Samsung Galaxy Tab S3

Marie Brewis reveals what we know of Samsung’s tablet

Samsung Galaxy Tab S tablet launches are annual, so we expected the S3 family to arrive in July 2016 ahead of the new Note7 that was announced on 2 August. However, that hasn’t happened, and the Tab S3 is now widely expected to be announced during Samsung’s IFA 2016 press conference on 1 September.

As before, we expect there to be a smaller (8in screen) and a larger model (9.7in) screen. These will be premium tablets, so expect to pay around £329 for smaller tablet and £399 for the larger one. Add another £100 for the 4G versions.

What to expect

When we first heard rumours of a potential Galaxy Tab Edge, we wondered whether Samsung might go down the same design route as it has for its S-series phones, complete with the metal frame and front- and rear glass panels. However, sketches revealed at the FCC show the new Tab S3 to have a similar design to the Tab S2. That’s not to say there won’t be a curved-edge tablet, in essence a larger version of the new Note7, although the curved edge functionality seems less appealing in a tablet and may be wishful thinking.

What we do know is that the Tab S3 will be a powerful tablet with some high-end specs. Expect a high-resolution, likely Quad-HD (1536x2048-pixel), Super AMOLED display. The new tablet is also rumoured to feature Qualcomm’s octa-core Snapdragon 652 processor with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. Leaked benchmarks have revealed a score of 4,275 points multi-core (1,225 single-core) in Geekbench 3.0 for the larger 9.7in Tab S3 and 4,122 points multi-core (1,312 single-core) for the smaller 8in Tab S3. That’s less than that achieved by the company’s flagship phone, the Galaxy S7, but not at all bad.

Cameras are tipped to be 8Mp at the back and 2Mp at the front, and we’d expect Samsung to use a Micro-USB rather than USB-C port for charging the 4000mAh internal battery in the 8in Tab S3 and 5870mAh in the 9.7in Tab S3. Expect Samsung’s fast charging tech to feature, too.

We’re expecting Android Nougat to launch ahead of the Tab S3, but even so we would expect it to be running Marshmallow with TouchWiz.