Samsung Galaxy Tab S5E review: A fantastic display

It looks great, has a fantastic display and comes in at a price that’s easy to swallow. Samsung might have finally made an Android tablet worth buying – but an iPad is more powerful. Let’s find out the detail in Samsung Galaxy Tab S5E review with Lifetravell!

Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e – Design

Samsung’s previous top-end tablet followed the design philosophy of many a flagship smartphone – it featured a glass back and metal sides. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e sticks to a more traditional tablet style. It’s aluminium all-round, apart from the glass pane above the screen, of course.

Cheaper to manufacture it may have been but I prefer this design to last year’s glass-backed device. Anodised aluminium has a finely textured grain that feels great in iPads, and so it does here as well.

Samsung has trimmed down the screen borders too, although there remains sufficient room for your thumbs to rest whether you’re holding the Galaxy Tab S5e on its side or upright. This trim down also makes this 10.5-inch tablet smaller (in most dimensions) than a 9.7-inch iPad.

It’s super-slim at 5.5mm and its 400g weight is light for a 10.5-inch tablet. Slim, trim and light the Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e may be, but a tablet with this screen size can only be so petite.

If you’re after a device for young kids, we’d recommend a smaller tablet. Or at least a larger one with the kind of protection offered by a Kindle Fire for Kids.

Cameras

The Tab S5e has two cameras, a 13 MP rear-facing sensor and an 8 MP front-facing one. The former has a 1/4″ CMOS sensor that can take photographs in up to 4128×3096 with a 4:3 aspect ratio and shoot 4K videos at 30 FPS. By contrast, the 8 MP front-facing sensor can only produce 3264×2448 pixels photos, also with a 4:3 aspect ratio, and it can shoot videos in up to Full HD at 30 FPS.

Both sensors have f/2.0 apertures, although only the rear-facing one supports autofocus. The default camera app contains settings for adjusting the level of exposure, ISO, and white balance. The app also has gesture controls, geotagging, an HDR mode, a beauty mode and filters including selfie stickers. Samsung has integrated Bixby Vision too, which has AR features and can translate texts, and identify products along with reading QR codes.

The rear-facing camera takes passable photos in daylight as demonstrated by scenes 1 and 2 below. However, they both look rather dull and washed-out. The sensor struggles to capture many details, even in ideal conditions too. Photos shot in low light amplify these shortcomings. Scene 3, for instance, is so underexposed that it is difficult to make out any details. In short, the cameras are good enough for occasionally taking the odd photo or selfie, but not much else.

Performance and battery

On paper, the Galaxy Tab S5e won’t impress with its specs, as they’re worthy of a relatively basic smartphone — a Qualcomm Snapdragon 670 processor, and 4GB or 6GB of RAM (that’s equivalent to what’s inside the Google Pixel 3a). In reality, it’s more than enough to drive the tablet for the tasks it’s intended for — watching movies, browsing, and reading. I never experienced any problems playing games either.

Multitasking and gaming

With a Snapdragon 670 chipset and 4GB of RAM at its heart, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e is relatively well-equipped to deliver a stable Android experience. Keeping that in mind, we stressed it out with pushing it with multitasking and gaming.

We had multiple PUBG sessions with the device, and it’s a better tab than the Galaxy Tab S4 to play games on. While the performance is matchable, the form factor here plays a crucial role in making it a better tablet for games. It handles PUBG Mobile’s fast-paced Team Deathmatch easily while keeping the graphics at medium level. In comparison to iPad 9.7 32GB Cellular? The iPad offers better gaming performance.

Multitasking is pretty fluid on the Tab S5e; it can handle everything that you would practically do on a tablet at a time. But note that the performance degrades after a point of time and switching, opening and closing of apps might show a lag after a few months of usage. It is fast, but it lacks the fluidity of the Tab S4 or its iPad rivals.