Samsung Galaxy TabPro S review: A taste of a future I’m not ready for

Honestly, I thought I fell into some kind of a wormhole and traveled back in time. While recently using Samsung’s definitely new Galaxy TabPro S—the company’s take on the Surface concept of a tablet with a keyboard cover accessory—I lost myself in a specific moment. Suddenly, I couldn’t tell if it was 2016 or 1996.

Some context: Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 was released on August 24, 1996. It updated various parts of Windows 95, including Internet Explorer 3, FAT32 filesystem support, Firewire support, and DirectX 2.0a. The release also introduced support for OpenGL 3D graphics. To showcase this new capability, Microsoft offered a handful of 3D screensavers.

In those days, screensavers were an important part of the computing landscape. We all used them because we had to: burn-in was a serious problem for the then-ubiquitous cathode ray tubes (CRTs). The phosphor compounds used in CRTs lose their luminance over time. Extended displays of static images on the screen cause uneven wear of the phosphors, and this degradation can result in faint “ghost images” of degraded phosphors being permanently burned into the screen.

Screensavers prevented such burn-in by showing a continuously moving image on the screen while leaving it still powered on. This wasn’t particularly power-efficient, but CRTs had a considerable start-up time that put stress on the display’s electronics. Keeping the screen on with a moving image was often the most convenient option. As such, screensaver choice became an important customization feature. Our screensavers, like our desktop wallpapers, could reflect our personalities. And among Windows 95’s OpenGL screensavers was 3D Text, a simple screensaver that renders some text in 3D as it bounces and spins around the screen.

Screensavers have become substantially less important since the switch to LCDs. Although LCDs can display short-term persistent images, and very occasionally individual pixels can get stuck, they’re essentially immune to the burn-in phenomenon. Nowadays, it’s power management that’s the chief concern. Instead of leaving the screen turned on and animated, the current trend is simply to blank it and power it down when not in use.

Flash forward 20 years to today: I started using this Samsung device, and it greeted me with this old throwback. The Galaxy TabPro S uses screensavers. Leave it alone for a few minutes, and you’ll witness its name in spinning, bouncing, familiar 3D text. It has been a long time since I’ve used a computer that does this, and it feels weirdly anachronistic.

This setting right here is what worries me so much about this machine.

A cutting edge so sharp you’ll hurt yourself

Why get so caught up on a screensaver in 2016? The reason this awkwardly named machine—the first Windows system to sport the hitherto Android-denoting “Galaxy” branding—shows this weirdly old-fashioned behavior is because its standout feature, the screen, is so very modern. Instead of the typical LCD screens usually found on tablets and portable computers, the TabPro S has an AMOLED screen. And it’s a gorgeous 2160×1440 12-inch AMOLED screen.

Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode screens, made up of a grid of red, green, and blue LEDs, are common enough on smartphones, especially those from Samsung (which is also one of the makers of such screens). But their use on anything larger has until recently been quite rare. The first large-screen applications have been TVs, while laptops and computers have only started to come onto the market this year.

OLED technology remains in its relative infancy, and large screens attract high price premiums. A 65-inch LCD 4K TV costs $1,099 at Best Buy right now; a 65-inch OLED 4K TV can set you back five grand. But more significantly, it’s a technology with some serious limitations.

Old LCDs don’t look as good as new ones because their backlights tend to grow dim. Apart from that, they don’t show much in the way of usage-based degradation. This is why the screensaver became so much less important; it didn’t matter a whole lot if our LCD displays were left at the desktop or login screen for hours or even days on end. OLED screens, by contrast, degrade over time. The longer their individual colored segments are illuminated, the dimmer they get due to the degradation of the chemicals within the LEDs. Leave a fixed bright image on the screen for a long time—the Windows logo on the Start button, say—and those pixels will wear out the fastest. Moreover, that degradation happens unevenly, and the blue LEDs lose brightness faster than the red and green ones.

Credit: Peter Bright

OLED burn-in on a Nexus 6 phone.

Credit: Ron Amadeo

This degradation over time means that OLED screens tend to have a shorter lifespan than comparable LCDs. Their overall brightness decays faster than that of LCDs, and the uneven degradation can result in discoloration and “burned in” ghost images, where parts of the screen that should be white or grey become tinged with color.

OLED technology is getting better and better, with longer lifespans and better strategies for handling the uneven degradation, but it still represents a deficit relative to LCDs. That’s really why using the Galaxy TabPro S feels like hopping in the DeLorean: OLED screens need protecting, just like CRTs did all those years ago. OLED screens are more robust than those CRTs ever were—it takes thousands of hours to reduce their brightness significantly, whereas CRT burn-in could occur much more quickly—but they’re nonetheless more fragile than LCDs are.

Accordingly, the OLED systems beginning to come to market are taking measures to protect those screens. The TabPro has its screensaver, and it also dims the screen. When I received the review system, its screen would dim, selectably, after one or two minutes of inactivity. A software update has extended that to let me keep it bright for as long as 10 minutes, but there is no ability to disable this dimming entirely (short of removing Samsung’s drivers and other software).

While this does leave the tablet with a foot in the past, it gives it a pretty fantastic foot in the future, too. Again, OLED screens look gorgeous. Vibrant colors, rich blacks, high saturation, all the things that OLED screens are known for. The screen can also be cranked ridiculously bright—500 nits—providing good readability in a wide range of lighting conditions. This is a luxurious screen, and I can’t wait for OLED prices to come down so that I can afford to equip my home PC with a triple-head OLED setup.

On the other hand, I’m not sure if I want to live with OLED right now. The screen dimming is a bore. For our battery testing, I ran a little app to move the mouse once a minute and hence prevent the dimming, but this is obviously going to shorten the life of the screen. I’m sure I could remove Samsung’s dimming app, but do I want to? Is that going to slash the screen’s useful life or create serious burn-in? My assumption is it will, otherwise Samsung wouldn’t have included this feature in the first place.

That concerns me. As beautiful as this screen is, I’m not sure I want a system I have to care for in this way. The TabPro S is constantly reminding me that it’s deteriorating before my very eyes. One day, perhaps in the not too distant future, that beautiful screen is going to be ruined.

A little too tablety

We’ve seen a few iterations of the laptop-like-tablet concept first popularized by Microsoft’s Surface line. The best of these offers much of the flexibility of a full laptop—the Surface Pro 4, HP’s Spectre x2, and a handful of others sport an adjustable kickstand integrated into the tablet unit itself, paired with a detachable keyboard. This provides a wide range of screen angles and allows the screen to be propped up even when the keyboard isn’t being used.

The Galaxy TabPro S is similarly positioned as a premium, productivity-capable tablet, but its approach to the keyboard and stand is rather different. The magnetically attached combination keyboard/cover wraps around the whole system (it includes a little cut-out for the rear-facing camera), and it folds to prop up the screen. This means without the cover, there’s nothing to stand the screen up. It also means the screen can only be held at two specific angles (one is a laptop-like upright one, the other is a laid back one that I don’t really understand the purpose of). It’s more like the iPad Pro than the Surface.

There are some upsides to this; the TabPro S doesn’t have to include the extra bulk/metal of the kickstand mechanism within the tablet unit itself, and as such the tablet is a little thinner (0.25 inches/6.4mm thick, compared to 0.33 inches/8.4mm) and lighter (1.53lb/0.70 kg, compared to 1.69lb/0.77kg) than a Surface Pro 4.

If tablet use is your sole or primary purpose of the device, then stripping out the unnecessary kickstand may be a wise decision, and the loss of flexibility may not matter much. But if that’s your goal, you’re probably not buying a Windows tablet in the first place. Samsung’s own promotional pages for the tablet make a point of its ability to run Office, which seems like an implicit acknowledgement that the keyboard accessory is going to find wide usage. Certainly for my own usage, the laptop-like mode is essential, which makes the lack of screen angle adjustments a problem. It was a problem back in 2013 with the original Surface Pro from Microsoft; it’s still a problem today.

Samsung’s cover design does in principle make the TabPro more lap-friendly than Microsoft’s tablets. If you push the Surface line too far back on your knees, you end up pushing the kickstand off your legs. The TabPro’s base and screen stand are a continuous piece, making it quite a bit more stable in lap usage.

However, the base does flex somewhat, which makes this feel a little perilous. It also gives the device a slightly cheap feel. I’m not sure that the base itself is any less rigid than the Surface’s Type Cover; it’s just that the Type Cover’s design means it’s never having to bear the full weight of the tablet unit. The device’s rigidity is never put to the test. The Samsung cover does flex, however. If you’re tempted to pick it up laptop style, by grasping the keyboard with the screen still open, the whole thing bends.

The solitary USB Type-C port.

Credit: Peter Bright

As a consequence of the way the cover folds to prop up the screen, the keyboard itself is too small. Its width is about the same as that of the Surface Pro keyboard, but the height is lower. I found myself regularly hitting wrong keys as a result, like tapping the ‘3’ every time I tried to hit ‘e.’ Key action is not as crisp as the current iteration of Microsoft’s tablet keyboard, either, but to my fingers it still feels superior to that of the MacBook.

This limited height means the touchpad is also small. The touchpad tracked my movement well enough, but the surface is rough and the size limiting. It is a Precision Touchpad, so it supports standard Windows 10 gestures (and will gain new ones in the future). Still, the size arguably reduces the utility of these.

I’m left feeling that for a Windows tablet of this type, the better solution is to put the stand into the tablet itself with a larger keyboard (and touchpad). Windows just isn’t that useful as a pure tablet. The keyboard and touchpad are essential parts of the system (it’s not for nothing that Samsung includes the cover as a standard feature). They need to be as good as you’d find on a laptop. On the TabPro, they’re not.

The TabPro has a solitary USB Type-C port that it uses for peripherals and for charging. A single port feels lacking on any kind of laptop replacement, especially if that same port is also used for charging the system. To alleviate this restriction a little, Samsung has a port adaptor that breaks the Type-C port out into three ports: HDMI, USB Type-A, and USB Type-C. You can use other devices while charging, but it will set you back $89.99.

The system is rather more extravagantly equipped when it comes to internal sensors. As well as the usual accelerometer to handle screen rotation, the TabPro includes NFC, GPS, proximity, and ambient light.

A whole galaxy of Galaxy products

Samsung Flow.

Pattern unlock on Windows.

Unfortunately, there’s no kind of biometric authentication built in, but Samsung has a sort of solution. The TabPro comes with a bunch of extra software. Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to include any kind of annoying antimalware software—it’s refreshing to use a machine that doesn’t come with awful McAfee nagware for once. Instead, it’s all Samsung-specific. There’s an update program that handles firmware and driver updates, a special Settings app, and Samsung Flow, an app for pairing the tablet with a Galaxy phone.

The Settings app controls the mandatory screen dimming. It also adds an extra authentication option, offering pattern unlock of the kind familiar on Android phones for Windows 10. Samsung Flow extends this further still. Pair the tablet with a Galaxy S7, and the Windows system can use the phone’s fingerprint sensor for authentication.

I haven’t been able to actually test this; for most of the review period the software said only that it would be available in the future. An update has since lit up the functionality, but I don’t have a suitable phone to test it with. The phone is paired to the tablet with Bluetooth; the fingerprints are then set up using the standard Windows Hello biometric setup process. Once set up, logging into the PC is done by tapping the phone to the NFC sensor in the TabPro’s keyboard and then swiping a fingerprint on the phone.

The Flow software also shows Android notifications on the PC and in some cases replies to notifications directly on the PC. It also allows the PC to turn on the phone’s mobile hotspot feature.

This feels rather overcomplicated, and as a practical matter I would much prefer to have a fingerprint or facial recognition capability built in to the system. However, it’s interesting that Samsung is trying to find ways to create a Galaxy “ecosystem.” Apple has integration between iOS and OS X, and Microsoft is adding various syncing capabilities with its Cortana on Android, Windows Mobile, and Windows 10. I suspect Microsoft and Apple will be more successful in this endeavor, as there will be more Windows 10 PCs and Macs than there are Samsung PCs. But if you’re a fan of the Galaxy brand, at the very least the notification syncing and hotspot control are useful extra features.

Aside from the sensors, the TabPro is quite conventional. Unusually for a PC, it’s also devoid of options. It has a Skylake Core m3 processor, 4GB RAM, and a 128GB SATA-connected SSD. The only decision to make is whether to get it in black or white. A total of 4GB is not enough memory in this day and age, especially on a full Windows PC. The Core m3 performs the way we have come to expect from the low-power Core m parts; in short, bursty tasks the m processors don’t give up much to their i siblings, but in longer tasks, the bigger power envelope of the i processors allows them to pull ahead.

Battery life was a little longer than that of the HP Spectre x2, which has a slightly faster m7 processor and a lower resolution (1920×1280) screen. It’s also in the same ballpark as the Surface Pro 4. At just shy of eight hours of light usage, it’s probably not going to get you through a full day without charging. But in this regard, it’s no different from its major PC competition.