Now, I heard rumors that Samsung will bring back the silo to the S22 Ultra, so that is at least one good news.
My main concern is that now with the death of the Note lines, there’s no longer the normal note (not plus, not ultra) that is in the sub 1000$ price bracket. There’s definitely a lot of user out there that want an Spen but can’t justify paying the 1300$+ price tag for a phone, don’t want or need the top of the line processor and huge RAM or 4k resolution on a tiny display.
The price barrier of a phone with S-pen had become so high, and while older Note phone are still performing great now, there is a high risk of buying used devices with still arguably high price.
That’s really more a complaint about the prices that smartphones have reached. Even accounting for inflation, they have become very expensive.
Now there’s a good argument that given these high prices that manufacturers should offer cheaper devices with some of their top end features. But I’m not sure how much demand there is for that given that people are more than willing and strongly encouraged to pay for flagship devices in split payments.
There was a lot I missed in that article I linked. I thought what was going on in that picture was happening natively in CSP when it’s actually from Canva, a third party app. It also carries a $12-13/month fee on top of what you’d be paying per month for CSP, so, yeah…. But I legit can’t spare the time right now to dig far enough to know whether you could avoid buying the Pro version, or even how it works to where you can get some of CSP’s menu on it. Skimming the front page makes it seem like it has nothing to do with CSP.
Then of course, you get into whether or not it’s such a good idea to select colors off a different screen, even if you aren’t a purist for color accuracy, and even with Samsung’s screen pedigree. I couldn’t say. Maybe they got it down to where, as long as it was the “daughter phone” to the TS8U, the S22 Ultra, you wouldn’t have to think about it even as a professional. Anyways, $1200 is a hell of a lot for a fancier Expresskey remote, more or less. Roughly $3000 is even more just to conduct an experiment in unorthodox work styles just to see if I could improve my flow and concentration by even a smidgeon, and my days of being that reckless are long over.
FWIW it does seem like it would be awesome to have a second S-tier AMOLED screen just laying flat on your desk, where you can eyeball some menus (Especially color selection) with your peripheral vision and select it with your fingers, freeing up that much more space on your main canvas. Then take your work with you on just the phone and continue working on it elsewhere if need be. But, y’know, $1200 bones lolol and no one really knows how well it works in practice.
I think it’s probably just a nice bonus. And the cost of any of these devices could buy an awful lot of paper, pencils, and coloring pencils/cheap paint.
Agreed. Though they can’t yet speak “on the record” Samsung reps we work with seem very enthused about the Tab 8 product line, “especially now that Google is taking tablets seriously again with 12L”
The big dampener to me is possibly the pricing eg. rumor is $1199-1299 for the base model ultra. Though that will price include the pen, but not the keyboard however.
And in fact the keyboard trackpad cover for the current Tab S7 Plus is the same price as the Apple keyboard folio for the iPad Pro 12.9 (not the magic keyboard) though it doesn’t have a trackpad.
But there still seems something a bit… wasteful with the UI on tablets with Android. And for all that is said about customisation for Android, small tweaks like AHK that you can do on a desktop OS often require clunky workarounds on Android.
Edit: Case in point: I was just playing around with Good Lock on my Fold. Only the app won’t work here, so you have to use Good Lock. But Good Lock can’t offer downloads of different modules in the Play Store app, so you have to use another app that redirects you ApkMirror.
Such things are much rarer on Windows (all I can think of is the otherwise excellent Tablet Pro).
Ars Technica are usually pretty decent, but they do occasionally post something very ignorant (I think calling them out there once got me banned there).
The device comes with a stylus that Samsung just calls an “S-Pen,” though it is nothing like the small, plastic “S-Pen” that lives in the Galaxy S22 Ultra. This is Apple Pencil-sized and presumably takes a battery. The stylus magnetically attaches to the back of the tablet, in line with the camera bump. This big S-Pen also works on the S22 Ultra, if you happen to buy both devices and don’t want to undock your S22 pen.
I really do wish the tech press would at least try.
One thing we’ve already heard from our Samsung rep is that more than usual (due to component shortages) it’s a good idea to preorder, the Ultra especially.
Plus, one other good reason to preorder is that you will get the Keyboard Cover for free ($349 otherwise) and supplies of it will also likely be constrained for at least a couple of months.
Not really a priority for them though, considering Google are often so slow to get such products out there (ready for OEM use) and that Samsung have already developed most of the same features themselves.
You can already get a taskbar of recent apps in the Folds using Samsung’s Good Lock software and of course they have DeX.
Even though they aren’t part of the public beta, we’ve heard that Samsung has been actively working with Google on a quick rollout of 12L.
Completely unofficial, but we’ve heard that the Tab S8’s , Tab A8 and the Fold 3 are the topmost priority with the Tab S7’s coming second. Still TBD on other tablets in Samsung’s line though the Tab A7 and A7 Lite will get it eventually.
So we had some hands on with the new Ultra and Plus last Friday. We can’t fully talk about it yet due to NDA, but we can share some impressions.
So the Ultra is truly a beautiful device in every way. It feels very premium in hand and the display is superb including being quite bright. Due to Samsung’s one UI tweaks, you notice the notch for about 10 minutes and then you move on (and it definitely is less obtrusive regardless than the notch on the new MacBook Pros)
We can’t publish any performance data yet, but it is noticeably faster in almost every way than the S7’s . The new keyboard folio is also an improvement in terms of both keyboard feel and trackpad use. And the backlit keys are a nice improvement though it’s worth noting that only the ultra version gets the backlight.
What many are going to be most interested in here is the new ultra low latency pen. Our biggest pen user in the company remarked that this was the first pen solution that she felt like she didn’t have to make a a conscious effort to slow down so that the pen could keep up. The same applies to the new s22 ultra as well, though we all found that while having the pen silo is great, it also felt small.
The size of the S8 Ultra got a mixed reaction, almost evenly split between being too big and being " a revelation".
One thing I did observe already is that the Ultra, unlike the plus or standard Tab 8 already had several small scuffs and dings on it which leads me to think that handling it could be an issue for some.
One other observation, that applies to both the new phones and tabs is the new 5g modems. They are a significant jump overall and especially signal acquisition in marginal areas/conditions.
More when we are out from under NDA, but TLDR these are some superb tablets, easily the best yet from Samsung, and can go toe to toe with Apple’s pros, at least hardware wise.
Just curious, which drawing app(s) did she test in?
It seems to be implied from the Samsung press release that the improved 2.8ms response time is software-based, and that it may require specific app-integration (eg. Samsung Notes):
The Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra and S8+ both come with a new and improved S Pen that uses a prediction algorithm for ultra-low latency15
15 Compared to Galaxy Tab S7. Latency speed of 2.8ms measured for Tab S8 Ultra(14.6’’) and Tab S8+(12.4’’) models when using Samsung Notes.
Judging from the language, other drawing apps may still exhibit the old 9ms response time. Alternatively, the improvements could be firmware-based on the digitizer, meaning the entire OS and application stack would benefit.
@marty Like I said we haven’t formally tested yet but every app she tried including canva, as well as photoshop showed the faster pen response.
We suspect (and it’s just a supposition at this point) that any app that uses the supplied Android/Samsung firmware/libraries will benefit. You could even sense/see it in PowerPoint
15 Compared to Galaxy Tab S7. Latency speed of 2.8ms measured for Tab S8 Ultra(14.6’’) and Tab S8+(12.4’’) models when using Samsung Notes.
But I think that’s them being transparent about what software they used, so someone could replicate it in a test rather than saying it’s limited by apps. This is common practice in footnotes like this. Car driven on x track in x conditions, score running x benchmark on x system, etc.
They’re probably using the same software prediction technique as the Fold 3 and I’d don’t know why they’d implement that anywhere but the driver. It doesn’t make sense to burden app developers with having to additionally choose to implement it other than just implementing S pen support in general.
