It has been a while since we saw an interesting Android tablet and we can attribute this to the ever increasing screens sizes on phones. Apple has been killing it in the tablet game with their iPads and it has been high time since we saw an Android alternative to the iPad.
Today, Samsung has announced their new tablet, the Galaxy Tab S5e and it looks quite appealing.
Design wise, it has a flat back with the Samsung and AKG logos at the bottom and the front houses the the 10.5 inch OLED screen with an even bezel all round. Apparently the screen has a 81.8% screen-to-body ratio which looks good and is comparable to what we have on the iPad Pro.
The OLED screen on the Galaxy Tab S5e has 2560 x 1600 pixels which gives it a 287 ppi, which is great for browsing and especially great for watching/streaming video. It has a 8MP selfie camera, a 13MP rear camera which seem pretty basic for the odd photo taking and video shooting.
Samsung has two models where one has 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage while the more ‘premium’ one has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. Both can be expanded by another 512GB using microSD cards. The whole thing is pretty light too at 400g.
Samsung has also decided to do something special with the audio. The Galaxy Tab 5e has 4 speakers which are tuned by their subsidiary AKG and feature Dolby Atmos. This positions it to being an excellent media consumption tool like the iPad Pros (they have 4 speakers too).
Powering the whole thing is the Snapdragon 670, which is not the top chip by any standards, but it benchmarks pretty well. It will ship with Android Pie which is great out of the box. It also has a fingerprint scanner, which is handy.
The Galaxy Tab S5e will cost $399 for the 4GB/64GB Wi-Fi variant which sounds quite reasonable for the tech that you are getting. It will apparently launch in the second quarter of this year in various colours (gold, grey and black). The cellular versions will follow the Wi-Fi only models and expect to pay more for them.
It is kinda nice that Samsung is satisfying a market for those people that don’t want iPads and instead want a solid Android tablet. This looks to be the one to do that
