Samsung Galaxy TabPRO 10.1 review

There are three 10.1in Samsung tablets in the current range. At the bottom you have the £225 Tab 3, with its relatively low-resolution 1,280×800 screen and dual-core 1.6GHz processor. At the top is the £500-plus Galaxy Note 10.1, with its capacitive stylus for note-taking and drawing. Finally you have this, the Tab Pro 10.1 (irritatingly written as TabPRO offically), which shares the Note’s 2,560×1,600 screen and eight-core processor, but takes away the stylus and over £100 from the price.

The Tab Pro 10.1 looks almost identical to the Note, and keeps the love-it-or-loathe-it faux-leather rear. This is a little cheesy and divides opinion, but it certainly makes the tablet easy to grip and is preferable to shiny plastic. Most Android tablets dispensed with physical buttons a while ago, preferring to devote a section of the display to back, home and running applications, but Samsung has kept dedicated controls on the bezel. This leaves more screen space for your desktop, but means you can’t easily use the tablet upside down – but we don’t consider that much of a hardship.

GALAXY TAB PRO DISPLAY

The screen is the tablet’s standout feature, thanks to its massive 2,560×1,600 resolution. This is the highest pixel count of any tablet currently available, dwarfing even the current iPad’s 2,048×1,536 display. The iPad’s screen may be classed as Retina, so the human eye is not able to discern individual pixels, but even so text on the Tab Pro’s screen still looked slightly smoother than on Apple’s tablet. There’s also little to choose between them in terms of image quality. In our calibration tests, both tablets have similar contrast ratios, with the iPad coming in at 805:1 and the Tab Pro 812:1 – impressively deep for LCD rather than AMOLED screens.

The Tab Pro’s display is slightly brighter than the iPad Air’s, with a measured figure of 397.9cd/m2 compared to 374.68cd/m2, but the iPad has the edge for colour accuracy, displaying 96.8% of the sRGB colour gamut compared to 93.3% on the Tab Pro. Side by side, there’s little to choose between the two screens, but the iPad has very slightly purer whites.

GALAXY TAB PRO PERFORMANCE

The Galaxy Tab Pro has a Samsung Exynos 5 Octa processor, which uses ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture. This has four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 processors, and is designed to switch to the lower-power cores when performing less-intensive tasks such as audio or video playback. The tablet managed 10h 14m in our continuous video playback test, which is one of the better scores we’ve seen from a 10in Android tablet, but lags behind the 12h 24m we saw from the iPad Air.

We weren’t particularly impressed with the Tab Pro’s performance, however. Its 1.9GHz processor should be able to run Android smoothly, but we experienced plenty of lag. Animations were jerky when opening and closing applications, and there’s a slight delay between pressing a key on the onscreen keyboard and text appearing. There’s also a delay between swiping your finger on a web page and the page moving. The tablet’s performance compares poorly to the super-responsive iPad, and also to the Google Nexus 5, which feels far snappier than Samsung’s tablet despite its slower processor. We suspect that a combination of the high-res screen and Samsung’s software customisations is affecting the tablet’s performance.

The processor showed its muscle in our 3DMark benchmark, though, with a huge score of 9,523. Real Racing 3 ran perfectly with all detail turned up to maximum.

GALAXY TAB PRO SOFTWARE

That’s not to say Samsung’s custom software is entirely unwelcome. As well as being prettier than stock Android 4.4, it has some useful productivity features. Our favourite is the multitasking support. Swipe in from the right bezel and a pane appears with a selection of apps. You can then drag one app to one side of the screen, and another to the other side, and even adjust how much of the screen is taken up with each app. It’s useful for looking at a document or website side by side, or having a map open while you look at an email.

Samsung has also tweaked its My Magazine app to suit business users. As on the Samsung Galaxy S5, swiping left from the main home screen brings up a tiled magazine view which pulls information feeds from various news stories in categories such as News, Arts and Sport, but swipe left once more and you’ll see a dedicated Business screen. This is a digest of everything a busy working person needs, and has panels for news stories, your calendar, your inbox and the integrated Hancom Viewer office document app. It’s a useful screen to look at as soon as you pick up your tablet, or to leave open when the Tab Pro is sitting on your desk.

The Tab Pro also comes with a remote access utility to let you log into your PC. Once we’d logged into the service and installed the agent on our PC, we could view whatever content was on our PC’s screen and even perform some editing, after a fashion; we found we could enter information into Excel spreadsheets, but not Google Sheets, for example. More useful was the ability to remotely access the file system on your PC and copy files to the Tab Pro. However, from a productivity point of view, we found using SugarSync to synchronise our documents between our computer and the tablet’s storage and editing them using the tablet’s built-in apps was better.

CONCLUSION

On paper, the Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1 seems to be an excellent alternative to the expensive Galaxy Note; it has the same high-resolution display and processor, and if you don’t need the Note’s stylus you’ll appreciate the £100 discount. We love the high-quality screen, too, but were disappointed with the tablet’s performance; the operating system just feels too laggy to sit well on a premium tablet such as this, especially compared to the similarly-priced, far more responsive iPad Air. If you really want an Android tablet we’d recommend waiting for our full review of the new Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet before you make a decision.