Nevermind the announcement of the Galaxy S22, every single tech reviewer that can get a free phone sent to them will go ahead and deem it fantastic and well worth your money after spending all of a week using it. Instead, let’s check the more entertaining, confusing, compromised cousin.
To say that both Google and OEMs have left the tablet market doors open for Apple would be to omit the gigantic red carpet they also put in back when the idea behind Honeycomb was taken to the back burner in that classical google way. Nowadays with iPadOS getting ever more competent and Apple making sure to let everyone know that actual professionals have integrated it as an essential part of their workflow, we find ourselves upon the rather amusing fact that people would honestly have a Microsoft Surface over almost any android tab not wearing the “Kindle” brand. In response to that, Google is giving it another go with Android 12L, designed specifically to take advantage of larger screens. And they will not come much larger than this, the Galaxy S8 Tab Ultra.
Honestly, it would be impossible to me to react negatively to it, it looks exactly like the sort of device that I would’ve given anything for back when I was sure that Android tablets would be the future. Step aside puny 12.9” iPad Pro, this is 14.6” of pure OLED goodness, up to 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. And the larger, better S-Pen to take advantage of it all comes included in the price. The fingerprint reader is on the screen and the headphone jack is…missing, okay, sure, it’s 2022 and surely you already have Galaxy Beans, don’t you?
Yeah, the problems start there and continue. Let’s take it from the top, literally. That notch. When apple first dropped the notch on the iPhone X, I absolutely hated it. As an android user, I couldn’t understand how they could add something that would so comprehensively ruin the user experience. Now, having the had the chance to test it on assorted Apple phones and knowing the difference in paradigms regarding the top of the screen, my main complaint is that I can no longer have a numeric percentage for battery charge, something I expect Apple to fix never.
When they brought it to the laptops, it was harder to justify, even if the arguments about using it as a way to maintain their form factor and perfect size with larger screens and smaller bezels was tempting to believe.
But on a tablet? The decision to include a notch seems rather baffling. Besides the size of the tablet, which we’ll come back to in a minute, something that even apple seems to have forgotten about is that, ultimately, you have to grab the tablet from somewhere when using it as a tablet. Bezels provide this wonderful area and a buffer that can also be used as a buffer before your experience with the tablet depends entirely upon its palm rejection technology. The Bezels on the S8 Tab Ultra are rather a bit too narrow for that, and the width that could’ve been used to make them more comfortable could be found by sampling making the width of the notch the width of the entire bezel. Samsung works closely with their display division, which surely would’ve been able to accommodate. And even with the slightly smaller screen, they could still flaunt having the largest tablet screen on the market.
Which brings me neatly to the next argument, do you actually want the largest tablet screen on the market? I own a Surface pro and its 12.3” screen with huge bezels and 1.73-pound weight seems already rather large for “normal tablet use”. That device is still an inch shorter and a quarter of an inch narrower. It is still heavier and thicker though, but I can’t expect that the S8 Tab Ultra will be that much more comfortable to hold, or to get hit by in the face when you’re falling asleep.
Surely Samsung wants you to use this as a professional device, with the $350 keyboard and doing everything the iPad Pro can do with its fancy iPadOS. And if that is the case, I will give them the same answer I gave apple when I noticed the actual retail price for their entry and all of the accessories I would need otherwise.
“If I wanted to buy a tablet priced like a laptop, I would buy a laptop.”
