Samsung Tab S8 - day 1 impressions

porina · October 21, 2022

I gave in and bought the Tab S8 which arrived today. This post will be a first impressions and not meant to be a comprehensive review of all its features. For background, I have been looking for a replacement to my iPad mini (2019) for the primary use of mobile gaming. The iPad I might review separately but it is degraded more than any Android tablet I've owned in the past and needs replacement. I also asked for input in the past, where the nearest Apple competitor was the iPad Air.

The conclusion at the time was the Air probably was the way to go. So why did I buy the Tab S8? Pricing has changed since then. Air was much cheaper then, but not now. The base model Air is now £669 direct from Apple for a paltry 64GB storage with no expansion. Then again, on large 3rd party sites they're still listed at £569. Why the massive difference? The base Tab S8 (128GB) is £649 from Samsung, but the Amazon price for the 256GB model is £669. Games are not small so this capacity is welcome, plus it can be further expanded by SD card should it be needed in future. The 256GB version of the Air is more again and already I'm spending more than I'd want for any of these.

Gaming performance

So far I've installed Genshin Impact and Azur Lane.

I prefer to play Genshin on PC but it is nice to have a backup on tablet or phone. The Tab S8 defaults to running it at medium settings in 30fps mode. This is more or less the same as my old iPad mini 2019. My friend's iPad Pro defaults to high at 30 fps, so high end (and high priced) Apple silicon is probably still optimal if you have to have the best perf.

Azur Lane isn't as demanding graphically. Level load times are comparable to the iPad mini, which is faster than my phone (Mate 10 Pro) or any of my much older Android tablets. Not much to say other than "it works fine".

The difference is in the screen estate. I've not done an exact measurement but the Tab S8 offers roughly 2x the usable screen area of the iPad mini. One pain point of the Mini is that the screen is 4:3, while most game content is optimised for 16:9, so you waste a lot of space. Games do hide it with filler but it doesn't really help. Image quality and brightness, I have nothing to complain about.

Physical aspects

There's a power button that doubles as fingerprint reader on the side. I'm not a fan of that, as my phone also has the same arrangement. I'd prefer a front or back reader. I've got used to the home button on the Mini so re-adjusting to the soft buttons on Android may take a little time. I don't miss it on the phone though. It supports face recognition but I've not set it up yet.

Sound is decent enough with side firing speakers (in landscape mode) which was a particular weakness of the Mini, which only came out of one side.

In landscape mode, after running intense apps for a while, the left side gets warm. Haven't looked for teardowns yet, but I guess that's where the hot chips are.

Too early to tell on effective battery life but it took what felt like a long time to charge, so there's probably some capacity in there. How much of that is needed for the bigger screen is another matter.

Software

This is and remains a pain point. I like stock Android. I don't like what other OEMs add on top to try and make it theirs. So far I've had to tell the Samsung stuff, no, I don't care or want you. I've uninstalled/disabled what I can, and I'm sure I'm still missing things. If I had gone Apple, I'd still have a similar pain process with getting rid of all the Apple apps and replacing them with Google equivalents. My Mini home screen looks more like an Android device than Apple!

There's an interesting power save feature I'm not sure about. If you don't interact with the tablet for some time, it goes into a soft lock dim screen mode. Not off, but not exactly on either. I first saw this downloading a LARGE game. It was still going, which would not be the case had it turned soft off. I hope it is sensible enough not to do this for Youtube or Twitch for example, but I've not used those much yet. To unlock this, you don't reach for the fingerprint reader which does nothing here. You have to swipe the screen to unlock. Not sure if I want this or will disable it somehow.

Specifically on Youtube, it offers the option to pinch zoom to fill the screen. The screen aspect ratio is 16:10, so pretty close to 16:9 of most content. If you want full screen at the cost of cropping off the edges, that's an option. I rechecked my phone, which is wider than 16:9, and it too also had the same feature. I just never noticed it before. Ok, can I do this on the official Youtube app on iPad? NO! Maybe 4:3 is just too square, or is there something else going on there?

That's it for now. Obviously I'll get to know it better in upcoming days and see what happens from there.

OhioYJ · October 22, 2022

13 hours ago, porina said:

There's a power button that doubles as fingerprint reader on the side. I'm not a fan of that, as my phone also has the same arrangement. I'd prefer a front or back reader.

So I have a Tab S5e (bought it for Lineage OS support) which has the same setup for the fingerprint reader. It was my replacement for my Tab S2 (also running Lineage) which had the front facing Fingerprint scanner. I was skeptical on the side mount at first, but I honestly kind of like it now. It doesn't take up room on the front. Tablets are a bit big to have them on the back (I prefer rear mounted on phones). Now when I pick up the tablet, it's kind of natural to touch the sensor and wake the tablet.

porina · October 22, 2022

1 hour ago, OhioYJ said:

So I have a Tab S5e (bought it for Lineage OS support) which has the same setup for the fingerprint reader. It was my replacement for my Tab S2 (also running Lineage) which had the front facing Fingerprint scanner. I was skeptical on the side mount at first, but I honestly kind of like it now. It doesn't take up room on the front. Tablets are a bit big to have them on the back (I prefer rear mounted on phones). Now when I pick up the tablet, it's kind of natural to touch the sensor and wake the tablet.

I guess I'll get use to it over time. While I love the big screen, it is harder to reach places than on a smaller device. I found it interesting the keyboard defaults to two half clusters near the bottom corner, rather than stretching out to the full width.

I've got a bit of muscle memory to pressing the home button on iPad I'll need to unlearn.

OhioYJ · October 22, 2022

11 minutes ago, porina said:

I guess I'll get use to it over time. While I love the big screen, it is harder to reach places than on a smaller device.

This for sure. I went from a Nexus 7, to a the larger Tab series devices, and I still find the larger devices, both good and bad at times. The larger screen is great for some things, not so great for other things at times. Overall though, even with the few times the larger screen sucks to have, I'd still rather have the larger screen.