Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.4” 2020 Review By Lon.TV

Hey everybody gets Lawn side, then we've got a new tablet to take a look at today from Samsung. This is the Tab A 8.4. This is kind of a budget offering at around 279 with an LTE radio built in it also, of course, works on Wi-Fi. It's got an 8.4 inch display, and this is different from the 8-inch tablet they came out with last year. We're going to take a look and see how this performs in just a second, but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that I paid for this with my own funds. After a bunch of you wrote in to tell me to get one all the opinions are about.

— here are my own. Nobody is paying for this review, nor is anyone reviewing or approving what you're about to see before it was uploaded. So, let's get into it now and see what this tablet is all about. So let's take a closer look now at the hardware, you've got an 8.4 inch display on this one. It's nice and bright, it's running at 1,900 by 1200, so essentially a full HD display.

So text and pictures look good I, like the aspect ratio here on the screen, which makes it easy to read text and other things so from the standpoint of just a basic browsing device, I think it's going to do pretty well for most people, it's got a Samsung Enos 700 CPU inside that has to 73 cores and 6a 53 cores, and the result of that is that it's not very fast. It's kind of a low-end performing device here, nothing spectacular when you go beyond the basics. So, right now, as we're browsing the web's, you can see it's working fine, but when you get into games and other things that might text the hardware more like video editing and that sort of thing, you're going to really start feeling the sluggishness of that processor, this is not a performance device. By any stretch, it has three gigabytes of RAM and 32 gigabytes of storage. On the side here there is a tray for the SIM card because it supports LTE over the cellular networks along with a micro SD card.

So you can bring the internal storage from 32 gigs up to 512 gigabytes. So that's something that you can use for downloading movies and that sort of thing this one was a Verizon subsidized unit. So when you booted up, it's got the Verizon logo on it. Then Verizon dumps all of this junk we're on here. All of these apps at least most of them I did not install myself.

They just came on here already, so I'm guessing Samsung and Verizon get a cut for those apps to be installed. So you will spend some time cleaning up some junk where that's on the device. When you first get things going, it weighs about ten point: nine ounces, so it's pretty lightweight bill quality feels okay, it's not spectacular, but it's not cheap feeling either, so I think from the build standpoint, it'll fit nicely in the hand. I do believe there are some cases available for it as well. It has GPS built in which is something that you don't always get on a low-cost tablet.

Camera system on this is not spectacular. You've got a front-facing camera here that runs at five megapixels decent enough for videoconferencing and that sort of thing the rear camera is a real basic rear. Camera eight megapixels photo quality, as you can see, is okay, nothing great it'll shoot 1080p video at 30 frames per second, there doesn't appear to be much in the way of stabilization and, of course, the video quality isn't going to rival what you would get on a more expensive mobile device either battery life, and our testing is pretty good about 10 to 12 hours. If you keep the screen brightness at a reasonable level and don't tax the hardware too much so if you're gaming you'll get less than that, if you're doing web browsing and email I expect that's about what you would get on here, there isn't much for ports. You've got a speaker down here.

You have USB type-c. This is used for charging and data devices, but not video output. So there's nothing coming out of that port. Just going in on the top here, you've got a headphone jack, so you can plug in your typical headphones to it. It also, of course, supports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so you can connect up your Bluetooth headphones to it.

If you want to do that, it does have facial recognition built in, but it's completely optical. So when I look at the camera here, it will let me in, but it doesn't have some of the security features that we're seeing on more expensive devices for face recognition. In other words, it's not taking a 3d image of your face. It is strictly going off of an image recognition. I did try putting a photo in front of it that didn't trick it, but I'm sure it's possible, so you're not going to rely on this facial recognition to keep state secrets or something important like that.

You'll probably want to stick with a password, but the performance here, as you saw a minute ago with web browsing, isn't bad I'll, pull up YouTube here real quick and show you what that's looking like again, it's not terribly fast, so things just won't spring to life on you like they will on something more powerful. Another thing I noticed too, is that although video plays back fine and looks great on the display, the colors really do look nice on the screen. You will get these moments of latency as you're changing screen orientation, for example, you'll get a pause, the video will stop, and then it will catch up and respond to the movements. So just a lot of little things here that will make you feel like you're, not using something all that quick, another area where you might notice some sluggishness is on games. Let's take a look at Call of Duty and see how it performs with one of the top mobile games at the moment.

Alright. So here we are playing Call of Duty and, as you can see here, it's running pretty well on the device, but we are running at the lowest possible settings. So, of course, a more powerful phone or tablet would deliver better graphical fidelity, but most developers target high-end hardware like this, so you should have too many games that won't play, but you'll find that they do look a lot better on devices that have a little more horsepower under the hood and on the 3dmark slingshot benchmark test. We got a score of 942 that makes this a bit faster than the 8-inch Amazon tablet, but much slower than most of the iPads. You can get right now, including the low-end iPad, that costs the same as this one do we're seeing so much better performance out of even the lowest cost Apple device, and it's crazy that we're not seeing Android tablet makers push these devices a little further Apple's proven you can put high performance in a low-cost device and why we still see these Android devices kind of puttering along is really puzzling.

To be honest with you, it's kind of a disappointing thing to see absolutely zero performance growth on the Android side, especially at the low-end, but we keep hoping that maybe there's a tablet out there that will. Finally, get us some performance that we've been lacking. Unfortunately, this one is not it now fairness. This device does have the LTE radio built-in for the price you have to pay extra for that on the iPad side, but nonetheless, I still think we should be seeing better performance than what we're getting here. Another little gripe I have with this particular device, is that it's not very good at ignoring unintentional movements on screen.

So, as you can see, the bezels are very thin on the tablet, which looked nice, but if your thumb is kind of resting there, it thinks you mean to touch the screen, and you're getting things like text, selections and apps launching and other things when you're just trying to hold on to the tablet and never mind trying to scroll here while you're holding it like this. It just doesn't work so, hopefully, future firmware updates will rectify this, because you really have to kind of pinch. The tablet on the side to prevent those inadvertent screen touches from registering and that's something that hopefully they can work out on future software updates and speaking of software. This is only running Android 9, which surprised me I even ran the update when it arrived to make sure that it was not going to go to ten. So right now it's on nine.

Hopefully they updated I'm, not sure what their track record typically is with these tablets, but there you go so overall. This is not a bad tablet. It's not a great one! Either it's just kind of in the middle. Its basic transportation I, often see my local Verizon store, giving these things away for next to nothing if you lock into a long contract. So my guess is: is that the marching orders from the carriers are make us something decent and cheap, and that means you get something that looks ok and feels ok, but doesn't perform all that well and that's what we got here.

So if you were disappointed with the 8-inch tablet in the past, you will continue to have those feelings about this one now. But if you want something inexpensive that can get on the LTE network by itself, maybe it's worth taking a look at, but right now, I think if you are spending less than $300 on a tablet. The only real choice out there is an iPad, because you get so much better performance out of that new 10.2 inch. iPad, then you're, seeing here on the Android side and I, think it's about time for Android manufacturers to step up their game a bit. That's going to do it for now until next time this is Loan Simon.

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Source : Lon.TV