Samsung Launches the 9.7-inch Galaxy Tab S3: Snapdragon 820 with 6000mAh and HDR
by Ian Cutress on February 26, 2017 1:11 PM EST
Along with the Galaxy Book parts being launched today, Samsung also announced the next generation of Galaxy Tab. The S3 is also an iterative design, with what Samsung believes is the premium Android tablet available in the market. Starting with the Snapdragon 820 SoC, featuring Qualcomm’s custom Kryo cores, the headline message for the S3 is support for HDR 8-bit content as well as a 6000 mAh battery and support for fast charging technology.
Aside from the SoC, the tablet is set to be offered in a 4GB DRAM and 64GB storage option, with a microSD card allowing for another 256GB. Wireless, aside from the 2x2 802.11ac inside, comes via an LTE Cat.6 modem, good for 300 Mbps downlink speed. There is also support for BEIDOU and GALILEO location detection services.
The 9.7-inch display uses Samsung’s Super AMOLED display technology, with a resolution of 2048x1536, and uses quad-stereo speakers tuned by AKG/Harman. Similar to the Galaxy Book, Samsung is promoting its latest ‘Flow’ technology, allowing biometric login for wirelessly tethered devices, and the new S Pen with ‘screen off’ note taking functionality. These are built upon Android 7.0, which along with the SoC is engineered for 4K60 video playback.
The camera setup is similar to the 12-inch Galaxy Book, with a 13MP rear sensor with auto-focus and a 5MP front sensor (other details should emerge on these. Samsung is listing the weight at around a pound for the S3 (434g in LTE mode), and the unit comes with a kickstand.
We’re awaiting more details on the hardware and the implementation, hopefully coming through the press event that’s starting as I’m writing this news post. We’ll hopefully get pricing and availability information too.
Edit: All Tab S3 units will come with the S-Pen as standard, and Samsung are partnering with Staedtler to provide a special S Pen called Noris Digital in the traditional school pencil style.
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UtilityMax - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
Dream on. Remember for how long one had to wait for the mobile "Kaveri" APUs, which never happened? The fact that AMD places its latest CPU against the desktop i7 is quite telling regarding where they're heading.R. Hunt - Sunday, February 26, 2017 - link
Why? So you can have ,ore complexity, terrible UI, no mobile apps?Meteor2 - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
So you can run the software you need?R. Hunt - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
What software? Visual Studio? SQL Server?On a 9.7" tablet???
BrokenCrayons - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
Visual Studio isn't a heavy lifting sort of thing. Maybe more/larger screen space would be nice, but I can't see many problems in getting a little bluetooth keyboard and a clip-on arm to mount the tablet to a desk for that purpose. A 7 inch Toshiba Encore with 2GB of RAM and a Bay Trail processor even handles something as low-demand as Visual Studio.SQL Server, aside from some maybe local testing of non-live data, would probably not run well on a tablet. It really belongs on appropriate hardware if its supporting something mission critical anyway and that rules out laptops and desktops too.
There are a lot of other basic applications that work only in Windows that would be perfectly fine on a 9 inch tablet. However, Samsung's also released a 10 inch Windows tablet that is only a tiny bit larger and has an Intel CPU so it'd be a better option than trying to use Windows on ARM on a platform like this.
ddriver - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
VS is a bloated bag of trash. It doesn't really demand that much performance, unless when you are compiling, but it is so poorly written it just runs like a slug, regardless what's your hardware. I am so happy I no longer have to deal with that.Meteor2 - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
Mr Hunt, why do you presume to even possibly know what x86 software I use?R. Hunt - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - link
Isn't that what you did, by assuming we all need to run x86 software on a tablet?ddriver - Sunday, February 26, 2017 - link
This with 6 gigs of ram would suit me just fine. 90% of the software I run is proprietary, and android is supported. The moment a cyano based rom is avaiable for it, which will be quick, I will install a google free android on it. No windoze spyware for me thanks.Meteor2 - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
Wait until the Snapdragon 835 running Windows on ARM version. That's the future.