Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 the sparkling star of multi screen

THE first thing you notice when you pick-up the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 is its aesthetics.

THE first thing you notice when you pick up the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 is its aesthetics. It’s a beautiful, lightweight Android tablet with a killer display. The LTE version we tried out is just 6.6mm thick and weighs 467 grams and it’s easy to read while holding with one hand. Its only rival in looks is Sony’s Xperia Z2 tablet — 6.4mm thick and 439g — even thinner and lighter.

But the S 10.5 blows the competition away when it comes to screen resolution, brightness and rich colours.

It has a super AMOLED display that produces vivid colours and jet-black blacks. You can feel yourself being drawn into the ­photos and video. There’s no backlighting, which helps save battery, yet the display is bright enough in sunlight.

The screen resolution, 2560x1600 pixels (known as WQXGA) equates to twice the number of pixels than on a full high definition TV — but condensed into tablet size.

The only issue here is that most media you watch isn’t this quality. Samsung’s demonstration videos on our device looked magnificent, but watch a YouTube video or two, and you’ll be reminded that video exists in a hotchpotch of qualities.

Some users don’t like Samsung’s cheaper plastic backplates; they prefer metal or polycarbonate ones.

Be warned that the S 10.5 continues this trend, but its perforated texture gives it a fabric feel and this didn’t bother me.

The S 10.5 and its little brother, the S 8.4 are among the first tablets with eight-core processors — ­Exynos 5 Octa chipsets that are as much about energy efficiency as performance. The four A15 cores do the heavy lifting while the more energy-efficient A7 cores perform lighter tasks.

This configuration means you may get big variations in battery life. If you use the tablet predominantly for gaming, you might not get near the 10-11 hours Samsung says its 7900 milliampere hour cell will deliver when passively watching video.

If you’re word processing, battery life might go through the roof.

In my case, actively using the S 10.5 to test features, configure screens, connect Bluetooth ­devices, watch videos and email and surf the net saw battery life reduced to 10 per cent after about five hours.

The S 10.5 uses Android KitKat 4 and Samsung enhances it with a few new features which I tried out.

SideSync lets you directly link a Galaxy S5 smartphone and Galaxy Tab S 10.5 using Wi-Fi Direct and transfer documents, photos and video between them using drag and drop.

It’s a bit like Apple’s Airdrop. SideSync is nothing new, having been used for linking phones and Samsung Windows computers in the past, but now it’s a phone-tablet affair.

To connect, you install the SideSync app from the Samsung app store on to both devices and follow the prompts. Once installed, the screen on your phone goes black and you see your phone and its screen contents reproduced as a window on the tablet.

I found it took a little practice to move the windows around the screen, and drag and dropping worked only when you were in particular apps, such as the ­Gallery.

I used SideSync to transfer some screenshots I had taken on the S 10.5 review unit to my smartphone, but frankly, I wouldn’t usually be transferring files this way as most files I create are synced to cloud storage and shared with other devices from there.

More useful is being able to virtually use the phone from the tablet to receive calls, and send texts and emails. The phone could be sitting in another room charging when you get the call.

This year Samsung has introduced its new Magazine UX interface as an alternative to the often ugly home screens on Google Android tablets.

Instead of littering home screens with floating widgets and app icons, you select from a series of widget functions that are stitched together into a tiled interface. I took great pleasure in putting together a magazine screen that showed calendar appointments, emails, and a general news briefing. It lifts the tablet experience.

Widgets for UX screens include news and topic feeds such as arts and culture and business, sports, a briefing, email, gallery, S Planner, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. Some are more useful than others: the Twitter widget for UX, for example, simply shows a photo and link to a story, rather than a feed. You can have up to five UX screens and you must have at least one of the old style home screens as well.

One observation about S Planner: if Samsung wants to entice iPad users to buy the S 10.5, it would be good if the S Planner app could display iCloud calendar entries. Calendar accounts seem to be limited to Samsung, Google, Microsoft Exchange and calendars synced from social networks.

Other software features include multiple accounts on the one tablet. Up to eight users can each have their own space on the tablet, and they can access it through fingerprint recognition if they want. Each account user goes through the Android tablet setup process and each can manicure their own home pages and choose apps. Photos taken from one account are not shared with another. You can make an account “restricted” and manage the app selection for a child, for example.

A user also can divide the tablet screen into two windows and multi-task apps. If one of them is video, they can turn the window into a video popup and have three applications on the desktop at once. It’s as if Samsung has out-windowed Microsoft.

But in multi-windows mode, you are restricted to selecting applications from a tray of apps, including Hancom Office, a Korean adaptation of Microsoft’s iconic suite.

When it comes to tablet apps in general, iPad apps tend to have better layout designs on big screens than Android ones. This is partly because developers have adapted their iPad application to Android, and not the other way around. Open the Trip Advisor on the S 10.5, and you’ll notice more white space in the centre due to it being a 16:10 rather than 4:3 aspect ratio.

In fact Android tablet apps have to adapt to a wide range of screen sizes, from 7-inch phablets upwards, and this is a problem. The Samsung app store has some apps specifically designed for the 16:10 screen and it’s worth seeking them out.

The other issue for Samsung is Apple’s secret sauce that has made it so successful with tablets — communities of dedicated users. Trusted and thorough iPad applications exist across industries and enterprises, and in education where iPads offer hundreds of school and university courses through iTunes U. Marketing, however good, cannot overcome this unless the features being marketed are enduring and embraced over time.

The S 10.5 has other features introduced with the S5. They include an ultra power-saving mode that turns the screen monochrome and limits app usage to save power, and booster mode, which lets a user combine their 4G and Wi-Fi streams to hasten downloads.

There’s an IR-blaster for controlling TV. The tablet has 8 and 2.1 megapixel back and front facing cameras, and a microSD card slot which can boost storage by up to 128 Gigabytes. Missing is a USB 3 connector found on the S5. It is priced identically to the iPad Air with similar internal storage.

Rating: 8.5/10

Price: $599 (16 GB, Wi-Fi), $699 (32GB, Wi-Fi), $749 (16 GB, 4G)