Samsung just announced their new Galaxy TabPro S at their newly reopened New York City flagship experience space. The Galaxy TabPro S sounds like the name of a Galaxy branded Android tablet, and it does look like a Samsung Android tablet from the outside, but once you turn it on, you’ll see that this is a full-blown Windows 10 tablet PC. It’s probably the thinnest Windows 10 tablet around at only 6.3mm thick. It’s also the first 12″ tablet with one of Samsung’s gorgeous Super AMOLED screens. Many of Samsung’s Android tablets still had LCD screens, so this is a new development not just for Windows tablets, but tablets in general.
Windows tablets aren’t really a new development for Samsung either. Remember the Samsung Series 7 Slate? That was one of the coolest Windows 7 tablets back around 2011. For the past few years it has seemed that Samsung has been all-in on Android though. What’s changed is that the 2-in-1 tablet PC laptop convertible market has seen a 40% yoy growth. Over 600 million PCs out there are over 5 years old, too. People who are going to upgrade are going to want something that handles everything their old PC can do, but also offer something new, and that’s what the Samsung Galaxy TabPro S is meant for.
As mentioned, this is the first Windows 10 tablet with Samsung’s colorful Super AMOLED display. That’s a 12 inch 2160 x 1440 pixel resolution display by the way. In terms of weight, it’s only 1.53lbs (693 grams) and the dimensions are 11.43″ x 7.83″ x 0.25″. This current model is WiFi only (no LTE), and the only ports are a 3.5mm headphones jack and a USB-C port. There’s no MicroSD card slot and no USB-A port! You need an adapter if you want to connect anything that doesn’t work over Bluetooth or WiFi (or USB-C). Have I mentioned lately how much I hate USB-C? Anyway, you can buy a special Samsung USB-C hub that has ports for outputting the display to a second monitor, connecting regular USB-A peripherals, and still providing the “Fast Charge” capabilities.
The Galaxy TabPro S fits a bit below the more-expensive Surface Pro 4 tablet, and significantly above the less-expensive Intel Atom CPU based Windows 10 tablets. Still, so far it seems like it will easily handle all of your computing needs provided they’re within the limits of the 2.2Ghz Dual-Core Intel Core M3 6th generation processor, 4Gb of RAM, and the 128Gb SSD.
Stay tuned as we dig deeper into the Samsung Galaxy TabPro S and put together a full review.
Originally published on Pocketnow on March 18, 2016.