The best of the big-screen Android tablets, going toe-to-toe with the iPad Pro
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PRICE 256GB, £999 (£1,199 inc VAT) from samsung.com
Even when other Android tablet manufacturers seemed to give up, Samsung kept plugging away, delivering bigger, better and more capable Galaxy Tab S tablets with each new generation. That really paid off with the Galaxy Tab S8 series, arguably the first set of Android tablets to give Apple’s iPad range serious competition. And now that goes double for the Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra, which is Samsung’s finest tablet yet.
This isn’t just about the hardware. Samsung has nailed usability with its One UI, so that you can manage multiple windows and multitask between them, just as you would in Windows or macOS. Even the window-snapping features work in much the same way. And while Lenovo has followed Samsung in providing an alternative, desktop-style UI – this activates when you connect a monitor and keyboard – Samsung’s DeX experience is slicker and more consistent.
Place the Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra inside its £339 book cover keyboard, and you have a very viable laptop replacement, provided you can work with a more limited set of Android and web-based apps. It’s a shame the typing experience isn’t quite up there with Apple’s Magic Keyboard or Lenovo’s Tab Extreme equivalent, though, especially given the price.
Providing the S-Pen as standard is another smart idea, giving you everything you need for making notes, sketching, annotation and lightweight digital art out of the box.
This doesn’t mean the hardware isn’t worth shouting about. Quite the opposite, in fact. Samsung has done just about everything possible to minimise the bulk of this huge tablet, while ensuring there’s still enough rigidity and something you can grip. It’s surprisingly robust for a big device that’s only 5.5mm thick, and is even IP68-rated against dust and water.
Other tablets give you a screen on which you can watch movies; the S9 Ultra gives you one on which you could probably make them, though it’s good at the entertainment stuff as well. It reaches SDR brightness levels of 592cd/m2, and HDR brightness levels of 765cd/m2. It covers 100% of the sRGB colour gamut with a volume of 181%, and 100% of DCI-P3 with a volume of 128%. Colour accuracy is near perfect, with an average Delta-E of under 0.2. It’s almost wasted streaming 4K HDR video from Netflix and Amazon Prime, even if it’s a splendid sort of waste.
