Review: Samsung Tab S3

A new top-end Android tablet is a rare occurrence these days, and after using Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S3, I can sort of see why.

This iPad Pro-chasing tablet is good-looking, fast and has a gorgeous screen, but I can’t fully recommend it because the Android user experience on a tablet still isn't quite up to scratch. Samsung has tried its best, but the future for high-end Android tablets isn't looking too rosy.

SAMSUNG GALAXY TAB S3 – DESIGN

The Galaxy Tab S3 is a mixture of the very best and the very worst of Samsung’s industrial design. It’s thinner than an iPhone 7, with a flat back and slightly curved sides that make it a pleasure to hold. Weighing in at just 429g it's also noticeably lighter than the latest iteration of the regular iPad.

The Tab S3 is about the same size as an iPad Pro 9.7-inch, but the all-black colour is a hue I've been wishing Apple would introduce for its tablets since the matte-black iPhone 7 arrived.

There are clicky volume and sleep buttons on the side, while the headphone jack and USB-C port sit slightly off-centre on the bottom. Like the iPad Pro, four speakers are dotted around the tablet and they have some software trickery that angles the sound depending on how you’re holding the device. There's also a very fast fingerprint scanner below the screen, flanked by two capacitive 'back' and 'overview' buttons.

It’s a stunning piece of kit, until you start using it. The glass back, for me, is a wrong step for a tablet. After using the Tab S3 for a few minutes the behind becomes completely covered in oily fingerprints.

I also expect tablets to be much more durable than a phone, mainly because they spend a lot of time being bunged inside a bag or passed around a group of people. An iPad can comfortably live inside a full rucksack without getting damaged, but I'm already starting to see tiny marks appearing on the Galaxy Tab S3. I understand a glossy, glass back might be a flashier design choice, but I'd prefer a matte metal back.

SAMSUNG GALAXY TAB S3 – DISPLAY AND SPEAKERS

Samsung has knocked it out of the park with the display on the Galaxy Tab S3. The screen is so good that it sits in the same league and in some ways surpasses the iPad Pro 9.7-inch's True Tone panel, which is one of the best I've ever seen on a tablet.

The thing that really gives it the edge over Apple’s tab is the screen tech used. While Apple uses IPS LCD panels, Samsung uses AMOLED, which allows for much richer colours, deeper blacks and a more immersive screen for bingeing on media.

The tablet packs the same 2048 x 1536 resolution as the Tab S2, but it’s now HDR-enabled when you’re watching supported content either through Netflix or Amazon Prime. HDR (high dynamic range) gives much greater peak brightness, with blacks appearing deeper and more natural as a result.

The demo HDR footage I've seen looks tremendous. It's a shame neither Netflix or Amazon has updated their mobile apps to support it yet, and there's no word on when that might happen, which means for now the HDR support feels a little superfluous.

The screen's much more colourful and saturated than the iPad Pro display, which can look a tad dull when they’re both side by side, but this is where the S3's lead ends.

The Tab S3's screen doesn't perform as well in bright light due to its overly reflective coating, which I've found is particularly annoying on trains. It also lacks any of the True Tone tech found in the iPad Pro, which alters the colour temperature depending on your environment and makes reading in the dark easier on the eyes.

Luckily, the media experience is made even better thanks to the four speakers. There are two on the bottom and two on the top, and they’re tuned by the audio gurus at AKG.

They’re decent speakers, with plenty of volume and the positioning means noise will come out in all directions, but they do have a tendency to feel like the sound is far away from you and being pushed the wrong way. This might have something to do with the software that’s supposed to alter the sound depending on which orientation you’re holding it in. Even with this issue, they’re much better than the majority of tablet speakers.
SAMSUNG GALAXY TAB S3 – PERFORMANCE AND S PEN

Another headline feature of the Galaxy Tab S3 is the S Pen stylus, which comes in the box rather than as a pricey add-on (listen up, Apple). It’s a squat, plastic pen that matches the colour of the tablet and feels nice to hold. It’s noticeably smaller than both the Apple Pencil and Microsoft’s Surface Pen. I'm also a fan of the fact that it has flat sides, to stop it rolling away when you place it down on the table.

The S Pen offers four times the pressure-sensitivity of Apple’s Pencil and can tell whether you’re shading or putting more pressure on the nib, which makes it very effective for everything from jotting down notes to doodling and digital painting.

Samsung provides a couple of pre-installed apps: Notes and an odd social network for sharing drawings called Pen.UP that seems to crash every time I try to use it. You can download Sketchbook Pro for free from Samsung’s app store, which is a far better app for making the most of the S Pen.

It would have been nice to have a slot in the tablet to store the pen when it’s not in use, but considering how thin the Tab S3 is, that was never really an option. If you pick up the keyboard accessory, something I haven’t managed to test yet, then there’s a neat pen loop attached to that.

Performance on the tablet is great, even though its spec sheet reads more like a early 2016 flagship phone than an uber-tablet from 2017. There’s a Snapdragon 820 processor running the show, with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. I’d have liked to see more storage on such a media-focused tablet, but at least there’s a microSD card slot.

In Geekbench 4, the Tab S3 picks up a multi-core score of 3945 – which matches similarly specced phones and beats Google's Pixel C, which scored 2816 on the same test. There’s enough grunt to have two apps running side-by-side, and it handled every game I tried just fine.

SAMSUNG GALAXY TAB S3 – SOFTWARE

My biggest issue with the Tab S3 is its software. Android 7.0 is a great phone operating system, far better than iOS 10 in my opinion, but it doesn’t translate well to tablets. Samsung has tried its best to alleviate some of the issues with its own modifications, but it still feels limited.

There is multitasking, and you can drag two apps next to each other to watch a video and read an email at the same time, but it seems to only allow the app that's in focus to do anything. For example, if I have Slack open on one side and Word on the other, I have to actually tap the Slack window to bring it back to life and update the message thread.

You can also pop a video out into a floating window, but again the implementation isn’t very good. The video window keeps stopping, and it seems to disappear entirely whenever I open up a new app. The idea is there, but the ways it works is counter-intuitive.

Then you’ve got the general issues with Android tablets. Apps are rarely built for the big screen, and most are blown-up phone apps that don’t utilise the 9.7-inch screen well. Even icons on the home screen look blurry because developers clearly haven’t built them to fit this size and resolution. Coming from an iPad with its fantastic array of specifically designed apps, the Tab S3 feels hamstrung.

There are some highlights, and most of these come from Samsung itself. The Secure Folder gives you a place to store important files and photos behind the fingerprint scanner, and the Game Launcher boosts performance for more intensive titles.

SAMSUNG GALAXY TAB S3 – CAMERA

The camera on the back of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 is pretty terrible, but then I wouldn’t expect much else from a tablet snapper. Considering it’s got a 13-megapixel sensor, a lens with an f/1.9 aperture, and a flash, it’s actually somewhat surprising pictures lack detail and depth.

But you really shouldn’t be using a tablet for taking pictures and I am going to hazard a guess that the phone sitting in your pocket has a much better camera.

The front-facing camera is more important on a tablet, and I would've liked Samsung to try a bit harder with the one here. It’s 5-megapixel, with an f/2.2 aperture, and it’s fine for video chats and not much else.

The camera app, plucked straight from the Note 7, is very good, and has a great UI and lots of options.
SAMSUNG GALAXY TAB S3 – BATTERY LIFE

Whenever you mention batteries and Samsung, the exploding Note 7 will probably come into the conversation. And considering the Tab S3 is one of the first big releases since that phablet was pulled from sale, it’s very important for Samsung that nothing goes wrong here.

That whole battery controversy might be one of the reasons why the Tab S3 has a slightly conservative 6000mAh cell inside, which is much smaller than the 9000mAh cell that keeps the Pixel C motoring along. It’s still larger than the Tab S2's, but that display and all those speakers are power hogs.

Considering the size, I am actually quite impressed by the stamina of the Tab S3 and in my tests it managed to just about match the 12 hours of video playback Samsung is advertising. This could all change when HDR content becomes more prominent, though.

A 45-minute video stored on the device, with the brightness set to 50%, eats through about 5-6%, while an hour of Netflix streaming takes it down by around 11-12%. Standby time is great, something that’s very important on a device you might go a few days without using.

Samsung has included one of its USB-C adaptive fast chargers in the box, and it charges up the tablet in around two hours – about half the time it takes to fully charge an iPad

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