De Galaxy Tab S7 has perhaps not immediately stood out under Samsung’s avalanche of new products announced last week Galaxy Unpacked event, but after you get the chance to really spend some time with a Galaxy Tab S7 + and use it a bit more, it soon becomes a staple for Samsung’s most enhanced new gadget, largely due to its incredible display .
Unlike the standard Tab S7, the Tab S7 + has a larger 12.4-inch screen that uses an AMOLED panel instead of an LCD, and the results are stunning. Not only does the Tab S7 +’s screen offer those rich, saturated colors and strong brightness you’d expect from a top-notch OLED display, for 2020 Samsung has also built up its specs to support a 120Hz refresh rate and significantly lower touch latency which stands at just 9ms, massively down from the 40ms latency on last year Tab S6. This puts the Galaxy Tab S7 + on par with Apple’s flagship 12.9-inch iPad Pro, except that the Tab S7 + produces even more vibrant colors and starts at $ 150 less ($ 850 vs. $ 1,000).
In a world where people are surrounded by screens, it’s easy to forget how important it can be to have that one spectacularly beautiful display. The screen of the Tab S7 + is not only what you see, it is also the main way you interface with the device interface (even on a hybrid device that can be paired with a keyboard), so if you allow me a car analogy, which means that the screen of the Tab S7 + is equal to both the window of a car, the steering wheel and even the tires. It’s almost everything that the processor or other gut is not like RAM and storage, and it’s an enormous reason why the Tab S7 + feels like such an important step up compared to Samsung’s two previous consoles.
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Those incredible colors just ask you to pick up the tablet, and do something, anything that makes pixels move and use that 120Hz refresh rate, because it’s so damn good. Even acting like scrolling through your Twitter feed is overrated because of how slippery it looks, despite how much good or bad play is actually being posted at the moment.
And if you pull out the stylus of the Tab S7 +, things get even better, because that upgraded refresh rate combined with lower input latency means notes and drawings are even more accurate while moving the S Pen across the screen even more looking liquid. At home, while testing the Tab S7 +, my wife even stopped following in her footsteps (something she rarely ever does, no matter how fun the tech is), because I tested Samsung’s Screen Writ feature, before I noticed that even my horrible chicken scratch looked so sharp and smooth that she thought it was part of the background, and not something I could produce. It was really just that the screen did its thing.
The display of the Tab S7 + is one of those features that you start looking for excuses to use. Honestly, after using it, it took Samsung a long time to create a screen like this, because as the world’s leading manufacturer of high quality mobile monitors, this is the kind of thing Samsung should use to lords over his completion. Sure as much as it can, because since Samsung’s Android tablet is the first of its kind with a 120Hz AMOLED screen, the Tab S7 + does not really have a comparable rival without looking at devices on other platforms such as the iPad Pro and Surface Pro 7.
Now I will admit that it is a disadvantage to have this good screen, which is something I most encountered when playing mobile games. The problem is that many Android games like Riot’s Teamfight Tactics are designed to run on significantly less powerful hardware, so to cater for a wide range of devices, Riot is failing to take advantage of lower reviews and optimizations to ensure that things run smoothly on machines with even lower performance. Normally, on a phone or something with a smaller screen, this is not something you will really notice, but on a screen with a resolution of 2736 x 1824 and image quality this well, you will soon start noticing where some textures and spelling effects are just not as good as they should be, or at least as good as on a desktop.
Fortunately, Samsung has a solution for that, because you can reconnect with Microsoft, use the Windows 10 Your Phone app, mirror your PC view on the Tab S7 to get the full desktop experience. Unfortunately, that functionality is not yet fully available, but it’s what I’m looking forward to testing for real as it is. The same goes for Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox Ultimate Game Pass streaming, which should make console-level games (and graphics) playable on the Tab S7, no matter where you are. And when it comes to productivity, that larger screen multitasking makes for a possible plan of operations, instead of always feeling somewhat limited like it did when I used Samsung’s previous 10-inch Tabs.
The Tab S7 also has a few quirks, such as the inability to right-click with Samsung’s Accessory keyboard, but only in tablet mode. If you want to right click, it seems like the only way to do that is to turn on DeX mode, which is a bit strange, and that’s why I put the Tab S7 + in DeX mode all the time.
But maybe the real critique of the Tab S7 + is one that has nothing to do with its build as its components, but instead with its platform. That many people keep saying that Android is just not built for productivity like Windows 10 or iPadOS is (especially to recent updates), and in some respects they are correct. It’s a problem that Google has kind of ignored for a long time and now needs to be addressed better. While DeX is still not perfect, it does fix many of these issues, while giving even longer-term users of Android a desktop-like OS that is easy to use without being completely unfamiliar.
Yet it is actually all about that screen. There’s really nothing different on any other tablet – Android or otherwise – and much of the strength of the Tab S7 + comes from Samsung’s ability to get the most out of this display. In many ways, paying $ 850 for a screen seems pretty surreal, and I can’t wait to test it out for real when the Tab S7 + finally goes on sale later this fall.
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