As I attended Samsung's big rollout of its Galaxy Tab S tablet last night, the one question that stuck in my mind was whether Samsung could really build a tablet that will compete with the Apple iPad. Samsung went out of its way to declare the Tab S its "flagship tablet," but just like in the phone world, the company actually offers a pretty wide range of products.
The Tab S itself looks quite impressive, set off by an AMOLED display and a very thin and light design. There are two versions, one with a 10.5-inch display, the other with an 8.4-inch screen.
The Tab S is the first large tablet to have an AMOLED display, and just as it does on the Galaxy S5, the display looks great. Both versions sport 2,560-by-1,600 displays, making the larger one 287 pixels per inch (ppi) and the smaller one 360 ppi. Even on the larger one, you'd be hard pressed to notice the pixels.
Samsung officials, notably Michael Abary, senior vice president of Samsung Electronics America, stressed the advantages of the display, saying the Tab S was the world's first high-res Super AMOLED tablet.
By definition, AMOLED displays have better contrast ratios, as they are based on an emissive technology rather than the backlight solution used in LCDs. It gives you a deeper black because you can turn the pixels completely off. But Abary also noted that, compared with LCD displays, this display offers a wider color gamut (more than 90 percent of Adobe RGB) with more colors, particularly in the cyan and green range. In addition, Samsung has set the display to adapt to the lighting around it in a number of key apps; and to focus on better outdoor visibility, with less reflectivity so the display looks better in direct sunlight.
Looking at the display at the event, it did look quite nice, although I didn't find much to complain about with the displays on the iPad or the professional Samsung NotePRO either, and both were based on LCD. I haven't been able to see the two displays side by side in a variety of environments yet, though.
Abary said the most common application of tablets these days is video watching. Samsung says both tablets support 11 hours of video playback at 1080p, with the 10.5-inch version having a 7,900 mAh battery, and the 8.4-inch one having a 4,900 mAh battery. If the real units can deliver this, it will be quite nice.
The basic hardware design itself looks quite nice. Each unit is just 6.6 mm thick, and I was particularly impressed by the small bezels around the screen, so that the units are not much larger than the displays. The 10.5-inch Tab S weighs 465 grams, while the 8.4-inch one weighs 294 grams. (For comparison, the 9.7-inch iPad Air weighs 469 grams and the 7.9-inch iPad mini starts at 331 grams.) Both units are based on a Samsung Exynos 5 Octa processor, with four ARM Cortex A-15 cores running at up to 1.9 GHz and four Cortex-A7 cores running at up to 1.3 GHz, as well as Imagination Power VR SGX544MP3 graphics.
Still, to me, the issue with Android tablets hasn't really been hardware, it's been software. I do worry that while Android has plenty of applications that work on tablets these days, many of these still simply don't look as good on Android tablets. (The phone apps for Android usually look quite good these days.) It's not that the apps don't exist – for almost all the major categories they do – but they aren't quite as polished. Of course, as Android tablets take more market share, that will change.
In part to contradict this image, Samsung unveiled a couple new applications, notably Papergarden, a magazine service designed for interactive magazines and Milk Music, an ad-free streaming music service, powered by Slacker but with a new user interface designed to make it easier to find new music.
I thought the Papergarden application was interesting, in part because most interactive magazines I've seen haven't really been optimized for the 16:10 display ratio we typically see on Andorid tablets. (Most magazines are designed for paper or the iPad's more similar 4:3 display ratio). Conde Nast seems to be backing this, although to be successful Samsung will need a lot more support.
Samsung continues to offer more tools for things such as multitasking (which I talked about in my review of the NotePRO), so you can see multiple applications, which I find particularly useful. And I also continue to like Samsung's concept of a content home screen with a briefing widget that collects your messages, calls, schedules, and bookmarks all in one location.
It even has a feature called SideSync which lets you take and place calls from you Samsung Galaxy phone directly on your tablet, using Wi-Fi, which is handy when the phone is charging in one place and you and the tablet are in another.
And I also like the security features – the Tab S has fingerprint security (something the iPad and most other competitive tablets don't have yet) and support for Samsung's Knox environment.
DJ Lee, Samsung's president for the IT market, said while introducing the Tab S that the new device "truly draws a line between the tablets currently on the market and what comes next." And while I will grant that the display is a first and that the hardware looks great, the Tab S seems to me to be the latest step in a continuum that over the past few months has seen the launch of the Tab 4 series (which is a mid-range tablet), the Note 8 series (which adds a stylus) and the NotePRO (which is even higher end, and has a 12.2-inch display). All of this has given Samsung 22 percent of the tablet market so far, Lee said, with the company setting its goals on larger share.
Samsung is pricing the 10.5-inch version at $499.99 and the 8.4-inch one at $399.99, either for Wi-Fi and 16GB, essentially the same prices that Apple charges for the current versions of their competitors. That seems reasonable for the hardware, but in a world where there are so many less expensive Android tablet options, it does make the Tab S seems like a premium device.
Compared with the iPad, Samsung does offer some real advantages– particularly the AMOLED display and the very thin and light design, and I like things like the ability to see multiple programs on screen at the same time. But still, the iPad itself has a great design and its ecosystem and all the tablet apps are a formidable challenge.
So my guess is that the Galaxy Tab S will make the most sense for people who have chosen the Galaxy S or Note series as their smartphone. In part, that's because of the similarities in design and the combined ecosystem of Samsung and Android. And in part, it's because the hardware is so attractive. I'm looking forward to giving one a try.