Galaxy Tab S6 Lite Honest Review - Watch BEFORE you Buy! By Max Tech

It’s not often that I tell people to simply not buy a new device that I’m reviewing. Companies typically improve their tech year to year or make something new that tries to stand out in the market but not this time. The Galaxy Tab S6 lite is Samsung’s latest tablet but when I started to use and test it I kept finding things about it that are worse than last year's model, I’ll go over every corner that was cut in a just a bit, but first I just want to say that I have two alternative tablets listed in the description that are much better buys, for both Android and iPadOS. The Tab S6 Lite’s biggest selling point is the price coming at just $350, so $50 less than last years S5e. With that $50 price drop it gained two features the S5e didn’t have and that is S-Pen support and a headphone jack. The biggest competitor to the S5e, Apples budget iPad has both of those so I can see why samsung added them.

Unfortunately in order to have those features and also meet a competitive price it ended up killing this device for me personally, and the one group of people that this would actually work well for should just buy last years S5e instead. Let’s start with the display. I loved the S5e’s sharp OLED display which was fantastic for watching video with its deep blacks and for reading with its 4 million pixels but now it's a dull TFT with 2.4 million pixels and the difference is definitely noticeable. Because of that change its also almost 30% thicker and 15% heavier. Now its still usable as a tablet, its just not as good.

On the sides we have dual speakers which are actually fairly loud and sound good but still not as good as the S5e’s quad speakers. Probably the most frustrating change is the removal of the keyboard dock connector. I love that we can attach keyboards to these newer tablets and use many of them for serious typing and the S5e worked fairly well for that so it makes no sense to me why Samsung would get rid of that. The only guess is they didn’t want to invest the money to make a new keyboard so now you’ll have to use a third party Bluetooth keyboard that won’t be as good. Now lets talk about that pen support that they gave us when they took away the keyboard.

One benefit is that the S-Pen is included in the box but it is super lightweight and kinda cheap feeling. When we draw on the screen there is a massive delay probably the worst I’ve experienced. It seems to be a mix of screen delay and the graphics not keeping up because the delay varies almost like frames are sometimes being dropped and this is just simple drawing not comlex projects with layers. Overall the pen experience is quite poor. Worse than the budget Surface Go 2 and much worse than the basic iPad that costs $329 but most of the time comes in well under that, links in the description.

Because of the lag and the fact that iOS has so many great apps with pen support if you’re thinking of buying an S6 lite I would go that route instead. Let me quickly cover cameras. Last year we had 13 megapixels on the rear and 8 on the front but a year later they got worse, 8 on the rear and 5 on the front. Hmm. On top of that, we no longer have the ultra fast fingerprint scanner on the side and now we’re back to the old days of punching in your pin or using basic facial unlock that's at times unreliable and can be fooled with pictures.

Now for the one true complaint I had with the S5e last year, the processor. We had the budget Snapdragon 670 which was quite slow and made the tablet sluggish so when I saw that Samsung got rid of it this year I was happy, well, until I tested it. Instead they used their own 8 core exynos 9611 but when I tested it I found that it is actually slower than the slow 670 and keep in mind it’s been a whole year so the biggest issue wasn’t improved. Graphics is slightly faster but not enough to make a difference and the worst part of all its less efficient so the battery life rating has gone down by 3 hours. The battery itself is the same but the included charger is now a 7.5 watt slow charger instead of the 18watt so it will take more than twice as long to charge and the battery will last 25% shorter. Yes I’m being very cricital of the tablet where many reviewers are being much nicer, almost too nice, and not even mentioning whats gone down in quality, and yes you can still buy and use this tablet and have a decent experience with simple apps and games, web browsing, and watching movies but that doesn’t mean you should.

Samsung went from an overall fantastic tablet that had a few shortcomings to one that is the complete opposite. It has a few things going for it but if you don’t need the poor pen experience and dont mind using a usb-c adapter or bluetooth earbuds just go buy the S5e instead, or if you can spend a bit more check out the really good standard Tab S6, I’ll leave links in the description and my review video right over there. Click up here to subscribe, This has been Max with Max tech and I’ll see you in the next video.

Source : Max Tech