This means the device can be used by everybody in the family, with each person getting their own files, apps, wallpaper, etc.
The other benefit of this is that the Tab S can easily recognize various users by their fingerprints. The home button hides a fingerprint reader of the same type as used on the Samsung Galaxy S5, for locking and unlocking the tablet without a password. Usually use on-screen buttons are better for flexibility, but this model does have a good reason for going this way. The Galaxy Tab S 10.5 uses a physical home button, placed in a landscape orientation. (And on a thankful side note, Sprint has finally joined the rest of the world and adopted SIM cards.)Īlong the top edge, just above the camera, you’ll find a tiny infrared port for Samsung’s increasingly ubiquitous universal remote control feature. The only other thing on the left side is the headphone jack, but the righthand side contains the microSD card slot and micro-USB connector, as well as the slot for the SIM card on LTE models. Stereo speakers occupy the “upper” edges of the device. The iPad Air can’t compete, and everything else not made by Samsung is so far in in third that they would need binoculars. The bottom line is this: The Tab S 10.5 has the best tablet screen that money can buy. The highest brightness feels like you could get a tan from it.Īlthough it does sport a 10.5-inch screen, larger than most other comparable tablets, the difference between that and a 10.1- or 9.7-inch screen isn’t terribly noticeable. The lowest end is so dim that it’s not very bright even in a pitch black room, making it very comfortable for reading at night. The brightness, for example, has an enormous range of adjustment.
It performs impressively in more mundane ways, too. And that’s really just a number to toss around, since the black pixels don’t need to emit any light at all how do you measure infinity? A good example of this can be seen when using the device in a dark room it’s impossible to distinguish between black areas of the screen and the device’s bezel. The OLED display in the Tab S 10.5 is rated at 100,000 to 1. A good conventional LCD will manage maybe 1000:1. A lot of this comes down to the contrast ratio: how much brighter white is than black. Colors are more vibrant, images seem crisper, and everything pops. If you’ve never seen one, it’s really hard to overstate how gorgeous an AMOLED screen is.