After a year-long hiatus, Samsung has decided to shelve its mid-range slate this year alongside the gargantuan Ultra and instead release a compact Galaxy Tab S11. It’s a pretty smart move, because when you look high and look low, you’ll hardly find a better compact. Android Tablet Right now it can compete with Apple’s regular iPads.
Table of Contents:
Galaxy Tab S11 Specs
A proper flagship tablet
Here are the Galaxy Tab S11 hardware specs at a glance:
| Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 |
|---|
| Size and weight 253.7 x 165.3 x 5.6 mm 481 GR |
| Display 11 inch OLED 120Hz, 1600 nits Corning Gorilla Glass 5 |
| The processor Mediatek Dimension 9400+, 3nm |
| Software A UI 8 Android 16 |
| Cameras 13MP wide angle 12 MP front |
| Battery size 8,400 mh |
| Charging speed 45W |
| Prices 12/128GB – $800 12/256GB – 60,860 12/512GB – 80,980 |
Galaxy Tab S11 design and display
A sharply dressed bullet
A fairly compact tablet that’s easy to love (Image credit – Phonerina)
Both employ the same flat design language that is now pretty universal in the industry. The Galaxy Tab S11 is made of aluminum and has Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5 on the front.
Just like Samsung’s previous tablets, the Galaxy Tab S11 boasts a very media-friendly 16:10 aspect ratio, as opposed to the more productivity-oriented 3:2 aspect ratio you get on the iPad. It is exceptionally comfortable to hold, carry around and use. The tablet is water and dust resistant with an IP68 rating, so you can even use it by the pool.
In terms of size, the Galaxy Tab S11 is compact enough for an 11-inch slate with a thickness of just 5.6mm. The latest iPad Air is just as thin, but it’s wider but narrower. The Galaxy Tab S11 is also lightweight at less than 500 grams, which is significantly less than the iPad Air.
In terms of colors, the situation with the Galaxy Tab S11 is quite boring: it only comes in gray and silver. A pretty conservative choice that lacks any colorful hues.
Inside the box, you’ll find the tablet itself, a charging cable, an S Pen, and the usual manuals and manuals that are required by law.
A Beautiful Screen (Picturephone)
The Galaxy Tab S11 has a beautiful 11-inch display, a vibrant AMOLED 2X one. It’s a 1-120Hz HDR screen with improved peak brightness that now reaches a peak of 1,600 nits.
According to our tests, the Galaxy Tab S11 has a particularly impressive display. In addition to near-perfect default color temperature calibration and viewing angles, the tablet reaches around 1,500 nits, matching Samsung’s specification. An iPad Pro is slightly brighter and has better grayscale color accuracy, but for most people, the differences will be fairly minor.
The Galaxy Tab S11 also comes with an optical in-display fingerprint scanner as well as face unlock. Fingerprint is mostly fine, but it’s a bit slow and sometimes requires a second touch to successfully register your finger, so definitely not the best around.
Galaxy Tab S11 Keyboard and Stylus
However, the S Pen has been toned down a bit compared to the S Pen on the previous generation. First, we no longer get Bluetooth connectivity, limiting some additional features. You can no longer use the stylus as a camera remote.
Another downgrade, at least for me, is the shape of the stylus. This new one has a hexagonal shape and is slightly less comfortable to hold and use for long periods of time unlike most circular S pens before it.
Galaxy Tab S11 Performance and Benchmark
Mediatech Power
The Dimension 9400+ is a 3nm powerhouse (photo by Phonerina)
The Galaxy Tab S11 comes with Meditech’s Dimension 9400+ 3nm chipset, which is quite a pound-for-pound rival to the Snapdragon 8 Elite. This chipset performs exceptionally well in both real-life and synthetic benchmarks, and I’ve never felt the need for “more” performance.
CPU Performance Benchmark:
The Galaxy Tab S11 performs exceptionally well in the Geekbench 6 single- and multi-core tests. Sure, it loses out to the Apple M3 and M4 chips inside the latest iPads, but those are dedicated desktop-grade chips, so the comparison isn’t very fair.
GPU performance
In terms of graphics performance, the Galaxy Tab S11 and the MediaTek chip are performing very well with high performance. Consistent performance is also pretty decent, even beating out the latest iPad Air. This means that you will be able to maintain maximum framerate on the Galaxy tablet.
The tablet comes with 12GB of RAM in three storage variants: 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB. There’s also a microSDXC card slot on deck for storage expansion, which is definitely a rarity these days.
Galaxy Tab S11 Software
The UI is a delight thanks to the multitude of customization options and features on board, and it’s not yet crowned one of the best custom Android skins.
You can no longer access Samsung Dex on the tablet itself (you have to connect to a monitor), which can certainly be seen as a shortcoming by many. Instead, you can use a new on-device Dex mode that lets you put your apps in a dedicated workspace by going to your recent apps and enjoying a slightly more desktop-like experience. It’s definitely a bit more confusing than the on-device decks of old.
Like the Ultra and Samsung’s flagship phones, the Galaxy Tab S11 is getting an OS update.
Galaxy Tab S11 audio quality
The Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 comes with a pretty decent set of quad speakers on board. They deliver loud, room-filling sound with no distortion, excellent bass, rich mids and beautiful highs. The sound isn’t as powerful as it is on the Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra, but it’s still exceptional.
One thing to note about the Galaxy Tab S11 range is that Samsung has gotten rid of haptic feedback. Granted, vibration was never great on the company’s previous tablets, so the loss isn’t that big, but it’s still worth noting that this tablet won’t vibrate, no matter what.
Galaxy Tab S11 Battery and Charging
Inside the Galaxy Tab S11 is an 8,400 mAh battery, which is a decent capacity for a compact slate, and it turns out that it’s unusually paired with the Dimension chipset on board. Both successfully deliver a pretty decent battery life, all things considered, and the Galaxy Tab S11 also holds its own against larger and more capable tablets.
In our custom battery tests, which are manually set to 200 nits with the display on to ensure a level playing field, the Galaxy Tab S11 gets about 10 hours in the web browsing test, about seven hours in video playback, and eleven and a half hours in the gaming test. Those figures are impressive when compared to the larger Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra and Apple’s latest iPad Pro and iPad Air. Very nice!
Phonerina Battery Test Results:
The tablet supports wired charging up to 45W. A quick charge of 30 minutes brings the battery up to 40%, while a full charge takes 97 minutes, which is comparable with most Galaxy flagship phones, for example.
As usual, there’s no wireless charging due to the all-aluminum design.
Galaxy Tab S11 Camera
Quite decent
Let’s be real, cameras on tablets are an afterthought, because they cost significantly less than camera systems on smartphones, for example.
The Galaxy Tab S11 has a 13MP wide and 12MP front-facing camera hidden in the bezel. There’s even no sign of the ugly V-shaped notch on the Galaxy S11 Ultra, which is great.
In terms of image quality, the tablet delivers fine results. It won’t wow you, but it won’t disappoint you either, provided you know what you’re getting into.
Image quality
The quality of both rear and front cameras is more than acceptable. Photos taken with the tablet deliver good details, plenty of sharpness and fine dynamics. Sure, if you start squinting at the pixels, you’ll quickly start to see the issues we usually attribute to non-flagship cameras, but for what it is, the Galaxy Tab S11 delivers fine image quality.
Do you buy it?
Seen in a vacuum, the Galaxy Tab S11 is an excellent tablet. Compact, lightweight and powerful, it’s practically a better way to consume media at home. It boasts some pretty good battery life and has a better display on a compact Android Tablet.
However, when you consider previous Galaxy Tab devices, it’s not a huge improvement. In fact, you probably shouldn’t even consider upgrading from an older one Galaxy Tab S9especially if you don’t have any outstanding issues with it.
Overall, we’d recommend the Galaxy Tab S11 to anyone looking to experience Android and Samsung’s latest UI on a slightly larger screen than a Samsung device, and especially to users who enjoy the best media experience possible.
