Going hands-on with Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S4

With the all-conquering iPad still, well, all-conquering, making a tablet to challenge it must be a mug’s game, right? But anything Apple can do Samsung must prove it can do too, hence the £599 Samsung Galaxy Tab S4. But while it wants to be the only computer you’ll need, can it really replace a proper laptop? We spent some time with one to find out.

Design: pure Galaxy

Available in black or grey, the Tab S4 is all glass on the front and back, with a sliver of aluminium running down its sides. It would be a bit much to call it a beauty but at 7.1mm thick and ultra-dense, it makes the standard iPad seem a little pedestrian, even if it is a total fingerprint magnet. The speaker array is one of the best hardware changes for this year. Like an iPad Pro, there are four AKG-tuned drivers around its frame. They certainly go very loud, although it’ll need to be put up against Apple’s offering before a winner can be declared.

Screen: back to old habits

For the Tab S4 Samsung has switched back to a 16:10 screen, which allows for a longer, less-cramped keyboard, although there’s no room for a fingerprint scanner or home button. Instead, you get face and iris scanning, which seems to work well. The Super AMOLED display is fantastic: sharp, with great colour and contrast. It makes the bog-standard Apple iPad look a bit naff, as it probably should do given the price.

Performance: second-hand chips

The Galaxy Tab S4 has 2017’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 CPU rather than the Snapdragon 845 used in 2018’s top phones. There’s 4GB RAM rather than the 6GB or 8GB we might have hoped for, and 64GB storage in the standard version. A 256GB model will be available in some areas, but no confirmation where as yet. Samsung also says the tablet lasts for up to 16 hours of video playback – more than Apple’s claimed 10 hours for the 10.5in iPad Pro – although its 7300mAh capacity is actually slightly lower than the iPad’s 8134mAh.

Keyboard: fantastically functional

The S4’s keyboard (a £120 optional extra) doubles as a case, with metal contacts that physically connect it to the screen. It’s quite deep and chunky compared to those on other hybrids, so it’ll do the job for the odd thousand words or so, even if it feels a little cramped and doesn’t have a touchpad. Like just about every Samsung phone and tablet, the Galaxy Tab S4 comes with Microsoft’s Office suite pre-installed, although with a quality QWERTY onboard, for once it seems justified.

DeX: who needs Windows?

Plug in the keyboard base and the Tab S4 switches to a distinct desktop-like interface called DeX. By making the icons smaller and bringing out some features that normally hide in a drop-down menu, all of a sudden the S4 seems much more productive. Plug it into a monitor and you can use the tablet as a keyboard and trackpad, with DeX up on the big screen. It’s a neat way of blowing up web pages and video but isn’t likely to be a deal breaker.

S-Pen: word perfect?

The S4’s S-Pen stylus is a little more curvy than the last, but the tech is similar. You get 4096 pressure levels, a button on the side, and there’s no need for a battery in the stylus itself. A cutesy art app called Penup is preinstalled, and like previous Samsung stylus tablets, you can “handwrite” messages and the software will use optical character recognition to decipher it. Handy for saving to Evernote or another cloud-based note app.

Cameras: suitably standard

The tablet’s cameras are, sensibly, more ordinary than a Galaxy S9’s. There’s a 13-megapixel sensor on the back with an f/1.9 lens, and an 8-megapixel one for selfies on the front. We’d rather hang around on a sightseeing bus with a bumbag and an “I Love London” baseball cap than walk around the capital taking photos using a 10.5-inch tablet’s camera, so we’re happy with these just-OK specs.

Initial verdict

The Tab 4’s new shape and new software make its attempts to moonlight as a hybrid much more convincing than its predecessor, plus Android has a lot of games that benefit from a big screen: XCOM: Enemy Within, Baldur’s Gate II and Ark Survival Evolved will love it. Add all the accessories (an S-Pen is included) and it costs £149 less than a 64GB 10.5in iPad Pro. Can it compete with Apple’s top-end tablet? That’s something we’ll have to wait for the review to discover.