Samsung Galaxy Tab S – Good enough to beat the iPad?

To stand up against the iPad, Samsung had to deliver something that is solid in build, awesome in hardware and has amazing display. They have achieved almost all of it with couple of bits missing here and there.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S is the latest and hottest tablet in the market today. This is an upgrade from Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4 with some added features.

It comes in two colours “Titanium Bronze” and “Dazzling White”. It has almost all the features from the flagship smartphone S5 including Multi window and finger scanner for that added security.

First lets get to know the hardware:

Front View

There’s is the sporting Super AMOLED screen with ambient light sensor on top and front facing camera. Fingerprint sensor and the home button are at the bottom with back and task manager touch buttons.

Back View

The backside of the tablet is host to an 8 MP camera, Samsung logo and there are two stereo speakers one at the top and another at the bottom. There are two circles on the right side are for the proprietary flip covers from Samsung. The small dots on the back side are supposed to give a good grip when you hold it with one hand or both hands.

The 3.5mm audio jack and the microUSB port are located on the bottom of the device.

Sides

On the right side of the tablet, there is a Power/lock button, volume controls, the IR blaster port and the microSD card slot. The SIM card slot of the LTE version is also on the Right side next to the IR blaster of the Tab. There are no controls/buttons on the left side on the tablet, well thought by providing all controls on one side of the tablet so that you should not have any problems while working in landscape mode.

Time to dig deep with some operations features of the tablet:

Battery

4900 mAh battery offers upto 10 hrs of internet plus it has the Ultra Power Saving mode which turns everything to grey with only handful of applications to run including web browsing and gives you that extra time for browsing on the go. This mode makes no sense on tablets as on now, but who knows might be very handy at times.

Connectivity

Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 comes with Wi-fi only and both Wi-fi and Cellular data. LTE supports GSM and 3G with HSPDA speeds upto 42 Mbps. Wi-fi Direct support are also available as well as GPS and GLONASS receivers. Bluetooth 4.0 is also available for local data transfer.

The IR blaster on the right of the tablet allows it to remotely control TV's and other devices using the Samsung WatchON app.

Unfortunately it does not support NFC, if it did it would have been a complete connectivity solution device. One of the missing bits from the device. I hope Samsung does include that in the future tablets of S series.

One of the new features is the SideSync 3.0, that allows you to pair your Samsung smartphone (S5, Note 3). This allows you to access your phone virtually on the tablet, you can access all features of the phone, make calls, send messages without even taking the phone out of your pocket or bag. A really handy feature, but again for those who own the specific models (S5 and Note 3).

User Interface:

Samsung Galaxy Tab S runs on the latest Android OS 4.4.2 KitKat with Samsung’s TouchWiz UI on top of it. The home screen layout is almost similar to what we see on Samsung S5 with one magazine pane required and you can have multiple TouchWiz panes, just like on any other android phone.

The magazine pane holds upto 6 widgets and they are dynamically resized in portrait and landscape mode.

Multi-window multitasking is one of the user interfaces that people have loved since its introduction to the Samsung devices. There are number of system applications that can be used in multi-tasking and they can be edited to keep the only ones that are useful for you.

Apps can be minimized to just a floating icon, go full screen from multi-windows view or just close it. You can open as many floating apps as you like, though you can have only a single app instance running.

Finally, Multi Window supports combinations - you can open two applications in multi-window and then create a shortcut with those two apps. Next time when you need those two apps to run at the same time just click the shortcut and you are ready to go.

The finger print scanner which appeared first on the S5 has exactly the same functions borrowed from S5. It can unlock device, make paypal payments and sign into your Samsung account.

Input methods

The Samsung QWERTY keyboard occupies about half of the screen in landscape and about a third of screen in portrait view. The Samsung QWERTY keyboard can be used as small floating keyboard to have more screen space for typing or a split keyboard for users to type using both thumbs.

There are options for making typing easy, from settings you can have predictive text, swipe input on the keyboard. And if you are using the larger keyboard you can use the arrow keys on bottom right for moving the cursor.

File Manager

The file manager in Samsung device is “My Files” app. It organizes your files into categories - Images, Videos, Music, Documents, downloaded apps, recent files and even Dropbox files (if your dropbox account is connected).

With “My Files” app you can move, copy, lock and rename files in bulk, send multiple files to another device. It can not access the system storage but the memory card and internal storage. You can also connect a USB directly to the device but for that you need to buy a connector.

Camera