Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro S Review: Gadget uses an AMOLED panel instead of a traditional LCD

By Ajay Kadkol - 28 May '16 09:59AM

Microsoft has been telling us that tablets are the future of personal computing since the original Surface and Windows 8, yet after all these years, very few Windows tablets have been able to hit the size, weight and battery life we've come to expect from Android and iOS tablets.Samsung tried to change that with the TabPro S. We liked it a lot when we first tried it out, but naturally needed more time to assess the finer details of performance and battery life.

Thankfully, it's held up just fine, especially at its $899 price.Our thoughts on the design are simple: this is a good-looking, well-built tablet.Samsung's designers have been at their best since the Galaxy S6, and that design language continues to be reflected here. An aluminum frame borders the tablet, and its back panel and keyboard cover come in either white or black.The keyboard cover itself is well-built too, with a high-quality leather build that snaps magnetically onto the back of the tablet with a satisfying click. Unlike the Surface line, you can only adjust the tablet to two angles, but unlike the iPad Pro, you don't have to be an origami artist to figure out how to set the different positions.

Although the Tab ProS is a fairly striking tablet in its own right, the display is what really holds you attention, if only for being so different. That's because it uses an AMOLED panel instead of a traditional LCD, one of very few PCs to use the technology.We've become used to the pure blacks of AMOLED on many smartphones, but it's rare to see it on a screen this size, and it makes for a great night-time movie experience; shadows fade into true black, instead of the dark-grey letterboxing you normally experience with LCD panels at night.

There are some caveats to the technology though: thePentile subpixel structure means that you can notice some faint coloration green and purple coloration around text and lines if you look really closely, especially at the screen's good-but-not-great 216 ppi.