It's here samsung's big boy so 14.6 inches the samsung galaxy tab s8 ultra is a mammoth tablet
but is it too big i'll let you know my first impressions here of using it for an afternoon now
so this is not a review so spec wise you probably already know it all it's got the snapdragon 8gen
one it's their new chipset from qualcomm and we do have with this model that i got the base model
so it's the wi-fi only model doesn't have 5g 8 gigabytes of ram and 128 gigabytes of storage
so this is the box it is a large box of course for a mammoth of a tablet
14.6 inches here for the tab is ultra and it's got this nice wrap around it to protect it
i'll get onto the build quality and the design of that in just a minute so we've got our s pen right
here and the good full size but sadly there's nowhere to put it still no missile silo style
in the actual tablet which i would have preferred but i guess being so thin they don't have room for
that this will be our cable which is i think it's type c to type c yes it is there we go so typical
samsung cable right here we have a well that's for the micro sd card slot because i don't have
the 5g version but will be some trade tool for micro sd card access and then yeah a little bit
of paperwork in there i won't bother going through that just be a warranty or whatever
so that's the unboxing part all right so this thing's an absolute monster it is really just
like the tab s7 plus but a larger mammoth version of it so the fingerprint reader i've been having
a lot of issues with this fingerprint reader and sometimes it just works for me straight away other
times there you go if you tap it it works better but if you tap and push or just tap and hold
it doesn't seem to unlock too well so i do think a few firmware updates needed for that
so the bezels around the outside here are very slim really good looking now you see that when
i get into for example internet website there it makes it stand out a little bit the bezels
now there's some banding happening i'm having an absolute mission trying to capture the screen
without seeing this weird and analyzing effect happening okay that's not actually something in
the background that's the screen or the banding it's just what it is because it doesn't have dc
dimming unfortunately and then reflections galore on such a big screen so here with a
darker image it does look a little bit better and i'm i'm not capturing it as good as i'd like and
i do apologize for that so you can see a little notch at the top let's have a look at it closely
there it is so it's not pretty it's there and i wish that they just did not do this i'd rather
have just a single camera if they could have put that in there without having the ultra wide one so
12 megapixel and then another 12 megapixel one just being the main normal and then the ultra
wide one and the unfortunate thing is this ugly notch but i'm sure i'll get used to it the back
of it again very similar to the tab s7 plus we've got the antenna lines yeah they love them or you
hate them i don't really mind them because if that means we've got better wireless performance then
i'm i'm fine with it it just looks kind of well like tron the lines i don't know anyway it picks
up smudges like crazy i've been using it for five hours i haven't wiped it down or cleaned it you
can see it's a bit of a smudgy mess so we have the cameras on the back they've got 13 megapixel
and then we have a six megapixel ultrawide which is not amazing and you probably won't really be
using them but hey it's good to have at least that option so the s pin that's going to go right here
that's where it will charge magnetically just clips onto the back there now it is incredibly
thin and you'll see here is 5.5 millimeters but then it's about seven eight with the camera that
sticks out a little bit now these are ak g tuned speakers like we had with the previous models and
i'll give you a sample later on what they sound like they are really nice they're good and they're
kind of like ipad 12.9 pro level and other tablets like the lenovo p12 or other ones similar to that
okay so that's where one of the microphones is and yes i do have the protective plastic still around
the outside of the frame because i haven't got my keyboard case yet i don't want to scratch it
on the right the other two speakers antenna lines type c port with video out symmetry if you've got
the 5g version and for all of us that's our micro sd card slot right there that's that mic and then
middle power button and volume up and down the buttons feel good don't rattle down the
bottom we've got a pogo port pin connector for our hardware keyboard and a little stays there to lock
it in place so magnets will keep it on i don't unfortunately have that keyboard samsung do tell
me their tracking information while the order that it's going to be at least two weeks out before i
get it which is uh that's a pain and i'll display so i'm still struggling to capture this correctly
i'm getting this weird effect coming through now there's no screen protector on it it's just the
way it is sharpening it so i've lowered my shutter rate to try and get rid of the banding here
now touch response as you'd expect is really good it's excellent i haven't really had any issues
with it at all so we've got lots of settings in here but the one for me the key one is where is dc
dimming there is no dc dimming in here so you've got edge panels on the side you've got all your
eye shield comfort mode adaptive brightness screen modes okay you can go through and adjust
the white balance there to your own preference however you like that you know you want a little
bit warmer you can tweak all of that which is great but it's just that where's the dc dimming
it probably doesn't support it which for such a large screen i think is a little bit of a shame
now the screen doesn't look super sharp because it is that 14.6 inches and then we're looking
at a resolution of 1848 by 29.60 off the top of my head which is i think you know that's a good
resolution don't get me wrong for 14.16 inches but they should have gone for maybe 4k plus
kind of resolution there so just bring up here display test and we'll take another look at it
and i'll just show you some of the real life images with this one the test that we can bring up
so it is looking great it's just that it's not the sharpest panel and there's some of that banding
so these images they look great anything like any content you look on this media consumption
wow it's it's great especially when you're gaming or looking at website content it's just really
perfect for that such a large immersive screen so the performance of the ui has been really good
i'm a big fan of one ui i think it's probably one of the best now and there is a couple of
things i want to go over to with it that we get a little bit of bloatware just jump in here to my
gallery where is it when you first get it you're going to be looking at this but it's not too bad
um we've got a couple of things there now that's my own that i installed 3dmark of course but
there's a few little bloatware applications but compared to some manufacturers like xiaomi
this is nothing and with our ui we are not seeing the horrible janky terrible scrolling that i've
actually seen on some other android 12 phones the oneplus 10 pro in xiaomi 12 and the xiaomi 12
pro in fact three phones with android 12 that had issues with scrolling with certain google
apps not happening here so optimization is really good now if you do go in here you can of course
set up and go to you want to split screen it you can split screen it and having such a large screen
look at all that space you've got you've basically got two tablets
side by side to work with there with chrome oh that's just antutu which i'll get onto those
benchmark scores on that in just a minute so when you do the split screening i notice a little drop
in performance depending on what you're running that's pretty typical and normal right there
and you've got all of that android 12 goodness they're in settings and there hasn't actually been
any firmware updates come through yet which is surprising i thought they might have had one
but i've done that check and there's nothing i'm on the latest firmware
and with the screen like this something like netflix just looks absolutely stunning so i
can't really show you anything or otherwise i'm going to get slammed with a copyright
strike against my account but just let me tell you that everything that's on this is great so
it's got a widevine level 1 cert you get full hd resolution amazon prime video 2 as well
disney plus and everything's quick very very quick here with this the peak speed so just show you
just a couple of seconds of the witcher 3 there that looks great okay so it takes a few minutes
well with my network connection to then swap over into full hd but you do see the difference
it looks sharp it looks great benchmarks now show that this is a real performer but
not as fast as i've seen with some other models running the same chipset so snapdragon
gen 1 here is powerful very very powerful and look at this this is what i'm impressed with
it's only gone up 0.4 degrees celsius that is great compare that to the same chipset
and this the xiaomi 12 pro it went up 9 degrees look at that the heat okay so it looks to me like
what samsung's done has throttled it back a little bit um but they're just keeping those thermals in
balance there was xiaomi it's completely out of control and of course we've got a huge tablet
here to dissipate that heat so there's a big difference in the scores quite a bit there
but i think it's well worth it to have these thermals because the back of it's just getting
slightly warm so far whereas run the same test on this phone and it gets quite hot
so big difference there so android bench our internal storage speeds it's looking very good
so we do have with this model here 128 gigabytes of storage eight gigabytes of ram and it's a ufs
3.1 storage so look at this very good i mean really fast there and i think that's that's
great there's there's no bottleneck there at all with those kind of speeds now geekbench five here
that's a good score okay not the fastest i have seen compared to other models again like the
xiaomi you'll see just bring that into the shot all right it is a little bit faster there but
again i will take this over that with the the heat issues that that phone does have and then lastly
i've just run this which is our wildlife so you can see it gets on average here frame rate of 55.6
versus the xiaomi which does get 56.4 so only a little faster there with the gpu performance now
i probably will run a stress test later on i'll run the wildlife extreme test which goes for 20
minutes in another video i'll probably compare it to snapdragon 8 gen 1 phone and we'll see
the difference in the thermal performance between a large tablet and then a phone
now for gps it does have yes gps on board with this even just the wi-fi only versions
which i've got here and a hardware compass so i'm indoors and it's still getting a lock here and the
signal strength isn't actually too bad considering i'm indoors it's around 25 there and if it's up
over well it should be over 30 at least that's when you're outside so the accuracy is going to
top out at 3 anyway but this is just live just to show you that this is going to be a fantastic
tablet for navigation because of the compass and just how big and immersive that screen is
very quick look now at the s pen so it does have palm rejection of course
and you hold it just above the screen you're going to get that hover that shows up now i
found it to be very fast here that's always been the case really for me the s pens are great it's
very similar to other tablets that have wacom tech which is always really quick too in my experience
like the surfaces so you can zoom in here with this and i just do a very quick little test here
you can see that that is almost instant and the stylus experience for me is really fast there is
almost well i don't see any lag with it at all although they claimed that the latin c now what
is it down to i believe it's down to about 2.8 milliseconds which is really really quick so
very fast and no lag and it does work right up into the corners of the screen okay no problems
with that and it doesn't go all over the place you can draw perfectly straight lines if you're
that skilled to be able to do that i'm not i'm just just little doodles here
and i'll gaming here so i was a little concerned about the size of this tablet affecting gaming
just how comfortable is it now with some controls here my thumb can't really get to things
easy like looking around i have to kind of do this and that to me is a little bit awkward and
i'm definitely getting that feeling after playing this game now for it's only about 15 minutes i've
been playing that with jin shin impact here it's more comfortable on a smaller tablet like the tab
s 7 plus this would be more comfortable now what i'm running is the absolute maximum settings
here at the moment and it's been fine i've seen a couple of little frame dips and lags
but the good thing is it's not getting too hot it's not crashing and burning like the xiaomi
12 pro and the xiaomi 12 did on me with the same chipset they just overheated and
the game closed on me but this one's good it's just the sheer size of this tablet when gaming
is a little bit uncomfortable i feel and i'm not over exaggerating here it just it's just not
doing it for me i prefer to game a game like this this kind of style on a slightly smaller tablet i
think 12 inches is the ideal kind of size there now what about our thermals i can feel a little
bit of heat now after 20 minutes of gaming but really for the snapdragon 8 gen 1 this is nothing
absolutely nothing so thermal so far excellent i don't need to break out my thermal imaging camera
but i possibly will later on when i do some real long lengthy stress tests to see how hot it's
going to get but it is nothing like the snapdragon 8 gen 1 in a phone phones of course much smaller
they can't dissipate that heat as quick they run into overheating issues in my
experience but here no that's good it's just slightly warm to the touch where the chipset is
around this area finally what about the four speakers so side firing akg tuned ones uh they
are pretty good they're really impressive they're loud they've got a bit of bass to them it's great
and yeah no one's gonna be complaining about these speakers i think they are good so i'll give you a
sample of them now just jump into one of my recent videos here and we'll hear what they sound like
and looking now at the cameras here on the tab s8 ultra so this is the main front facing camera now
you would notice that when i walk around that it shakes all over the place that's because it does
not have any electronic image stabilization with these front-facing cameras for vlog footage which
is a bit unusual considering the spec of this one so this is the main camera then you can you get
the ultra wide which does fit so much more in the shot now when you're using these cameras depending
on what apps you're using it can actually do this on the go automatic that's when you're in like
skype calls or something it pictures and detects someone else there so you can swap over now just
on the go where we do have electronic image stabilization
see as i walk ahead now that at least does have the electronic image stabilization
to me it's not really a deal breaker because i personally would not be shooting vlog footage
with a massive tablet like this and the quality well it's definitely not as good as their phones
from that main rear camera as i pan around here and just walk ahead
it's cropped in quite a lot
okay so the speakers in this fantastic really loud and rich sounding great speakers a good
tune there from akg considering it's just a tablet it's really impressive probably better
than most of the laptops that i review and even gaming laptops it really is that good
so there's a couple of things about this tablet i i want to make really clear even though this is a
first impressions with this i have reviewed now my lifetime a lot of tablets and i do think what
i suspected from the beginning that 14.6 inches is simply too large for what this is intended to be
a tablet i do find with games like genshen impact that when you're playing and you have to stretch
your hands in to control it properly because it's just too large it gets a little bit uncomfortable
now watching netflix on this for the first 20 minutes is great and they're going oh this is
amazing uh watching my favorite episodes on it but after about 20 minutes you're going oh
i want to put it down i want my stand where's the stand i want to stick it in the stand there
so it can support its own weight at 730 grams it's not exactly a lightweight tablet so that's why i
think a lot of people should think very hard about this one don't fall for all the hype videos going
it's amazing go buy it i think my recommendation is don't buy it actually go for the tab s8 plus
and me personally i should have gone for that i think i made an error here i really should have
got the slightly smaller version while quite a bit smaller version because it's just simply too big
and i believe it'll be too big for most people now when i get the keyboard for it i can see myself
using this all the time in the keyboard because the keyboard will be a stand for it as well
and that's what i believe most people will do with the s8 ultra here is simply just use it as a big
android laptop now i haven't covered samsung dex i might in another video there's a desktop mode but
it works on this really good i have tested it out but i just haven't recorded it you've got video
out with it the performance of it is fantastic and i'm pretty happy with the snapdragon 8 gen
1 so far in a tablet as i suspected i mean it's logical a bigger heat base there to dissipate
that heat sorry away from the chipset it's got all that back area there huge amount of alloy it can
get rid of that heat quickly so it's not really getting that warm it's not throttling like it is
in the phones i've tested three phones from two different manufacturers now with the snapdragon
8 gen 1. if you haven't seen those videos for me it's been very disappointing it's been a
throttling hot mess that chip said in a phone bit in a tablet absolutely fantastic it's it's
really not getting that hot at all it's just getting warm so i think samsung's done a great
job with the cooling on it so far my testing so i may possibly have more videos coming out
on this where i get into a full review i'll see how this first video goes interest-wise
uh and i may come back with some throttling tests with it just push it really really hard
to see how much will it throttle how hot is it going to get and possibly do a comparison
to a snapdragon 8 gen 1 phone so stay tuned for that i do hope to see in the next one bye for now