Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 review: Good notepad, bad notebook By Engadget

While the rest of the industry may have given up on making premium Android tablets, Samsung isn't quitting just yet. It still believes Google software has the potential to power, super thin and light productivity oriented to and once, and so it recently unveiled a new version of its hybrid tablet. The Galaxy Tab s, 6 is a 10.5 inch device. That's designed for people who need to get work done on the go. It comes with an upgraded s-pen that features air gestures for remote control of your apps, enhance handwriting recognition to sort out your notes and a redesigned optional keyboard cover. As with previous Samsung tablets, you can also expect a beautiful display, long battery life and capable performance.

What really stands out about the tab is 6, though, is yes pen, which is included in the 649 price. I love the S Pen on the Galaxy Note 1000 of the tab, a-sixes stylus as well. The tablet version is larger and feels more like a real pen which makes sketching for prolonged periods of time, more comfortable. As with the note 10 Samsung added and a seller meter and gyroscope to the tab, a sixes S Pen, along with a Bluetooth radio, to enable remote control with air gestures. So when you're using the camera, for example, you can remove the s-pen, hold down its button and swipe from side to side to switch modes, flick up and down to change cameras and make an N Shake to zoom in on a scene.

As with the note, 10 I mostly found these gestures useful only in the camera app and for very specific instances like trying to capture me nailing. Some yoga poses for the most part, though, I enjoyed the s-pen more as a stylus than as a remote control. Writing with the s-pen feels as smooth and the lifelike as before. There's just enough resistance from the screen to make it feel like I'm writing on paper, but Samsung has improved as handwriting recognition software to the point where it's not just more accurate and identifying what you've written, but it also automatically converts your scribbles. In the background.

This way you don't even have to manually hit, convert on each note to be able to search for specific words you've jotted it down. I found the tab a6 just as effective at recognizing right all full handwriting. As a note 10, though, when I truly let go and wrote in lazy, extreme cursive, the system couldn't decipher my words. I get it most. Human beings probably couldn't make sense of my chicken scratch either, but the tab at 6:00 understood most other things, I wrote, I didn't have to try too hard to write legibly, for it correctly interpret my jottings Alto.

This is a truly useful feature that gives me more reason to rely on the s-pen and the tab a6 as a sort of digital notebook. You can also easily convert your notes, Word documents or PDFs and then send them to your friends for thoughts as an aspiring author I found it particularly handy to jot down my musings when inspiration hit me and then convert them later before, adding them to a running Google Doc because of its new Bluetooth features. The S Pen requires charging, and you can do so by docking. The pen on the back of the tablet, where there's a groove carved out for it, the pen stays in place magnetically with a charging indicator appearing on the tablet itself. This generally seemed like a flimsy method to keep the S Pen I felt like it could fall off at any time, though, to be fair, it didn't, but if you get one of Samsung's first party cases for the table of six they'll hold a pen in place more firmly, you can get Samsung's new 2-piece keyboard cover — for an extra 180 dollars.

The top half includes a kickstand that sticks magnetically to the back of the Davis 6 and has a little bump that houses the s-pen. The other half of the cover is a detachable keyboard which connects to the tablet via Pogo pins. You can tear away this bottom half when you don't need to type documents and just use the kickstand part to prop up the device for playing games or, like I, did on a recent flight watching videos on a tiny airplane tray I enjoyed my episodes of the good place on the plane by the way, thanks to the tab, s6 is sumptuous.10.5 inch, Super AMOLED screen it's as bright and colorful as on previous models, but this one comes with HDR, 10, plus certification, offering dynamic range that makes even the darkest scenes in like the final season of Game of Thrones, easier to see another note about the display: Samsung integrated a fingerprint scanner under the tab, a-sixes screen, which I appreciated whether I was using the device as a tablet or a laptop. It was convenient to lay my thumb on the screen to sign in I prefer this to having to reach for the back of the device or to mess around with facial recognition. One of my biggest complaints about the Galaxy Tab s 4 was its shoddy keyboard accessory.

Not only was it crammed and somewhat flimsy, but there are a bunch of redundant keys. Worst of all, it didn't have a trackpad, so you had to reach across the keyboard to touch the screen. If you wanted to say, select a cell on a spreadsheet or hit a yes button with the taxa six, it seems like Samsung heard about half of what I said. There's now a trackpad hallelujah. It makes very much more intuitive environment for working in desktop mode, even if it is a little smaller than I like the touchpad was responsive and two finger gestures for scrolling and zooming worked well.

I couldn't use the three finger swipe to switch between open apps, nor could I use this cursor to drag and select text them. Samsung also made the buttons a little deeper than before and added a function key, so you can use it to trigger shortcuts that have been added to the top row on the old keyboard. This row simply had numbers and symbols, and you could trigger it by pressing down shift now. You can also get escape decks and delete if you hold down function and press the tilde, backslash and backspace buttons respectively. As for the rest of the keys in a row, using FN with them will give you F 1 to 12 for things like opening a new tab or refreshing.

A webpage I prefer, if Samsung put controls for display, brightness or volume here, but if I suppose I have to be thankful for the little improvements here. I have some lingering complaints, though the buttons are still a little too small, especially the backspace key I end up having to reach a lot further than I'm used to and keep hitting backslash. Instead, when I am holding down the shift key and then animate about of all caps typing, the space bar doesn't work I'll end up with a stream of words tied to each other, so it looks even more incoherent when I'm digitally screaming at the world. Also, the arrow keys, don't always work they're useless in a URL bar, for example. These may have more to do with the Taxa success software than the keyboard itself, which brings me to another one of my biggest annoyances with Samsung's tablets decks codex.

Where do I begin on the table of six decks? Is a software interface that mimics a full desktop experience, allowing you to pull up all your apps and windows? You can resize these panels and overlay them on top of each other. It sounds like a great idea, except my early experiences with decks really burned me. There was a lot of inconsistency around whether the browser app was pulling a desktop version of a site and which apps have been optimized for the desktop environment. Samsung has since refined the software, and it's a very subtle improvement. Apps behave more like I expect them to on a desktop, although you'll have to make a lot of tweaks for them to truly run like they should, for example, you'll need to enable the force apps to resize setting index labs.

Before you can maximize every window you open. Some apps will also have to relaunch when you switch between Android and DEX modes, which takes a few seconds. Also, Chrome still doesn't automatically load the desktop version of websites and for some reason there are two screenshot shortcuts on the taskbar — one is the native Android screenshot button and the other is a special Samsung one, even if one it's much better than the other, like. Maybe it pastes rainbow unicorns all over your screenshots or something. Why include both? Why not just have the better one in there? I would also like to see some interface changes when I use the alt tab shortcut to switch between apps, for example, the highlight over the selected app is really faint, and I can't really tell which app I've toggled to a bolder color scheme would make this much easier to see at a glance.

I'd. Also like the name of the app on each window, title bars, so I don't have to guess also sometimes clicking on a browser. Tab closes it even when I touched nowhere near the X button. It's all these little annoyances that Chuck's still feel unreliable, even though it's more stable in the Crash's less than before. I still want it to be better aside from failing to provide a reliable, desktop, multitasking interface, though the tab f6 is a sturdy performer.

Its Snapdragon, a 55 processor, capably handled my workflow, which typically consists of slack Gmail, chrome, calendar, Docs, Twitter and a few other miscellaneous apps. It also held up when I pushed it further by sneaking in a session of cooking —, which typically lags a bit on my pixel 3 I was also pleasantly surprised by the Tabs.6 is battery life. It made it through a recent two-day journey from Germany to New York, including an eight-hour flight with plenty of juice to spare on our battery tests. It lasted fifteen hours and eight minutes, beating its predecessor by three hours. That's also better than the iPad Air and the twelve point nine-inch iPad Pro, though just shy of the surface six pros fifteen and a half hour result with this kickstand keyboard and wannabe desktop interface.

The Tab A six is Samsung's latest attempt at mimicking, Microsoft's surface tablets. Sure Samsung could have just done that by making another Windows hybrid. But if you say the company knew Android would be a better match for the S pen's newfound capabilities, and once again it is the comfortable, smooth stylus that sets the tab series apart. Those who, like taking notes by hand and want an attractive lightweight powerful device that lasts ages, will appreciate the tab as six Android and X may be a limited platform for anyone looking to get real work done. But if you don't need to do much more than edit a few documents or a slide shows on the go while staying in touch with your colleagues that have is-6 will do just fine.

You.

Source : Engadget