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High-end Android tablets are a bit rare on the market. Apple has had success with its iPad Pro, firmly targeting the creative community, while most Android tablets are a bit more pedestrian and offer relatively basic functionality at a good price. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 + is therefore a bit weird; It is likely to be the highest-end Android tablet on the market, offering a combination of a very responsive tablet for drawing and the option to use it more like a desktop computer.
I’ve used it a lot over the last few weeks and found a lot of things that I liked, but also a number of things that made me wonder if it really was a machine for me.
The Tab S7 + is big for a tablet, with a 12.4-inch, 2,800-by-1,752-pixel display, measuring 11.25 by 7.3 by 0.2 inches (HWD), and weighing 1.3 pounds. That’s big, although not quite as big as the 12.9-inch iPad Pro (which is slightly larger and weighs 1.4 pounds). Samsung also makes an 11-inch, 2,560-by-1,600-pixel Tab S7, which competes with the 11-inch iPad Pro or the new iPad Air.
The screen is nice with a 120Hz panel that makes scrolling very smooth. You can set it to 60Hz for better battery life, but I doubt most people will. The faster screen not only makes scrolling faster, it also reduces latency when using the included stylus. You can also choose between vivid and natural colors and set the white balance. Vivid mode makes colors pop and is great for viewing web pages and the like. Natural mode makes the most sense when editing photos or working with videos.
The S Pen in the Tab S7 + uses Bluetooth, is 5.8 inches long and weighs about 8 grams. It fits well in my hand and you can place it on the back of the tablet for charging. It felt good in my hand and drawing on the tablet was a pleasure, and again, the improved screen really helps. Magnetically attaches to a strip on the back of the tablet under the camera for charging.
Of the included apps, the place where the S Pen is most useful is a revised version of Samsung Notes, reflecting similar additions on the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. With Notes, you can not only write or draw, but also convert your handwriting to text, sync the audio with your written notes, and now import a PDF file for annotation, which I found very nice. You can also sync notes between Tabs S7 + and Note; and the Tab S7 + has a new folder system, making it easy to file and find notes.
The S Pen is also useful for general use only, for things like capturing part of a screen; translate words on a page; control presentations with PowerPoint; or to advance or pause music or movies. There are several new S Pen gestures for selecting items and moving home and vice versa. These are supposed to make some of this a little easier, but overall, I found myself tapping the screen to open a menu for a lot of this rather than trying to move my wrist in a particular way.
The S7 + includes trial versions of some applications that show the S-Pen. These include Clip Studio Paint, a drawing program; Noteshelf, another note-taking application; and Canva, a popular social media graphics tool. I especially liked using Canva, with the pen; made social media graphics editing work great.
Adobe offers a variety of apps for both iPad and Android, and the Android versions worked well on the S7 +. I was especially happy with Adobe Sketch; I’m not an artist, but I thought it worked particularly well with the S Pen. In general, all the pen apps I tried worked fine.
Another way you can use the Tab S7 + is as the equivalent of a laptop, using an optional keyboard ($ 229.99) that comes in two parts: a keyboard that snaps into the front and a back that acts as a cover and as a cover. place to hold the S Pen when not in use (and recharge the pen while it rests there). It seemed like a nice arrangement and it worked well for me.
The keyboard has a nice array of function keys and a useful trackpad. Like most tablet keyboard covers, the keys don’t have a lot of travel, but in quick use it was fine. When the keyboard is plugged in and you use the tablet in landscape mode, it automatically brings you Samsung’s Dex environment, which is a more desktop-like experience. If you want, you can connect it to a monitor via the USB-C port, although when you do, the tablet monitor turns off. Samsung says that a future update will support multiple displays. Additionally, there’s a new wireless feature that lets you stream your apps to a monitor that supports the Miracast standard, with Samsung targeting its TVs from 2019 onwards. Unfortunately, I didn’t have such a TV to test this.
DeX now has multi-window support so you can see up to three apps on the screen at the same time, although in practice on a 12.4-inch screen, I used mostly full-screen apps and only occasionally used two apps at the same time. time. If indeed a future version supports a second screen, I hope this will be much more useful.
In general, mobile apps aren’t as comprehensive as their Windows and Mac equivalents, but I found the Android version of the Microsoft Office app to work quite well. It was good for basic writing in Word or editing or authoring in PowerPoint, although it lacked some of the more advanced features, such as macros in Excel. The Android version of Outlook worked great on a larger screen. Of course, any application that runs in a browser works fine. The Tab S7 + includes the Samsung Internet and Google Chrome browsers.
It’s not really a complete laptop, but it’s close. The keyboard case for the S7 + weighs 1.11 pounds, so combined with the S7 + itself, the total carrying weight is 2.4 pounds, about what a Microsoft Surface Pro 7 weighs with its keyboard. (At 1.7 pounds, the Surface Pro is slightly heavier, but its keyboard is lighter since it doesn’t include a back cover.)
As a tablet, one downside to all Android tablets is that most Android apps seem really designed for phones, not tablets. For example, neither the New York Times neither him Wall street journal The applications were designed for offline reading, a feature they offer in their iPad versions. But the apps used full screen and everything I tried worked fine.
Other features include moving the front camera so that it now appears in the top center above the keyboard, when connected, so you can better use it with a video conferencing app. This worked fine. It also offers 45-watt fast charging, though the box only includes a 15-watt charger; And like recent Galaxy phones, it includes an under-display fingerprint reader, as well as somewhat less secure facial recognition.
The device is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ processor, just like the Galaxy Note 20, and the version I tested came with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage (plus a microSD slot if you want to add up to an additional 1TB). He always seemed very receptive. Samsung also offers a 6GB / 128GB configuration. It has a 10,090 mAh battery, enough that I found that I could go several days between charges with moderate use.
The rear of the device includes a 13-megapixel main camera and a 5-megapixel ultra-wide camera. Although I don’t find myself using the rear cameras much on the tablets, these worked well. There’s an 8-megapixel front camera that worked quite well in apps like Zoom.
The Tab S7 + costs $ 849.00 for the Wi-Fi version I tested and $ 1,049.00 for the next 5G version, not including the keyboard. For the same money, you can get a good Windows 2-in-1, although Windows apps designed for tablet operation are still a small selection.
The Galaxy Tab S7 + is the best Android tablet I have ever seen. It’s expensive for a tablet though (only the bigger iPad Pro is more), so it’s really aimed at someone who will really benefit from the big screen and stylus, let’s say someone who spends a lot of time creating graphics or reviewing blueprints. architectural. You can use it as a productivity machine, switching between DeX laptop and tablet modes, but it’s still not what most people would consider a “real laptop.” It’s a great tablet, but you will likely find a limited audience.
Here’s PCMag’s hands-on with the Galaxy Tab S7 + and their full review of the smaller Galaxy Tab S7.
