High-end Android tablets are a bit of a rarity in the market. Apple has had success with its iPad Pro, aimed firmly at the creative community, while most Android tablets are a bit more pedestrian, offering relatively basic functionality at a good price. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+ is therefore a bit of a rarity; it's likely the highest-end Android tablet on the market and offers a mix of a very responsive tablet for drawing and the option of using it more like a desktop.
I've used it a lot over the past few weeks, and found a lot I liked, but also a number of things that made me question whether this was really a machine for me.
The Tab S7+ is large for a tablet, with a 12.4-inch, 2,800-by-1,752 pixel display, and measures 11.25 by 7.3 by 0.2 inches (HWD) and weighs 1.3 pounds. That's big, though not quite as big as the 12.9-inch iPad Pro (which is slightly bigger and weighs 1.4 pounds). Samsung also makes an 11-inch, 2,560-by-1,600 pixel Tab S7, which competes with the 11-inch iPad Pro or the new iPad Air.
The display is nice with a 120Hz panel that makes scrolling very smooth. You can set it to 60Hz for better battery life, but I doubt most people will do this. The faster display not only makes scrolling faster, it decreases the latency when using the included stylus. You can also choose between Vivid and Natural colors and set the white balance. The Vivid mode makes colors pop, and it's great for looking at web pages and the like. The Natural mode makes more sense when you're editing photos or working with videos.
The Tab S7+'s S Pen uses Bluetooth and is 5.8 inches long and weighs about 8 grams. It fits well in my hand and you can attach it to the back of the tablet for charging. It felt good in my hand, and drawing on the tablet was a pleasure, and again, the improved screen really helps. It magnetically connects to a strip on the back of the tablet below the camera for charging.
Of the included applications, the place where the S Pen comes in most handy is a revised version of Samsung Notes, which mirrors similar additions on the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. With Notes, you can not only write or draw, but also convert handwriting to text, sync audio to your written notes, and now import a PDF file for annotation, which I found to be very nice. You can also sync notes between the Tabs S7+ and the Note; and the Tab S7+ has a new folder system, which made it easier to file and to find your notes.
The S Pen also is handy for just general use, for things like capturing part of a screen; translating words on a page; controlling presentations with PowerPoint; or for advancing or pausing music or movies. There are several new S Pen gestures to select items and move home and back. These are supposed to make some of this a little easier, but in general, I found myself just tapping the screen to bring up a menu for a lot of this instead of trying to flick my wrist in a particular way.
The S7+ includes trial versions of a few applications that show off the S-Pen. These include Clip Studio Paint, a sketching program; Noteshelf, another note taking application; and Canva, a popular tool for creating graphics for social media. I particularly liked using Canva, with the pen—it made editing graphics for social media work very well.
Adobe offers a variety of applications for both the iPad and Android, and the Android versions worked well on the S7+. I was especially happy with Adobe Sketch—I'm no artist, but I thought it worked particularly well with the S Pen. In general, all the pen applications I tried worked well.
Another way you can use the Tab S7+ is as the equivalent of a laptop computer, by using an optional keyboard ($229.99) which comes in two parts: a keyboard that snaps in front, and a back that acts both as a cover and as a place to hold the S Pen when it isn't in use (and recharges the pen as it rests there). This seemed like a nice arrangement, and one that worked well for me.
The keyboard has a good range of function keys and a serviceable trackpad. Like most tablet keyboard covers, the keys don't have much travel, but in quick usage, it was just fine. When the keyboard is plugged in, and you use the tablet in horizontal mode, it automatically gives you Samsung's Dex environment, which is a more desktop-like experience. If you want, you can plug it into a monitor through the USB-C port, although when you do this the monitor on the tablet itself shuts off. Samsung says a future update will support multiple screens. In addition, there's a new wireless feature that lets you stream your applications to a monitor that supports the Miracast standard, with Samsung pointing to its TVs from 2019 onward. Unfortunately, I didn't have such a TV to test this with.
DeX now has multi-window support, so you can see up to three applications on screen at the same time, although in practice on a 12.4-inch screen, I mostly used full-screen applications, and only occasionally used two applications at once. If indeed a future version supports a second display, I expect this will be much more useful.
In general, mobile applications are not as full-featured as their Windows and Mac equivalents, but I found the Android version of the Microsoft Office app worked pretty well. It was good for basic writing in Word or editing or creation in PowerPoint, though lacking some of the more advanced features such as Excel macros. The Android version of Outlook worked very well on a larger screen. Of course, any application that runs in a browser works well. The Tab S7+ includes both Samsung Internet and Google Chrome browsers.
It's not really a full laptop, but it's close. The keyboard case for the S7+ weighs 1.11 pounds, so combined with the S7+ itself, the total carry weight is 2.4 pounds, about what a Microsoft Surface Pro 7 weighs with its keyboard. (At 1.7 pounds, the Surface Pro is a bit heavier, but its keyboard is lighter since it doesn't include a back cover.)
As a tablet, one downside for all Android tablets is that most Android apps look like they were really designed for phones, not tablets. For instance, neither the New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal applications were designed for offline reading, a feature they offer on their iPad versions. But the applications did use the full screen, and everything I tried worked well.
Other features include moving the front-facing camera so it now appears in the top center above the keyboard, when it is attached, so you can better use it with a video conferencing application. This worked well. It also offers 45-watt fast charging, although the box only includes a 15-watt charger; and like recent Galaxy phones, includes a fingerprint reader under the screen as well as somewhat less secure face recognition.
The device is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ processor, just like the Galaxy Note 20, and the version I tested came with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage (plus a microSD slot if you want to add up to an additional 1TB). It always seemed very responsive. Samsung also offers a 6GB/128GB configuration. It has a 10,090 mAh battery, enough so that I found I could get through several days between charging with moderate use.
The rear of the device includes both a 13-megapixel primary camera and a 5 megapixel ultra-wide one. Although I don't really find myself using rear-facing cameras much on tablets, these worked well. There's an 8-megapixel front-facing camera and that worked quite well in applications such as Zoom.
The Tab S7+ costs $849.00 for the Wi-Fi version I tried and $1,049.00 for the forthcoming 5G version, not including the keyboard. For the same money, you could get a nice Windows 2-in-1, although Windows applications designed for tablet operation remain slim pickings.
The Galaxy Tab S7+ is the nicest Android tablet I've seen. However, it's on the expensive side for a tablet (only the larger iPad Pro is more) so this is really aimed at someone who will really take advantage of the great display and pen—say someone who spends a lot of time creating graphics or reviewing architectural plans. You could use it as a productivity machine, flipping between tablet and the DeX laptop modes, but it's still not what most people would consider a "real laptop." It's a great tablet, but it probably will find a limited audience.
Here are PCMag's Hands-On with the Galaxy Tab S7+ and its full review of the smaller Galaxy Tab S7.
Further Reading
The Link LonkNovember 06, 2020 at 09:34PM
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Living with a Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+ - PCMag
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