Watch The World Come To Life With Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 8.0

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 is a premium tablet that runs Android 5.0 Lollipop. It portrays an upgrade only in size and name. It has a more slim and lightweight profile than its previous versions, with a new aspect ratio of 4:3. This Android tablet is a great budget iPad challenger.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 review

Design

Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 is lighter in weight and can be held comfortably in one hand. The tab weighs 389g for the 9.7-inch tablet and 265g for the 8-inch version. It removes the excess weight of its Samsung tablet predecessors and was also considerably thinner at the time of the release than the entire iPad line from Apple. The 9.7-inch tablet measures 237x169x5.6mm and 8-inch tablet measures 199x135x5.6mm.

Galaxy Tab S2 has a soft-touch plastic cover rather than an aluminium shell. The edges are outlined with metal. However, the device is made up of plastic and not of metal still it feels very much smooth and grippy.

There are two small grippy buttons mounted into the back, but they are intended to clip a cover on the tablet and are not released to pop off the back. On the frame, there's a microSD card slot to expand the storage up to 128GB. There are power and volume buttons on the sides. There are one headphone jack, stereo speakers and an off-centre micro USB port at the bottom. The tab also has a fingerprint sensing home button and two capacitive buttons. Galaxy Tab S2 is available in Black, White and Gold colours.

Display

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 features a bright, vividly coloured Super AMOLED screen and a resolution of 2,048 x 1,536 that matches the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 4. That's great but not Samsung's best. The previous Galaxy Tab S slates had a 2.560 x 1.600 resolution, with even more pixels per inch. In that respect, the Tab S2 is theoretically a step-down, even though at first glance you can not recognize it. While S1 has a small, movie-friendly aspect ratio of 16:9, the new Tab S2 is wider, with an aspect ratio of 4:3 letter-sized paper. It's best suited for surfing the web and related activities.

Performance

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 demonstrated improvement in performance over the tablets that arrived before but trail the iPad Air 2 in its benchmarks. To start with, running Android 5.0.2 averaged its Geekbench 3 scores to a respectable 4.077. At the core of the tablet, the duo is the Exynos 7 5433 octa-core system-on-a-chip from Samsung which combines another 1.9GHz quad-core processor with a 1.3GHz quad-core processor.

Clock speeds are very much the same as the Galaxy Tab S of the preceding version and do not exceed the performance standards of their respective Galaxy S6 and Note 5 devices, but the ARM-based cores have been upgraded. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 features a new GPU Mali T760MP6. The LPDDR3 RAM remains 3 GB, compared to the Note 5 has 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM.

Internal Storage

Samsung has made a fair trade-off with the internal storage specifications. When the tab was launched, all the Apple devices began with 16 GB while Samsung's mobile phones and tablets began with 32GB. There's an ample space to store the large files, photos, videos and apps locally. When it comes to the performance under pressure, the Galaxy Tab S2's processor handles it well.

Battery Life

The Galaxy Tab S2 has great battery life. You can run a 90 minutes HD video at full brightness and the battery will go down to 84% from 100%. Beating the Galaxy Tab S2 was indeed the Samsung tablet that arrived before the first one, the Galaxy Tab S1 – the specific slate saw a decline to 87% for the same 90 minutes of HD video from a complete charge. There's no wireless charging option available. It takes up to 4 hours to fully charge the device.

Camera

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 has 2 cameras. The front camera is 2.1 megapixels and the back camera is 8 megapixels.  The front camera is to cover selfies and video conferencing. However, the photo quality is not really good and should be avoided. The 8 MP back camera is good if there's enough light. Don't expect a 4K video option. The rear camera can only shoot 144p video at 30 frames per second.