BARCELONA—The S Pen is back, and it's better than ever.
After Samsung sunk its self-destructing Note 7, the company's pen technology went on hiatus. Here at Mobile World Congress, you can now get your improved S Pen three ways: with the 10-inch, Android-powered Galaxy Tab S3, or with two Windows-powered Galaxy Book tablets, one of which looks a little lame and one of which looks pretty great, especially for creative types.
Android tablets aren't exactly the most exciting part of the consumer electronics market today. Samsung didn't even bother to update its flagship Galaxy Tab S line last year. But Samsung marketing manager Hassan Anjum says the company's research shows that "tablets are actually on top of mind for purchase intent from a consumer electronics perspective."
The Galaxy Tab S3 steps up entertainment options and also makes a nod—but not too much of a nod—to productivity. Yes, there's a keyboard case, but I'm of the opinion that the Android dog just won't hunt for full-fledged office work, especially with Windows tablets at the same price points. For easy entertainment and creativity, on the other hand, Android does well; my daughter uses a Galaxy Tab S2 right now for movies and Marvel Unlimited, for instance.
Samsung amped up the speakers to quad speakers that rotate with the tablet, playing near-field sounds out of two and far-field sounds out of the other two to get a sense of space. I could tell they were loud. The S Pen, meanwhile, makes the Tab S3 a quick electronic note-taking and sketching tool. It has an eraser button, and it now has a rubber tip, which gives a much better feel on the screen than the previous plastic pen did.
The Tab S3 has a 9.7-inch, HDR-compatible, 2,048-by-1,536 Super AMOLED screen. That's the same resolution as the S2, but the HDR feature is new. As on other HDR screens, it gives much richer colors with HDR content; the tablet supports the HDR10 codec, which is the most basic and common form of HDR. Expect Netflix and Amazon Video content to really pop.
The tablet measures 9.35 by 6.65 by 0.23 inches. That's ever so slightly slimmer than the iPad Air 2, although it's slightly thicker than the Galaxy Tab S2, which was 5.6 inches thick; I expect that the extra bit is the digitizer for the S Pen.
The device feels a little thicker than the S2 but not heavier. Some of that is the glass back, which makes me nervous; why not soft-touch? Anjum said that as tablets tend to live in your living room, they aren't dropped all that often. All the same, our home iPad has a big crack in it.
"We wanted a finish that somebody pulls out in a café or public place that they're really proud of," he said.
The Tab S3 runs Android 7.0 on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor with 4GB of RAM. The tablet was designed too early for a newer processor, Anjum said. There's 32GB of storage plus a MicroSD card slot. Anjum said the tablet doesn't need more built-in storage because of the MicroSD, but also couldn't confirm if it supports adoptable storage.
The two cameras are 13-megapixel and 5-megapixel, big steps up from the Galaxy Tab S2's 8MP and 2MP shooters.
Network-wise, the tablet has 802.11ac Wi-Fi, but oddly only category 6 LTE when the Snapdragon 820 supports Category 9. Anjum said that might be a typo on the spec sheet. We're double checking.
We Prefer a Big Book
The S Pen reappears on Samsung's two new Windows-powered Galaxy Books, the successors to last year's Galaxy TabPro S. Here, it gets an extra feature: tilt sensitivity, which is currently only compatible with Photoshop but which will spread across more applications.
Both Books come with keyboard covers that are quite like the Surface Type Cover, magnetic keyboards which fold back to prop the tablet up in laptop mode. The 12-inch one isn't that usable when it's on your lap, because the weight of the tablet causes the whole thing to tilt backwards sometimes. But typing on a table or hard surface is excellent, and the keys have plenty of throw at 1.5mm. There's a little loop on the side of the cover to keep your S Pen.
The two Books have wildly different specs. The one you want is the 12-incher. There, you get an Intel Kaby Lake Core i5 at 3.1GHz, a 12-inch 2,160-by-1,440 AMOLED display, 13MP and 5MP cameras, 4GB of RAM, 128 or 256GB SSDs plus a MicroSD card slot, and two USB Type-C (3.1, not Thunderbolt) ports. Samsung had a demo of the tablet driving two USB-C 4K monitors as well as itself, and powering itself through one of the monitors, which was pretty impressive.
The tablet isn't feather-light, at 26.6 ounces, but it's thin, at 0.3 inches. And honestly, I didn't feel punched in the face by color with this screen the way I originally was with the Tab Pro S. But the S Pen functionality was great, especially for people who sketch. The rubber tip and tilt sensitivity gave it a tighter tactile feel in Photoshop than the pen on my Surface Book, for instance.
The 12-incher is much superior to the 10-inch model. The smaller Book has a more cramped keyboard, only one USB-C port, a 1080p TFT LCD screen, and a 2.6GHz Intel Core m3 processor. It's lighter, at 23 ounces, but thicker at 0.35 inches. It only gets 64GB or 128GB of storage, plus a MicroSD card, and one 5MP camera. Samsung didn't even want to demo it for me in depth, preferring to show me the Windows functions on the 12-inch unit. That all looks like a low-cost tablet, but Samsung hasn't been able to deliver a low-cost Windows tablet that could compete with Acer and Asus at the same price points yet.
For all these tablets, price is still a big question here. When we looked at the TabPro S, our biggest issue was that it was overpriced for its specs, and if the Galaxy Book 12 is more expensive than the Microsoft Surface, it'll be hard for buyers to keep the S Pen and AMOLED screen in mind.
Launch dates were also not revealed. The Galaxy S8, meanwhile, has been most recently rumored to launch on March 29 with a sale date in mid-April.