Samsung Galaxy Tab S4
An unbeatable entertainment device with some useful productivity capabilities thrown in
SCORE PRICE £423 (£507 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/290tab4
The Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 easily rivals the premium looks of the Apple competition. Samsung has removed the Home button from the front panel, which results in thinner bezels and a larger screen size of 10.5in, up from the 9.7in panel of the Tab S3. We also didn’t lament the lack of the physical buttons, or even the fingerprint reader, especially since the iris scanner worked so well – the bigger screen is ample compensation, too.
It’s a fraction heavier than the 10.5in iPad Pro, but that’s fine: it feels reassuringly substantial. Samsung neatly integrates volume and power buttons, USB-C for charging and an audio jack. The SD card slot is inside a concealed compartment, which maintains the sleek, rounded edges, so if you find the default 64GB of storage too limiting then you can expand the storage by up to 400GB.
There are still a couple of niggles with the design, though. The boxy 13-megapixel rear camera can make the Galaxy Tab S4 look like a giant smartphone, and the glass back is both slippery and seemingly designed explicitly to attract fingerprints.
Samsung knows a thing or two about displays, and the 10.5in Super AMOLED screen is easily the Tab S4’s strongest feature. It is, quite simply, breathtakingly good. If content consumption is your primary reason for owning a tablet, the display is unbeatable. Watching Netflix in HDR, for example, looked so crisp that we found ourselves ogling the image quality and missing important moments in the story. The 2,560 x 1,600 resolution and 16:10 ratio is also better suited to video than the 10.5in iPad Pro’s 4:3 ratio.
The Tab S4’s 288ppi pixel density is again higher than the Apple device, although in practice it would be hard to tell the difference, since both are exceptionally sharp. Sure, the iPad Pro has the 120Hz Pro Motion display and DCI-P3 colour accuracy, but these are more beneficial for creative professionals than for binge-watching The Walking Dead.
Unless you like to be antisocial, the headphone jack or Bluetooth transceiver will be the more likely method for delivering audio to your ears, but the quad-speakers are of surprisingly good quality. They’re tuned by audio brand AKG – which is itself a subsidiary of Samsung – and support Dolby Atmos audio. However, to our ears the Huawei MediaPad M5 had more punch from its Harmon Kardon speakers.
It would have been nice to see a Snapdragon 845 processor inside rather than the 835, but paired with 4GB of RAM the performance is still strong enough to beat all the other Android tablets on test. The Geekbench 4 scores of 1,888 and 6,506 are way behind the Fusion A10Xpowered Apple iPad Pro, so for heftier content creation work Apple has the advantage. The iPad Pro is also a stronger gaming device, but the Tab S4’s score of 36fps in the GFXBench Manhattan test still makes it a powerful option.
There’s more to the Galaxy Tab S4 than just being an incredible entertainment machine, though. Included in the box is Samsung’s S-Pen, which offers 4,096 pressure levels and is great for taking notes or undertaking creative work in Photoshop Lightroom. That said, we still prefer Huawei’s M-Pen.
Photoshop work is assisted greatly when switching to Samsung’s DeX mode, which provides a Windowslike interface. Switch to DeX and apps run in dedicated windows, making it simple to multitask. With the HDMI adapter, sold separately, the DeX interface can be displayed on a full-sized monitor, with the tablet acting as either a virtual keyboard or large touchpad. A number of apps are optimised for DeX, including Lightroom, but there are still quirks. For instance, Amazon Prime Video only ran in a window, and the playback paused whenever the video window wasn’t in the foreground. And, in general, the apps that aren’t optimised for DeX can be hit-and-miss. So there’s clearly still work to do in order to improve the DeX experience. For working on the move, Samsung offers the Keyboard Book Cover for £119. This attaches via the Pogo interface and is good enough for light office work, and it also provides a handy stow for the S-Pen. We found that the 7,300mAh battery was excellent, looping our test video for 17hrs 50mins. There are more features and accessories too, such as the Pogo charging dock, which can turn the Tab S4 into a smart home display, similar to an Echo Spot. All of this technology comes at a cost, however, and the 64GB Wi-Fi model weighs in at £599. This is £20 less than the 10.5in iPad Pro, though, and if you add the Apple Pencil then the Tab S4 is £119 less. If you’re simply looking for a quality tablet with pen support, note the Huawei MediaPad M5 Pro is almost £100 less than the Tab S4. But, as a superlative entertainment device that can also double as a light productivity machine, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 is tough to beat.