Samsung Galaxy TabPRO 10.1 review

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.