Samsung Announces The 8.0″ and 9.7″ Galaxy Tab S2 Tablets

Today Samsung announced the Galaxy Tab S2, the followup to last year’s Galaxy Tab S tablets. In our review of the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and 10.5 we ultimately concluded that they were easily the best tablets that Samsung had made to date, but were held back by their Exynos 5420 SoC which was just decent at the time. This year Samsung is changing up things significantly, with the move to a new form factor, two new display sizes, and a much newer SoC. Look below to see the specs of Samsung’s new flagship tablets for 2015.

As far as specifications go, the Galaxy Tab S2 is improved over the original Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and 10.5 in most respects. Inside it sports Samsung’s Exynos 5433 SoC, which has four Cortex A57 cores with a peak frequency of 1.9GHz, and four Cortex A53 cores that go as high as 1.3GHz. Paired with the SoC is 3GB of LPDDR3 memory plus 32 or 64GB of internal memory, and a microSD slot to expand that by up to 128GB officially. Andrei took a look as Exynos 5433 in his review of Samsung’s Exynos edition of the Galaxy Note 4 earlier this year, and performance was quite impressive. If the Exynos 5433 in the Tab S2 is running in AArch64 mode it could mean further performance improvements, but we’ll have to wait and see if this is the case.

While Exynos 5433 is certainly no slouch, I do find myself wishing that Samsung had decided to use Exynos 7420. Not only is it faster and more power efficient due to its 14nm manufacturing process, but there’s also improvements to memory bandwidth with the adoption of LPDDR4 memory. Samsung’s tablets always seem to lag a bit behind their flagship phones, which is unfortunate for heavy tablet users. Samsung’s listed specifications for the Tab S2 also seem to confirm that the HEVC decoder in Exynos 5433 is still not being exposed to the operating system, which is disappointing as someone who has begun to move some of their library over to the new encoding standard.

Beyond the SoC and memory we find an 8MP rear-facing camera and 2.1MP front-facing camera on both sizes of the Tab S2. The Tab S2 doesn’t support UHD video recording, but it does support recording 30fps video at 2560×1440 which is an uncommon resolution for video recording. Being 4 times the number of pixels as 720p it could be useful for recording and then downscaling to a 1280×720 resolution to reduce artifacting.

On the display side, both sizes of the Tab S2 sport a 2048×1536 SAMOLED display. This is a significant change for Samsung, who has traditionally shipped 16:10 tablets. I’ve already noted several times in previous tablet reviews that 16:10 is an aspect ratio that is good for watching videos and really nothing else, and is too extreme to allow the interface to naturally work in both portrait and landscape without any extreme changes to how the UI is fit onto the display. Google launched the 4:3 Nexus 9 not long ago, with ASUS recently following with their Zenpad S, and Samsung launching their own Galaxy Tab A tablets. It seems that after five years of 16:10 tablets the Android manufacturers have realized that it just isn’t comfortable or practical, and are finally moving to more proportionally balanced displays for future tablets.

While I appreciate the move to 4:3, it does pose a problem as far as specifications on paper go. This is because both models of the original Galaxy Tab S had a 2560×1600 resolution, which is higher than the 2048×1536 of the Galaxy Tab S2. I honestly don’t think the difference matters at these screen sizes with these resolutions, but it’s something Samsung will have to deal with. At this time we also don’t know what type of subpixel arrangement these tablets use. I noted in my Venue 8 7840 review that even at 360ppi there was noticeable artifacting caused by the PenTile subpixel arrangement. Since both models of the Galaxy Tab S2 are of an even lower pixel density I hope they use a conventional RGB subpixel arrangement or Samsung’s S-Stripe arrangement.

As for the design of the Tab S2, it seems to be similar to the Galaxy Note 4 in how it sports a metal frame around the edges but a plastic back. However, there are no more dimples or strange textures on any of the edges of the device, which I think makes for a much cleaner and aesthetically superior appearance. While it’s not a full metal unibody like the iPad Air 2, both models of the Galaxy Tab S2 have one thing that make them stand out from other tablets. At 5.6mm thin they appear to be the world’s thinnest tablets, snatching the title from Dell’s Venue 8 7840 which was previously billed as the thinnest at 6mm thick. At 389g the 9.7″ model is also one of the lightest full size tablets that I’ve seen, and I’m very eager to see how it feels in hand compared to the iPad Air 2. Even more impressive is the 8.0″ model which is also 5.6mm thick, and has a mass of only 265 grams. That’s extremely light for a powerful tablet, even at an 8″ size, and it sounds like it will be a great tablet for keeping on your person at all times.

According to Samsung’s press release both tablets will be available in global markets starting in August of this year. SamMobile reports that the tablets will be 399€ and 469€ for the WiFi and LTE 8″ models respectively, with the 9.7″ WiFi and LTE models being 499€ and 569€. From their photos it’s clear that they’ll be available in black and white, and I would imagine that pricing in the United States will follow the standard € = $ conversion for the pricing.

The Dell Venue 10 7040 Review

When the first modern tablets were introduced to the market they were primary focused on facilitating content consumption. During the keynote where Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPad, he stated that tablets would need to be better than both laptops and smartphones at browsing the web, reading emails and eBooks, viewing photos and videos, and playing games. These are all tasks where the user is consuming content rather than creating it. As tablets have advanced and become both more capable and more widespread they have become more suitable for content creation purposes. Software companies with long ties to the PC market like Adobe, Autodesk, and even Microsoft have made their software available for iOS and Android. However, these programs are often more limited than their traditional PC counterparts.

While one can put a great deal of work into making interfaces that work well with the touchscreen input of a tablet, there are certain tasks that really require the use of input devices like a mouse. Tablets have their own virtual keyboards, but this still presents issues with the keyboard taking up a great deal of space on the screen, and not providing the tactile feedback of a physical keyboard. These input limitations have given rise to convertible or 2-in-1 devices, where the goal is to either allow a laptop to transform into a large tablet, or to extend the capabilities of a tablet with a dock that includes a keyboard and a touchpad. This brings us to the Venue 10, with Dell choosing the latter option for pairing their tablet with a keyboard and touchpad. Read on for the full review of Dell’s newest tablet, the Venue 10 7040.

Microsoft Introduces A 128GB Version Of The Core i7 Surface Pro 3

This weekend Microsoft introduced a new model of the Surface Pro 3. Like the existing two Core i7 models, this new version uses Intel’s Core i7-4650U CPU. At $1299 in the United States, the new model is significantly cheaper than the next Core i7 model, which starts at $1549. In fact, it’s the same price as the high end version of the existing Core i5 model. With this new introduction, the Surface Pro 3 lineup is now as follows.

In addition to the models above, Microsoft still offers a version at $799 with an Intel Core i3-4020Y CPU, 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and Intel HD 4200 graphics.

The sacrifice you make with the less expensive Core i7 model is that it only comes with 128GB of internal storage, while the Core i5 version at the same price has 256GB of storage. However, you move up from Intel’s HD 4400 graphics to HD 5000 graphics, which bumps the number of GPU EUs from 20 to 40. The Core i7 has a lower base frequency at 1.7GHz vs 1.9GHz on the Core i5, but it can turbo up to 3.3GHz which will outperform the Core i5’s 2.9GHz in bursty workloads. Moving to the Core i7 also gets you 4MB of total CPU cache, instead of the 3MB in the Core i5.

The intended audience for this new model seems to be users who want more CPU and GPU power, but are able to survive within 128GB either by leveraging cloud storage or simply by not having many programs and files that they need to store. With this new model the Surface Pro 3 line has now expanded to six different versions. While there’s still no option with 16GB of RAM, Microsoft now offers a different model to suit almost everyone’s preferences.