Difference between revisions of "Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e"

A midrange tablet released in 2019. The highlight of this model is the always enticing OLED screen, with perfect display uniformity, contrast and visual comfort. Unfortunately, despite the release date of this model, the screen does not feature any HDR10 capability and colour reproduction is slightly disappointing for blues, as they look closer to purple. This is typical of older OLED display technology. Vertical screen scrolling can be slightly annoying due to colour motion blur effect, as updates are slower than expected. However, the contrast and uniformity of the display make the visual comfort close to perfect in most circumstances.  

The chipset is, clearly, the major design issue. As with most tablets, and especially so for Samsung ones, the CPU specifications are way too conservative. In general, poor performance can be more readily accepted on smaller screens, like ones of mobile phones, but tablets should have much better CPUs as they drive bigger screens, were any slowdown is that much more noticeable. Moreover, as tablets are expected to have more usability time, poorer performing CPUs also tend to use up more of the battery's capacity. However, Samsung is not the only manufacturer to blame for this approach as most Android tablets do not have better CPU/GPU and chipset combinations.

The tablet's responsiveness is decent, albeit laggy in some instances, especially when browsing the internet or using more demanding applications. The 4GB RAM configuration feels outright obsolete considering the screen and potential of the tablet, but it is, again, in line with other manufacturer's poor design decisions. A tablet with such a high resolution screen should have 6 and 8GB RAM configurations to ensure better response, especially when the rest of the configuration is not fast enough. 4GB RAM configurations are somewhat minimal even for midrange phones.

The battery capacity is another disappointment. As the CPU and screen are not particularly energy efficient, reasonably intense operation of the tablet is unlikely to reach a whole day without recharging. The camera performance is decent for a tablet, in-line with average expectations for such a device, as cameras usage is not particularly concerning in this scenario.

The wireless performance of the tablet is nothing to be excited. Although the tablet supports Wi-Fi 5 or 802.11 ac standard, networking performance is significantly lower than expected for a typical upper market tablet and transfers may be slightly slower than on similarly equipped mid-range phones. This means that watching 1080p60fps video clips may be quite difficult in some cases.

The included software installation has about the same issue as most tablets: not enough applications can be uninstalled to reduce the impact of unneccessary ones using CPU and RAM resources, dragging down the system performance. Other than that, the Android and OneUI 3 experience is pretty typical. Android 11 runs reasonably fast.