Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra: A Monster Tablet!

[Music] hey what's up mkbhd here and this this is the best android tablet out right now and it looks like it's from the future or something like if you show this to someone 15 years ago they would think it's impossible i guess it's impossibly thin 1.6 pound powerful medium machine with speakers that somehow fill a room a massive battery and an entire desktop computer interface inside i mean it's so thin you'd swear you could just snap it in half super easily which i'm not going to try it but som

eone keep this thing away from zach so this is the galaxy tab s8 ultra so yes there is a galaxy tab s8 and a tab s8 plus both of them far more reasonable far less expensive and most importantly smaller but you know what there's a real interest in huge tablets like this mega tablets because there is an actual benefit to tablets that are this big i would know because i've been using this one and the benefits of this massive nearly 15 inch screen are for media watching gaming multitasking and of co

urse the huge canvas for the stylist they're all very real there are also some real drawbacks though so if you are one of the many people who have been tweeting at me asking about this thing wondering if it's a legit ipad pro alternative well this is everything you need to know so really the number one standout piece of this tablet is the top-notch display sorry i had to we'll get there but the screen is just awesome and there's a bunch of things that combine to make it probably the most impress

ive i've ever seen in a tablet number one is just of course the sheer size of it 14.6 inches diagonally which definitely suits the ultra name it's got these thin symmetrical bezels all the way around aside from the dual cameras now we're working with a 16 by 10 aspect ratio at 2960 by 1848 resolution which sounds really high in person it's not the sharpest thing i've ever seen just because it's so huge so it checks out to about 240 ppi and if you get close enough with this pixel arrangement you

can actually start to see the soft edges of some text and icons and things like that but it's definitely not a problem at all for normal viewing distances and then it's oled so i think this is the largest oled touchscreen i've ever used we all know about the mini led displays and some laptops and even the ipad pro with their tons of local dimming zones but this is a full size basically laptop size screen where every individual pixel lights itself so you're getting those pitch black inky blacks y

ou're getting an incredible contrast ratio and watching videos that take advantage of it are very impressive there's also an optical fingerprint reader underneath the display on the right hand side the only thing really that's not world class about this display honestly is that it's not ltpo it's just 120 hertz all the time and the max brightness it maxes out at 380 nits which is actually totally reasonable inside but it's not actually doing much if you go out in the sun if you're the type of pe

rson to use a tablet in your window so that's just something to keep in mind just for context the m1 ipad pro gets up to 600 nits and the s22 ultra the phone i just reviewed gets up to 1750 nits but you know that's a phone you use outside so let's talk about the notch then right so huge display up at the top in the middle there's this little tiny notch with two cameras in it that's two 12 megapixel 4k webcams one regular and one ultra wide they're both too big to fit in the thin bezels that they

fitted all the way around the tablet so it punches in a little bit they put this little notch up here it's tiny it's way smaller than the iphone's notch and in a display that's way bigger honestly it doesn't bother me at all you use the screen for three seconds and it disappears to your eye and you forget about it now is there a hilarious irony that this is the same company that made these commercials making fun of the notch every chance they got and now they're the first to put a notch on thei

r tablet yeah absolutely that's really funny but i don't actually mind it here what i will say is they did put them in the right place which is on the horizontal long side of the bezel because this is a tablet that's basically meant to be used horizontally all the time you know an ipad maybe you can argue sometimes you use it in portrait like a notebook and a clipboard sometimes in landscape this one feels pretty ridiculous holding it vertical and i think samsung knows it's going to be horizonta

l a lot with this aspect ratio and so they put the webcam on the top and the fingerprint reader over there on the side is easily reachable with your thumb it's great and then dave2d said something really interesting really smart in his video which is we don't actually usually hold these huge tablets while we're using them like sometimes you do sure maybe you're leaning back on the couch holding it up watching a video maybe typing something out real quick but actually most of the time we're using

a tablet we're sitting it down somewhere it's like propped up or it's in a folio case i don't think my ipad pro has left its folio case in like a year just because i prop it up all the time and so there is a book cover case available for the s8 ultra but it costs 350 dollars so there's your kickstand get to prop it up watch stuff but this plus the keyboard three hundred and fifty dollars so i've been using this total at least fourteen hundred fifty dollar package for about a week and it's great

honestly it's great the performance and animations have been consistent it's amazing for media consumption youtube netflix games that is not a surprise what's interesting is the snapdragon 8gen one in here it turns out it's actually underclocked a little bit this actually benchmarks lower than phones running the same chip but i'm telling you that's because a phone is eight millimeters thick and it can actually fit a new cooling solution for this hot new chip this tablet is too thin and can't fi

t that so this tablet will get a little bit warm and under clock a little bit so then the battery life is okay so it has it has a surprisingly large 11 200 milliamp hour battery in here despite being so thin but it also has a huge screen so evens out i was getting about eight hours of screen on time on a heavy day which is a bit more than a really good phone but you definitely do still have to charge it at the end of a heavy day if you use it a lot but if you use it occasionally you know the sta

ndby time is excellent it can last you several days i just have a feeling if you're spending this much on a tablet convertible thing you're going to want to actually get a lot of use out of it so we're probably already fully entrenched in the what is a computer conversation so this computer is very much still a large android tablet so that means it has all the pros and cons of every other android tablet meaning there's still no instagram app that scales properly my to-do list app tick tick doesn

't really take advantage of the whole screen soundcloud doesn't work there's lots of apps that don't look amazing on this huge screen because that's the way it is with android tablets and that's on the developers yes but that's a pretty consistent android tablet thing but you know what there's one way you could say is maybe a way around it and that is samsung's dex so dex is samsung's desktop ui that's built into a lot of their devices so if you were to plug into a keyboard and a monitor or in t

his case the book cover keyboard and hit the shortcut key it switches you into dex mode which kind of feels like a chromebook so you've got a dock at the bottom that actually matches what you had in tablet mode plus a windowed ui now that lets you multitask and move things around you can do file management and treat it a lot more like a real computer or at least the chromebook so the trackpad is decent it's just overall a next level of versatility that makes this thing way more useful if you are

trying to turn it into your primary computer you can also change the opacity of windows for some reason it's great it's definitely not perfect though there's plenty of apps that don't play well with the scaling the whole system still has the same problem too that the ipad has which is it's very top-heavy all of the weight is in the tablet and it's genuinely difficult to use it on your lap like a normal laptop but i still say this this is clearly better than the ipad's attempt at being a compute

r it does a lot of things better it does the floating window support way better than the ipad ever has it has a micro sd card slot which the ipad has never had and it also has the cameras horizontally in the right place and in much better quality than the ipad so for video calls or recording videos with the front facing cameras these cameras are actually really good the ultra wide camera even has auto framing although it's not nearly as responsive or smooth as the ipad pro and it cuts down to 10

80p in this mode but at least it looks like you're looking at the person you're talking to on a zoom call and then last but not least drawing stuff now i'm not even going to pretend to be an artist who can take advantage of the differences between this and the apple pencil versus others but here are some things that i definitely did notice so number one this pen still charges on the back of the tablet here in only this specific orientation which is kind of easy to scrape off and and get knocked

off if you move around too much which is unfortunate but what's funny is they did make a case this book cover case and you can see it has a little indentation here so if you slap it on the back it actually holds the pen in place if you align everything just right so it's charging and can be accessed like that cool the other thing is it actually does now attach magnetically to the top but it doesn't charge there so that's a good place to leave it temporarily i guess if you're going back and forth

between using it and not using it but yeah if it doesn't charge there don't forget about it at least you have the option then number two this pen is actually included with this tablet so you can mess around with it if you want to you're kind of encouraged to play around with it and try stuff the features pop up and just make themselves known whenever you pull the tablet off of the back of the thing but you know it's really good at just drawing and sketching and things like that the palm rejecti

on with these tiny bezels is good enough that i don't have to think about it and it has lightning quick basically real-time 2.8 millisecond response times that make it feel like real paper remote controlled air actions are still here samsung notes is as powerful as ever with the handwriting recognition and pen up is also included for you know more digital drawing type stuff and it's good you know i'll defer to some actual digital artists to make the call on whether it's actually better than othe

r options out there in their reviews but i like this overall package and then bonus points the tab s8 ultra has the second best speakers i've ever heard in the tablet right behind the larger ipad pro but it's got all this space so it's got this huge quad speaker setup dolby atmos support very loud not quite as full and bassy as the ipad pro but easily fills a room plenty for watching movies and videos and things like that really good speaker setup so if it sounds like i like this tablet a lot be

cause i do i really like this i think this is the best android tablet out right now um and it's even gonna be getting better they said they're gonna add they're they're working on adding lumafusion to the galaxy store which is that video editing app on tablets which could make it even more powerful so then do i recommend it well you gotta know what you want and if you were looking for a tablet that actually fits the ultra name this is the first one that actually does it the huge screen is kind o

f unrivaled than any other tablet and then it's so capable with decks and with all this other stuff they've built in that it's actually genuinely one of the most versatile computers you can get so that's been it thanks for watching catch you guys the next one peace [Music]