welcome back to my review now here of the samsung galaxy tab s8 ultra i've used it now a week this
mammoth tablet 14.6 inches is absolutely fantastic 5.5 millimeters thin it weighs just over 760 grams
and i did find in my first impressions that well it's you know as you'd expect very big
for your standard kind of tablet use you really want to have it in the keyboard stand or in a
stand like i have now so has my first impressions changed this video will also follow up on things
that were missing in my first impressions i'll focus on the performance take a look and analyze
what kind of frame rates we get the refresh rate battery life and charge time and pretty much
all you need to know really about this particular mammoth tablet here from samsung i wanted to look
here at this ui performance so one ui now a week later has just been fantastic for me performance
is really good everything is fast so the gestures all working good they're swapping over between
various different applications it's all really nice and smooth and quick and i don't really see
too much noticeable lag but i do sometimes see a little bit of a frame dip okay here and there
so what i'm showing right now is this was 120s not actually our fps counter that is the refresh
rate so what i wanted to do here is just take a little look at the performance what kind of
frame rate is it delivering so under the developer settings if you go into developer options you can
enable this which is called gpu watch now i've got it on turned it on now the widget
and you'll see right here the average frames per second 121. so that's good but you will see
here when sometimes you trigger things like the gestures and you're scrolling and moving about
see how it dipped down to 84 to 60 to 30. so that's just the way the ui is but you don't really
see these dips unless you're someone that plays um high fps games like you used to 144 hertz monitor
gaming at 144 hertz you'll probably pick up on that okay but the average joe won't you won't be
able to see like the noticeable lag or anything like that often when bringing up just all of the
apps there in the app drawer can sometimes trigger a little bit of a frame dip but it's pretty solid
this performance is good and i just go back to some other apps here so some of them will
be rendered at 60 and here it's only pumping out four frames per second as you can see so this is
saving a bit of battery life so that's good really because why do we need this to be pumped out at
120 frames per second we don't you see that when we start to move though that frame rate then picks
up to 120 or well over at least 90 most of the time and that is smooth okay i'm not really seeing
any lag it's very very smooth performance here in netflix and it's going to be like this in a
lot of content that when it's static now it won't take too long that frame rate should actually drop
down again but it's keeping it 117 there which is good and that'll be throughout the ui you're gonna
see this in chrome uh other areas you can see right now that that's only four frames per second
that doesn't need to pump out much and why is that it's because this page hasn't loaded okay there we
go but once you start to scroll same thing okay so while it's not an adaptive refresh rate it is
adaptive rendering you could say okay which is a good thing it's going to save on our battery life
on the subject of battery life what am i able to get so screen on time 7 hours and 48 minutes this
was at 120 hertz so if you run it at 60 you will get i would say about 10 hours of screen on time
you can see my use here that i was doing a little bit of well emulation there playstation 2 a lot of
netflix okay watching some episodes mostly um at night there and this is why there was a few pauses
during the day that's night time so standby battery drain was very good it only dropped a
couple of percent a lot better than what i've seen on previous one ui roms but that's been one ui
two and three and on android 12 it seems to be reasonably good here okay a little bit of gaming
as you can see an antutu benchmark now did i run it for two hours and 36 minutes i didn't but i
had it in the background because it was measuring the charging times that's what i'll get on to so
realistically i do believe my brightness was set to approximately 200 nets okay which is reasonable
for indoors i believe that most people should be able to get between seven and nine hours uh maybe
even less of course if you game you're really only looking at about four hours really or less
than that actually about three and a half charge time so here we go now this is not the official
charger because i didn't get one in the box and i'm not gonna buy one so i used my 45 watt power
delivery charger no in fact it's 65 watts and it took only 100 minutes to go from nine percent
to 100 percent which is very good it's almost an 11 000 milliamp hour battery so i don't think
that's too bad especially for samsung that is that previous models did not charge very fast
performance so i just wanted to show this very quickly okay i won't drag this out that it could
perform better here samsung have basically underclocked this they've not let it reach
its full potential here the snapdragon 8 gen 1 and i do know this because i'm testing phones that can
reach a million points and over or slightly under with antutu if you like your antutu scores you can
see here at least that it could do better it could definitely do a lot better but samsung decided to
throttle it or power limit it the internal storage ufs 3.1 very very quick here and those sequential
reads and rights are excellent and the random reads and rights which are the important ones
they are looking very good there not a problem with that so i've already covered all this in
my other video but i just wanted to touch base that the performance out of it is
super quick very fast one of the fastest android tablets if not the fastest i have our fps counter
and resource monitor right there with the gpu and the cpu we can see what kind of load it's under
and let's have a look now at a very demanding game gentian impact i won't bother about pub g because
that's not actually that demanding but this title certainly is on my widgets floating around all
over the place here now you can see this is where the refresh rate's no longer 120 it's gone now to
60 hertz which makes sense because this game doesn't run at 120 here it's at 60 max
so we're looking around 45 down to even 32 frames per second here now it's not because i want to
stress this not because it's face down on the table the only reason i'm playing it face down
on the table so i'm holding it like this there's going to be my lights and reflections all over the
place that's why i'm not doing it and if i was to play like that the result will be exactly the same
i've already tested this in a previous video so why is the performance here not performing
as it could i've got a phone at the moment that i'm reviewing that has the snapdragon 8
gen 1. it runs a solid 60 frames per second even after one hour even in the demanding areas
even with boss battles everything it's a super solid frame rate and performance whereas what
samsung has decided to do well down to 29 frames per second on the top settings here what samsung
decided to do is play it safe all right they don't want it to get too hot and when you look now with
the thermal imaging camera this is actually after gaming for one hour get up skids up to about 36
37 degrees celsius on the back so definitely samsung's playing it safe they could push this
chip so much harder but they just chose not to they want it to be cool they don't
want issues they don't want to damage the batteries they've got their reasons behind it
but i hope with the thermite update they improve the gaming performance quick look at youtube so
once the quality picks up here of my internet connection or the buffer health should i say
it will run it at 1080p but that's all it seems to be for me i don't know if it'll switch over to
1440 but it won't do 4k that was a common question youtube playback i've not seen any issues with
it it looks great on such a massive screen just viewing one of my own videos here so i don't get
slammed by copyright from anyone else okay that's the only reason i'm doing that not to blow my own
trumpet here anything getting out of that it's still very good and the scrolling performance
uh great okay no issues but what i wanted to test now is those four akg tuned speakers they
are excellent very loud but not only that they're rich and i'll give you a sample at 100 volume now
so those are some impressive speakers they're very loud now are they better than the ipad pro 12.9 i
don't have it on hand anymore i sold mine but i do believe they are i think they are better these are
probably the best uh tablet speakers they've done an excellent job with them and the bass you get
out of them but they don't distort either i don't see anyone complaining about these speakers no
one's going to go and say oh they sound terrible because they don't they're fantastic and our web
camera so this is one area that the tam s8 ultra certainly excels i think it has the best webcams
hands down that i have seen in the tablet so two 2 megapixel cameras this is the main one we don't
have any electronic image stabilization so you can see it shakes around a little bit but this is not
going to be an issue because you'll probably be using this in the keyboard dock or in a stand so
you wouldn't really be holding it so if i tap now i can ultra wide and you can see you can do this
on the fly without actually breaking the video so this quality i think is going to be excellent
for zoom calls whatsapp skype things like that so if i swap over back again to the main camera
you see that one's slightly better quality what i really like about this as well is listen to the
quality of these microphones you can probably hear that rooster in the background crowing
really really good quality here and i think this is definitely the best video quality you get out
of front facing cameras on a tablet just like the front cameras you can shoot 4k video with
the rear camera it's 13 megapixels we've got that ultra wide too that you can swap over to
but not as you're recording because it only supports 1080p but the main camera here
13 megapixels with electronic image stabilization the quality is reasonably good for a tablet
but not quite as good and as sharp and as detailed as those front facing cameras now photo samples
just a few snaps here you can see that it does take a reasonably good photo the tab s8 ultra now
our screen this is what it's all about 14.6 inches absolutely huge so we'll just go into it a little
bit here and my thoughts on the screen now a lot of people got a bit triggered when i mentioned it
doesn't have dc dimming and for me that was not an issue but it would be really nice to have why
is it nice to have well it's a form of controlling the brightness and it should stop any flicker but
it doesn't it's got pulse width modulation you're very sensitive to pulse width modulation flicker
on amoled screens then at lower brightness levels you could possibly see it now i've
done my best here to make the screen look and represent exactly what it's like but you see this
bit of effect going on that's to do with the glass okay it should actually look a little bit better
but there's no banding now showing at all in my video here touch response great 120 hertz it's a
fantastic screen now the ppi when i mentioned in the first impressions video that's not as
sharp as the tab s7 plus screen that again seemed to have triggered a few samsung fans
it's just a fact okay because the pixel density on this model isn't as dense and not as densely
packed the pixels as that other tabby 7 plus but it makes sense because it's a smaller tablet
this is larger by no means is the screen blurry it was just a straight out comment to say it doesn't
look as sharp as the tab s7 plus when you look at it closely but normal viewing distances fantastic
screen gestures work great touch import very good it reacts instantly really no one is going to be
complaining about this screen because it is a grade one of the best tablet screens out there
very quickly our s pen so this for a lot of people is the key reason to get it of
course because you got a huge amount of screen real estate here to use nice sharp resolution
and this pin has now a 2.8 millisecond latency latency there is incredible very fast and i i
can't detect or see with my eyes anyway any delay there it seems to be very very quick as soon as
you write there it is coming out so solid and of course the harder you press those pressure
sensitive levels are then triggered and the darker it was going to be so for apps that support that s
pen support nowadays of course is very very good here so you can enable a lot of apps that only
the s pen is going to work so you don't have any problems then because it's palm rejection total
palm rejection and you're able to jot down notes very very quick so for handwriting it's great okay
really good experience here with the s pen now the fingerprint reader has something that i've been
complaining about it's been hit and miss the weird thing is it's starting to get better and better
and better it was the first day it was terrible the second day wasn't great it must have some sort
of why this is the only thing i can think of some sort of algorithm that's actually learning here so
watch as i test this out that's good i don't know what's going on it's getting better and better
it's starting to work better either that or the moisture levels in my skin for some reason now
are working a lot better than what it was in the first few days but this is strange it really has
improved what's my final verdict then after a week with this it is hands down the best android tablet
it's a fantastic tablet and probably the best tablet at the moment at the time of this video
there are a couple of areas that i hope samsung can improve upon with firmware updates first off
my biggest complaint is that fingerprint reader i've reviewed all of their galaxy phones and this
is something that's reoccurring on the initial release fingerprint readers aren't perfect okay
aren't great remember the s10 i had a lot of problems with my s10 it's kind of like that a
little bit so this definitely they have to improve that now there's some absolute hilarious comments
on my first video that people said i was making it look bad you're supposed to tap and hold you're
tapping too slow you need to tap faster if you don't hold for a second or so it tells you please
hold okay so it's not me it's just the way it is and as i demonstrated in this video it's still
problematic anyway the other is the performance of the snapdragon 8 gen 1. while it is super quick
very fast fast wireless we're only reaching about 90 or 85 of the true potential of this
chip how do i know this well i'm reviewing phones that have the snapdragon 8 gen 1 and they can get
a lot higher points so i'm talking about a million over a million points with antutu just a few look
at that benchmark okay and this scores well less so it's around 15 even over a percent that they've
throttled it back they're limiting the power limits they're lowering the clock speeds
and the thermals on it are fantastic so i've seen after gaming for hours on this or an hour
pubg gen chain impact it gets warm around where the camera is they could have done a better job
with the thermals maybe a transfer heat pipe in there a bit of graphite film or whatever
a few tricks up their sleeve to make it a bit better to push the performance so i hope a
firmware update comes out that they allow it to get a little warmer to the touch it's normally
called the skin sensor where it's warmer if they just push that up to instead of being around
35 degrees to throttle it set it to 42 or something we could push it a bit harder there
the screen it is very very good okay it's bright it's amoled it's 120 hertz
and i've got zero complaints with it really apart from it doesn't have dc dimming
so for some people ultra sensitive to pulse width modulation flicker with the dc dimming
which is another form of using current another form of manipulating uh the brightness control
it reduces that flicker so it's a shame it's not there maybe it could be added with software
i don't know if that's possible that's just one minor thing but the brightness is there the auto
adaptive brightness is working great too i don't really have any issues with it touch response is
great and then s pen so for the artists out there definitely you want to get it for this for that uh
s pen the other things i can point out wireless performance amazing speakers amazing uh it really
is quite good and the build in general very thin very fragile but let's get on to then the use of
this so this is why my first impressions was that it's a it's a huge tablet a little bit too big
for me personally is what i was getting at for me the sweet spot is about 12.4 okay so the tab s7
plus or the s8 plus for me is a better size i think okay because i use my tablets me personally
my own use everyone's different of course as tablets i like to hold them and after about 10-15
minutes 20 minutes it's like it's a bit heavy i've been watching a lot of netflix on this so
i end up having to just let it support its own weight and hold it which is fine and it's wow
you know an amazing screen to be looking at their content gaming on it i would do with a controller
but if you've only got touch controls with a game like ginge and impact you're out of luck and it
is a bit uncomfortable with this tablet to then use it a gaming like that i don't find great so
that's why i said that it's too a bit of a niche product like artists are just going crazy for this
stylus of course that huge screen you can use and the latency of this of the s pen is absolutely
brilliant so i believe still that most people will use this as a laptop an android laptop you keep it
in the keyboard dock it comes with the keyboard dock when you pre-order or at least it does here
in europe and you probably be having it stood up here in a stand or you use the keyboard case stand
cover so it's really not so much a tablet more a laptop that you can use for short bursts short
periods as a tablet there so very niche product for me still i'm going to say that that nothing's
changed it's a little bit too big as a tablet to use it as a tablet that is so thank you so much
for watching my follow-up one week review i may have more videos on this so do subscribe for those
probably when my keyboard gets here i'll go over the experience of using it like a laptop then
focusing a little bit more on the desktop mode and day-to-day usage with such a monster of a tablet