to match Apple’s True Tone technology. Dial up the brightness to maximum and it’s not quite as searing as the iPad Pro, although it’s still bright enough to use happily in all but the most glaring sunlight.
The S4’s audio hardware deserves a mention too. Around the edges you’ll find four AKG-branded speakers that are more than loud enough for you to enjoy a movie in a hotel room, without a hint of distortion even at maximum volume. The only catch is that there’s not a hint of bass, which sucks the weight out of music, and means you’re not going to get the best of the S4’s Dolby Atmos support either. Still, you can always use headphones or external speakers: the Galaxy Tab S4 features both Bluetooth 5 and a 3.5mm audio jack socket.
“Bixby’s text recognition works well, and you can translate your captured phrases to or from a long list of languages”
Camera and Bixby Vision
While only a lunatic would regularly use a 10.5in tablet for photography, the Galaxy S4 is equipped with a 13-megapixel camera at the rear. Thanks to a 1/3in sensor and an f/1.9 aperture, it captures clean, detailed shots, and goodlooking 4K video at 30fps.
There’s a decent selection of shooting modes too, including panorama, a variable-frame-rate “Hyperlapse” mode, and a Pro mode that lets you tweak the exposure compensation, white balance and ISO. Whichever you choose there’s absolutely zero shutter lag – unless you engage the little LED flash, which takes a moment to half-illuminate the scene and lock in the focus before firing for real. The rear camera also works with Samsung’s Bixby Vision app – a feature obviously inspired by Google Lens, which aims to recognise places, things, text and (believe it or not) foodstuffs. Text recognition works rather well, and you can translate your captured phrases to or from a long list of languages – although you have to tap to contact the translation server, rather than getting instant feedback as you do with the Google Translate app. Object recognition, alas, isn’t so hot. I found that Bixby got it wrong almost 100% of the time: it misidentified an envelope as a bed, a tomato as an orange, a Nokia smartphone as a book and a Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 as a wallet. The front camera has an 8-megapixel resolution, with a quarter-inch sensor and a maximum video resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, which is fine for selfies and Skype. It’s also used for Samsung’s biometricrecognition feature, which unlocks your tablet when it recognises either your face or the irises of your eyes. This worked for me – which is just as well, as the removal of the physical home button means the fingerprint reader has gone, too.
The S Pen stylus
The Tab S4 comes with an S Pen stylus in the box. Not all S Pens are alike, however, and this is a much larger model than you’ll get with one of Samsung’s Galaxy Note smartphones. It’s 138mm long, with a 9mm barrel, and weighs a nicely balanced 9g. In use, it feels like you’re holding an actual ballpoint pen rather than some spindly approximation thereof. The writing action is excellent too. The glass is thin enough that it feels
like you’re scribbling directly onto the virtual canvas, and the S Pen’s rubber tip drags along with just the right amount of resistance – there’s none of the unnatural slipperiness you often get with cheap styluses. Pressure and tilt sensitivity work well too, allowing the 0.7mm tip to emulate everything from a fineliner to a marker pen. You’ll quickly master variable-width strokes and start knocking up expressive sketches and beautifully handwritten notes. Well, you will if you can on paper already.
The usefulness of these capabilities is still an open question. Samsung provides apps for taking notes, annotating images and so forth, and the S Pen works with third-party tools including Microsoft OneNote and AutoDesk Sketchbook – but I’m dubious of how many tablet users will really make regular use of these. Still, it’s a nice bonus, and you aren’t limited to stylus-specific apps: you can use the S Pen in place of a fat finger anywhere in Android, and click the side button to bring up a customisable menu of app shortcuts.
I’ve only two real grumbles. First, the S Pen is made from cheapfeeling glossy plastic, which feels jarringly incongruous as a companion to a glass-encased tablet. Second, Samsung hasn’t provided any convenient place to stow the pen when it’s not in use. I would have loved to see a handy slot in the casing, as with Samsung’s Galaxy Note phones, or perhaps a magnetic clip à la Microsoft. But no – you have to carry it around separately, or invest in a separate case (Samsung’s own ones start at a stiff £59).
DeX and the Keyboard Cover
In many ways, the Galaxy Tab S4 delivers exactly what we’d expect from a high-end Android tablet. What makes it unique is DeX mode. Originally introduced on the Galaxy S8 smartphone, DeX turns Android into a more laptop-like experience, with a windowed interface and support for a keyboard and mouse. On Samsung phones, DeX requires a special dock, but the Tab S4 can be switched into DeX mode without extra hardware.
It’s a nice idea. Android 7 Nougat introduced a split-screen multitasking mode, but I’ve never found it intuitive or pleasant to work with. DeX is more sophisticated, with windows that can be freely shunted around and resized, and a familiar taskbar along the bottom. It feels a lot like Chrome OS; the Chrome browser even has handy tabs along the top.
While switching into DeX in this way is a neat trick, it feels cramped in use because you have to tap out text on a floating virtual keyboard, and use a finger or the S Pen in place of a mouse. One solution is to connect an external monitor to the USB-C socket; you can then use the whole tablet surface as a virtual keyboard and touchpad, or connect a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse for the most desktop-like experience possible. Alternatively, you can invest in Samsung’s custom-made Keyboard Cover – a £119 plastic case with a built-in keyboard, which snaps onto the Galaxy Tab S4 and props it up from behind. If you’ve ever seen Apple’s Smart Keyboard for the iPad Pro, you’ll know exactly what it looks like, and it’s obviously designed to help you make the most of DeX on the go.
The keyboard is decent, too. The keys have a strong, positive action, and despite the compact format, the spacing doesn’t feel too tight. Pleasingly, like the Book Cover, the case also includes a holder for the S Pen. I’m less keen on the fact that the Keyboard Cover doesn’t have a built-in trackpad, as found on Microsoft’s Type Cover accessories for its Surface devices. To be fair, the iPad Pro Smart Keyboard doesn’t have one either, but DeX – unlike iOS – has clearly been designed as a mousedriven environment, and jabbing at an upright screen with a finger or stylus isn’t quite the same.
I’m also turned off by the presence of a few unnecessary keys. To the right of the space bar, there’s a button to call up language settings – as if this is something people need to access regularly. Even more bafflingly, on the left of the physical keyboard there’s a button that calls up the onscreen keyboard. I guess this could be useful if you frequently want to insert GIFs and emoji via the virtual keyboard, but if that’s the intention it feels like a misreading of the target audience.
Performance and battery life
The Galaxy Tab S4 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, with four cores running at 2.35GHz and another four running at 1.9GHz. That’s the same CPU as found in the Galaxy S8 smartphone, the
“You’ll quickly master variable-width strokes and start knocking up sketches and beautifully handwritten notes”
Google Pixel 2 and the Nokia 8, and Android feels every bit as slick here as it does on those devices.
The Tab S4 runs Android 8.1 Oreo with various Samsung-specific tweaks to the homescreen, app drawer, icons and so on. These are mostly cosmetic and make little difference to the overall experience, but Samsung’s insistence on futzing with Android does mean that it will probably be many months before the Tab S4 gets Android 9 Pie. Still, that update doesn’t add anything particularly urgent or important for tablet users.
It’s also worth noting that, while we certainly wouldn’t call any of the aforementioned smartphones underpowered, they’re all from 2017. Compared to the cream of this year’s handsets, such as Samsung’s own Galaxy S9, the Galaxy Tab S4 is behind the pace – and, as the Geekbench test exposes, it’s a long way behind the iPad Pro ( see right).
Predictably, it’s a similar story with the Galaxy Tab S4’s gaming performance. The GFXBench Manhattan test again confirms that the older CPU can’t keep up with Apple’s own-brand chips, nor the latest Snapdragon processors.
This isn’t a disaster: there’s enough power here for all your Office-type tasks, and for all but the most demanding games. But if you want to take full advantage of DeX, by hooking up a large monitor and opening lots of Android apps and Chrome tabs at once, you’ll get bogged down pretty quickly.
Still, there’s good news on the battery front. The Galaxy Tab S4 comes with a 7,300mAh battery, which is a step up from the 6,000mAh of the S3. Samsung claims it will deliver 16 hours of full-screen video playback, and in our own tests – with the brightness set to a comfortable level for indoor viewing – it comfortably exceeded that promise, giving us 17hrs 10mins of non-stop entertainment before conking out. Although the iPad Pro has an even bigger battery (rated at 8,134mAh), Apple’s tablet managed only 12hrs 59mins with the screen set to a standard brightness of 170cd/m2.
Nice try, but…
The Galaxy Tab S4 is an ambitious device, and it’s exciting to test a tablet that pushes the boundaries of what Android can do. It feels like a long time since we’ve seen that. There are several things about this tablet I like very much, too. The screen is great, the S Pen works brilliantly, the battery life is exceptional, and overall it feels like a premium piece of hardware.
The trouble is, I could have said much the same about the cheaper, older Galaxy Tab S3. And when we turn to the new features that define the Tab S4, it’s harder to be enthusiastic. DeX presents an inspiring vision, but the overall package lacks the slickness, the coherence and the sheer horsepower of the iPad Pro.
To be sure, Samsung deserves credit for not merely mimicking Apple with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S4, but attempting to carve out a distinctive future for Android as a productivity platform. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t come off. For every plus point there’s also a but – and that’s hard to accept from a tablet that has set its sights so high.
DARIEN GRAHAM-SMITH SPECIFICATIONS
Octa-core 2.35GHz/1.9GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor Adreno 540 graphics 4GB RAM 10.5in Super AMOLED display, 2,560 x 1,600 resolution 64GB storage microSD slot 13MP/8MP rear/front camera 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5 USB-C connector Android 8.1 7,300mAh battery 249 x 7.1 x 164mm (WDH) 482g 1yr warranty