I finally got my hands on the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra
about two weeks ago and we finally got to review it today.
Everyone's jaw dropped when we saw that humongous screen.
But of course, there is more than just having a humongous screen.
So let's take a look at what other specialties
that the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra has to offer.
So let's start off by talking about the contents in this box office.
When I first got the box, it was very heavy.
And that is because everything that we are showing here today
on this tablet itself, including the kickstand and also the
Book Cover Keyboard, everything is included inside this box.
And combining all of the three parts on this tablet
itself, is actually quite heavy.
Anyway, for this review, I'll put the box here and we'll be splitting this review
into multiple different segments and everything is timestamped below.
So feel free to skip
to whichever parts that you want to know more about this tablet here.
For me, I'll start off
by removing everything from the tablet and only talk about the tablet first.
So let me just do that real quick.
And the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, as you can see here, is humongous.
But also impossibly thin.
And this is actually still a very rigid tablet thanks to Samsung's
so-called Armoured Aluminium
or something like that - or aluminum if you prefer to call it that way.
And yeah, I don't really know how to describe this tablet
except for the word humongous.
So this tablet uses a 14.6-inch Super AMOLED screen
that goes up to 120 Hertz refresh rate with a super high resolution
of 1848x2960
that equates to nearly 5.5 million pixels which is nearly
1.5 times more pixels than standard 16:9 1440p displays.
And I have to say this screen looks absolutely stunning and beautiful.
But don't take my word for it
because I took our colorimeter to test all the color accuracy too.
Tested at 100 nits of brightness, this screen
can cover up to 99.87% of sRGB and 99.4%
of DCI-P3 color gamuts while maintaining a very low Delta E number.
And that means that this screen is very color accurate and it doesn't
deviate off the true color much.
However, the average maximum brightness of this screen
is only at about 385 nits.
That number might seem low,
but since this screen is so big, it is actually enough
to light up an entire room at just 100 nits of brightness.
That is because the nits is describing something
like the density of light intensity
This is also why larger
displays, we tend to use it at much lower nits number.
Like how I'm using a 34-inch ultrawide monitor
at home at only 80 nits average.
Anyway, truth be told, everything looks very amazing on this tablet.
It's huge, bright screen with vivid colors and that amazing quad channel speaker
means that this tablet can't go wrong in terms of media consumption.
On the side note, one of the things I did
with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra is to take some pictures
with this tablet here and they actually look kind of okay.
But yeah, I've never experienced such a big viewfinder before
and that experience is something interesting to me.
But for the video capabilities of this tablet, though,
everything is limited to 30fps maximum.
No matter what resolution it is filming at.
Also holding
the tablet might be a bit problematic since you can see the bezels around
the screen is very small and there's no place to rest my thumb.
But I do have two things to point out.
Number one is the notch.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra has two selfie cameras, one wide angle
and the other one ultrawide angle camera housed in this tiny little notch up above.
But I don't really think there's a reason for it.
I mean, it can be literally just smashed
inside the bezel and it could be just working the same way.
Right.
But honestly speaking, the notch didn't really bother me that much because it
takes up such a small percentage of the overall screen real estate.
And the second
thing I want to highlight is the under-display fingerprint scanner.
I freaking hate under-display fingerprint scanners even on phones
and now on this freakishly huge tablet,
the scanner is placed around this area here.
So it's near the USB Type-C Port, which is kind of difficult
and awkward to use in any other position other than just my right thumb
placing it like this.
Even if you want to do it like this, it's kind of impossible
As you can see here, yeah, you'll hurt your wrist some day.
And oh,
one more thing is that I should mention that prior to doing all of the tests
that we mentioned just now, was before applying this tempered
glass screen protector.
I bought this tempered glass somewhere like about 9 bucks?
I can't stand seeing any tiny scratches on this humongous
display because changing this display will also be very costly.
So before we
proceed into the second part, I want to just quickly measure
how heavy this tablet is only the tablet itself
with the S-pen attachment at the back here.
We'll talk about the S-pen later. So
this is a bit awkward.
800 grams. Yep.
799 grams.
So now I want to switch gears and talk about this accessory first.
This is a piece of back cover, something like that.
It just snaps magnetically onto the tablet itself
at the back and it provides you a kickstand.
Personally speaking, I'll leave these two pieces together at all times
because having a kickstand on this humongous tablet
is very beneficial If you want to just watch some shows and whatnot,
but if you want to just carry this tablet, then you can collapse the kickstand.
Just stick it out like this and it offers protection to your tablet as well.
And there's also another flap here to protect the S Pen
from falling off or whatever, because it's just attached
magnetically to the back of the tablet to charge it as well.
And one more thing that I want to highlight here is that this
kickstand is a very nice kickstand, so it's very strong as well.
If I just do it like this, poking the screen,
it doesn't really move that much. So it's kind of stable.
And if you want to start drawing something, let me just think about this
S-pen here, you can adjust the angle to an extreme and go like this.
It's near flat, but with a slight inclination
of about 15 degrees then you can just start drawing.
Then we can start the Samsung notes and start drawing some stuff
or maybe start writing like, hello, my name
is Kok Kee...
wow my writing is ugly.
But you get the point is it's actually very comfortable to use.
And before proceeding to the next part, I once again
need to take the measurement of the weight.
Okay.
So now only we have the bank piece alone.
It really resulted in more than one kilogram.
It's 1087 grams.
Okay.
Keep that in mind because we revisit this later after
attaching the last accessory and now the keyboard, a.k.a.
the key... the Book Cover Keyboard.
This is meant to work in tandem with the kickstand. So
yeah, this is the full set
that is included in our version of the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
S8 Ultra and having this accessory attached with the kickstand.
It literally converts this entire tablet to be more
or less like the Microsoft Surface kind of experience.
And overall, the keyboard cover has one of the best feeling material ever.
I can't tell you if it's PU leather or not,
but it's just really smooth and it's really nice to touch on.
And yet if any dirt or grime or oil ever get on this piece of wrist rest,
we can just easily wipe it off so that is nice.
This keyboard, though, is using a very typical 14 inch laptop keyboard layout
which is fitting since this device is about the same size
anyway, and the keyboard keys are fantastic to type on.
They are kind of having a very nice travel distance
and the bounce back of each key is very quick
and springy at the same time, which makes it just really fun to type on.
The keycaps on this keyboard is also slightly rough
and it can catch oil and whatnot.
Yeah, as you can see here, my spacebar this area is slightly shiny,
but overall the keycaps they do feel really nice to type on
this keyboard also has a white backlight.
So if we hit Fn + F12, we can see that the backlight
can be toggled between three different levels of brightness.
But how does it feel like to actually use this device?
How does the device actually feel?
Is the user experience of this tablet with a humongous 14.6
inch screen still going to be just an enlarged phone?
Yes. Unfortunately, in the most basic Android UI,
this tablet is just kind of horrendous to use.
That is not even Samsung's fault because we do have
quite a lot of fundamental UI elements that is from Google
that just doesn't scale well with this kind of display.
Take a look at two examples here.
The Google Play Store
is having this humongous icon that takes up a large chunk of the screen.
Why, Google?
And then comes another issue is the homescreen scrolling.
I saw other people commenting about this on Twitter before seeing that swiping
between home screens result in our very super slow animation.
And I can confirm that this is indeed true.
But this is also due to Samsung's lack of attention to detail,
because if I swipe at the same speed but across a longer distance,
then the animation is quite quick.
But if I swipe the tiny little distance on this tablet,
then as you can see, the animation is really slow.
But when
I change to Nova Launcher, that issue goes away.
So yeah, it's definitely something to do with Samsung's default launcher.
But the saving grace for the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra
though, I would say it's Samsung DeX.
Technically DeX acts like another homescreen
launcher for the system and it changes the entire interface
to a more traditional and more familiar Windows PC or Mac interface.
Since we have the Book Cover Keyboard accessory with us,
we can literally just use this device as a laptop with Samsung DeX on top,
which is a topic that we will leave for another time.
Overall, DeX feels like any other Samsung phones or tablets,
but it comes with a few more interesting features.
DeX is treated like a literal subsystem within Android,
and we can customize how DeX looks independent of Android,
like the interface zoom, text size, all of those stuff,
and we can even customize the trackpad gestures to like triple tap to go back.
By combining all of these, the experience on the Samsung Galaxy Tab
S8 Ultra is quite decent on DeX.
Multitasking is fantastic and I don't have to worry
about those scaling issues since every app is constrained
in its own window, which we can resize to whatever size we want.
Plus the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset is also able to perform really well.
Since this tablet has such a large surface area to dissipate all of the heat away.
If you want to play games on this tablet though, then going on ahead.
The performance is going to be amazing.
But we still do not have the "alternate gaming performance management"
option on this tablet yet, but that is not something that I'm worried about
since this tablet doesn't seem to have any thermal limit built into the firmware.
However, do keep in mind that this tablet here doesn't work
well with touchscreen controls because it is just so big and reaching those buttons
with my fingers is kind of problematic and I kind of have big hands here.
And what is not fun here though, is the battery life.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra comes with a 11,200mAh battery,
which sounds like a lot,
but it's actually one of the worst battery life on the tablet I've reviewed so far.
In our PCMark 10 battery life tests at a 100 nits of brightness.
I got less than 7 hours.
That is quite a bit oof...
and I guess combined with the big screen, with the high resolution display
and also high refresh rate,
this is a recipe to be the worst battery life on the tablet ever.
Remember, this is only on Wi-Fi and I can't imagine how bad the battery
will be if a 5G version of this tablet exists.
Charging speed, though, is quite okay.
As you can see here, the box of the Samsung Galaxy Tab
S8 Ultra doesn't include a charger inside.
And on Samsung's website it is said that this tablet will support
45 watts of fast charging.
Since we don't have the fast charger
with us - as in the Samsung Super Fast Charge 2.0 charger.
We just use the
Ugreen 100W GaN charger and it took like 1.5 hours to charge
from 15 to 100% and comparing our data with Sam Mobile's charging tests
it doesn't really differ that much from Samsung's official 45 watt charger.
So yeah I think it's more or less the similar problem with the S22 Ultra.
So in conclusion for the price of RM5,899.
Yes that is the price of this tablet and it is definitely a super hefty price
at that.
This product is definitely not meant for everyone,
mainly because of the size and price at the same time.
Actually, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra is a lot cheaper here in Malaysia.
Compared to in the US because when I compared the
same configuration with the keyboard cover accessory included,
then it results in $1,550 USD
that converts to about RM6,500.
And yeah, we got a pretty hefty price cut, I would say.
However,
spending this much on a premium tablet might be questionable for some people.
And I'm not here to tell you how to spend your money.
This review is just to let you know more in-depth about all of the information
about this tablet before making your purchase.
And as an addition here, it's not even a part of the original script.
I'll personally pick a premium Chromebook over this tablet
because even a premium Chromebook is a lot cheaper than this tablet.
And yet those Chromebooks also have Google Play Store support as well.
They might not run the same games as a dedicated
Android tablet, but most of them will work.
So, yeah, that's it.
That's all we have to share with you about the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra.
This is a very long video.
And before we end,
I want to take one last measurement because this tablet
is really heavy so...
oh don't run out of battery
Yeah, it is now
1457 grams, which is nearly 1.5 kilos.
So that's it.
If you have any questions, leave them down in the comments section
below and we'll see you guys in the next video.