Samsung Galaxy Tab S review

If you're after a tablet with an impossibly great screen... this is it

The Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and 10.5 are Samsung's latest flagship devices, built to show off the very best of the company's hardware and software prowess.

They're designed as upgrades to the Tab Pros we saw earlier this year, with some spec bumps, a slightly evolved look and, of course, different screen sizes, just in case you were foolishly expecting Samsung to follow any kind of pattern as far as display dimensions are concerned.

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Apart from the screen sizes there's very little difference between the Tab S models, so this review combines the two tablets into one. I'll talk primarily about the 8.4-inch model and include additional observations about the 10.5-inch version where necessary.

It's a brutal battle down at the budget end of the tablet market — one that Apple refuses to get involved in — but here we're very much at the premium end of the scale. The Galaxy Tab S devices have been built to go toe-to-toe with Apple's slates, a brave and perhaps foolhardy undertaking.

First impressions are good, though: these devices feel like they're made by a company that has perfected its art. Both models have a 2560 x 1600 pixel WQXGA Super AMOLED screen, which works out at 287 pixels-per-inch on the larger model and 360ppi on the smaller one.

The internals are identical, comprising 3GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, an 8MP rear camera and 2.1MP front-facing camera. The Samsung Exynos 5 Octa CPU inside these tablets combines 1.9 and 1.3GHz quad-core processors with the faster taking over from the slower when required at the expense of some battery life.

Those are some eye-popping specs when you consider that the iPad Air gets by on a mere 1GB of RAM, for example, or that the 2013 Nexus 7 offers a resolution of just 323ppi on its 7-inch screen. There's much more to a device than raw specs of course, but on paper at least Samsung has produced a true champion.

The pricing of these slates matches Apple's iPad line. The Wi-Fi Tab S 8.4-inch will set you back £319 (US$399.99, AU$479.00) the same as the 16GB Wi-Fi iPad mini and the Wi-Fi Tab S 10.5-inch comes in at £399 (US$499.99, AU$599.00) the same as the 16GB Wi-Fi iPad Air.

3G/4G versions of the tablets that can access mobile networks with a SIM card are also on the way, as are 32GB models.

Aside from the iPads and the Sony Xperia Tablet Z2,, the Galaxy Tab S doesn't have much competition. You could put it up against the likes of the Nexus 10 (though it's starting to show its age) but really with most other Android tablets going for less powerful innards and lower prices, Samsung has the premium end largely to itself. Has it produced an iPad rival that Android users can be proud of?

Key features

Samsung has never been one to shy away from packing in as many bells and whistles as it can, and the Tab S is no exception. Like the Galaxy S5, the tablet boasts a fingerprint scanner that you may or may not prefer to a PIN code.

It recognized my print every time, but because you need to swipe the home button rather than just put your finger on it, the process can be fiddly - especially the larger tablet, which meant some precise holding to make the function work.

Multi-faceted

There's a multi window feature for multi-tasking which works as advertised, letting you chat while browsing the web or control your music while poring over Google Maps and so on.

It's of more use on the larger tablet and at this stage multi-tasking on a tablet feels kind of superfluous — once you get a keyboard up on screen as well everything starts to get really cluttered.

Tablets are built for single-tasking and there doesn't seem to be any real need to try and turn them into fully fledged computers, but if you think you're going to find the feature useful then by all means power it up.

The way that Samsung has implemented it works fairly well and managing open windows and apps is straightforward. However, only the main native apps and a few extras such as Facebook and Evernote support it, so you can't go multi-tasking crazy.

Phone and tablet together

Another Samsung extra is SideSync, enabling you to link a phone with your tablet — you can then send and receive voice calls, transfer data, send texts and more.

Unfortunately, it only works with a few Samsung phones (the S5, the S4 and the Galaxy Note 3) which limits its appeal. Like Multi Window, it feels like a niche feature created just to show off rather than to meet any particular need, but to some it will be a great innovation.

There are 30 different gifts bundled with the Tab S, covering subscriptions to sites like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to an in-flight Wi-Fi deal with Gogo and a free game or two.

None of them are particularly life-changing but they might sweeten the deal if you're sitting on the fence about picking up one of these tablets.

Xiaomi Mi 3 review

Chinese cult smash is well worth a risky import buy

Xiaomi (pronounced "Shiao Me") has been mentioned a few times before on TechRadar, regularly picked out as "one to watch" for the future as the emerging smartphone brand becomes more widely known.

That's for two big reasons: it has a reputation for making good phones at very low prices, and the fact that former Google/Android man Hugo Barra joined the Chinese maker last year to head up an international push.

It's an interesting company. It sells mobiles direct to customers via its website, so the money it saves on marketing pushes is passed on in offering solid hardware at a budget price - it's not too dissimilar to the OnePlus One in this respect.

Xiaomi's current high-end model is the Mi4, but before then it was the Mi 3 and it offers specs similar to those of most of 2013's flagship Android models, combining a 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 chipset (as seen in the Nexus 5, LG G2, Xperia Z1 Compact and many, many more top-spec mobiles) with a 13MP camera, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage and a 5-inch 1080p resolution display.

In terms of what's inside it, the Xiaomi Mi 3 is very nearly as good as it gets in the world of on-paper performance, if you ignore 2014's brand new models with their superior Snapdragon 801 chipsets.

There's a catch, though. Xiaomi hardware is not officially available outside of China, so buying the Mi 3 or its cheaper RedMi model in the UK, US or Australia, means paying someone else to source them, import them, and pass them on at a significant mark-up.

Happily, though, the Mi 3 can be bought from around £229 (about US$390, AU$415) online including taxes and delivery from several import suppliers, meaning that even after eBay and the sellers have made a few quid there's a substantial price saving to be had.

The Mi 3 is pleasingly thin and angular, with a squared-off look from the front accompanied by curved plastic sides, which seamlessly round into the unibody casing.

I like it. It's minimal and futuristic looking, if not more than a little reminiscent of the Nokia Lumia 900. It does manage to avoid the common fate of looking like a Samsung Galaxy clone that afflicts many budget smartphones.

There's a big speaker grille at the bottom, with microUSB connector to the side. I'm not massively keen on this trend of placing speakers in the bottom edge of the phone, as it means sound gets muffled very easily by your hand when holding it in landscape to watch media or play games.

The top edge of the Mi 3 is also clean and sharp, housing access to the full sized sim car, with the 3.5mm headphone jack alongside it. Power button placement is of the standard right-hand variety, with volume up/down toggle above the power button.

The notification light can blink in different colours, plus there's an option within MIUI to specify personal choices. It can blink red for SMS messages, blue for incoming calls and so on. It's great to see hardware and software working together as well as they do in the Mi 3.

It's slimmer and lighter than Sony Xperia Z2 and, for my money, has more to it style wise than the Huawei Ascend P7, the latter of which is probably the nearest competitor to the Mi 3 in terms of budget brand promises.

The Mi 3 feels like a solid, high-end piece of kit. There's a lovely bit of detailing where the glass of the screen meets the bottom of the phone, with the bezel overlapping the corner a little and creating the impression that there's a thick lump of glass on the front of the Mi 3.

The main negative here is the decision to use capacitive touch buttons instead of using Android's on-screen software buttons that have been widely used for a couple of years now.

This is no doubt down to the fact that the Mi 3 runs the popular MIUI software, a thorough and comprehensive reskin of Android 4.3.

It feels like these buttons are organised backwards. When holding the Mi 3 in the right hand there's a bit of a cramped squeeze to get to the back key, a button used much more widely than the easier to reach menu. That said, if you hold your phone in your left hand it's ideal. Perhaps Xiaomi has its eye on the left-handed phone market?

Also, despite Xiaomi going to great lengths to point out that the Mi 3 comes with an "aluminum-magnesium alloy frame, coated with 3 layers of thermal graphite" it feels like it's made from plastic.

Decent and solid plastic, yes, but perhaps not quite up there with Apple and Sony in terms of impressive, premium feel.

Nvidia Shield Tablet review

It's not for everyone, but this tablet stands a fighting chance to win over gamers

Despite its problems, we actually liked Nvidia's original Shield Android gaming handheld. Our biggest issue with it was that it was bulky and heavy. With rumors swirling around about a Shield 2, we were hoping to see a slimmer, lighter design.

So consider us initially disappointed when we learned that the next iteration of Shield would just be yet another Android tablet. Yawn, right? The fact of the matter is that the Shield Tablet may be playing in an oversaturated market, but it's still great at what it sets out to be.

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At eight inches, the Shield Tablet features a gorgeous 1,900x1,200 display, which shares the same resolution as Google's flagship Nexus 7 tablet. At 13.1 ounces, the Shield Tablet is about three ounces heavier than the Nexus 7 but still a lot lighter than the original's 1 lb. 4.7 ounces.

Part of the weight increase with the Shield Tablet over the Nexus 7 is due to the extra inch that you're getting from the screen, but also because the Shield Tablet is passively cooled and has an extra thermal shield built inside to dissipate heat. It's a little heavier than we like, but isn't likely to cause any wrist problems.

On the back of the Shield is an anti-slip surface and a 5MP camera, and on the front of the tablet we have a front-facing 5MP camera and two front-facing speakers. While the speakers are not going to blow away dedicated Bluetooth speakers, they sound excellent for a tablet. In addition to the speakers, the Shield Tablet has a 3.5mm headphone jack up at the top.

Other ports include Micro USB, Mini HDMI out, and a MicroSD card slot capable of taking up to 128GB cards. Buttons on the Shield include a volume rocker and a power button which we found to be a little small and shallow for our liking.

Performance

All of this is running on the latest version of Android KitKat version 4.4. Nvidia says that it will update the tablet to Android L within a few weeks of Google's official release. If Nvidia's original Shield is any indication of how well the company keeps up with OS updates, you should be able to expect to get the latest version of Android but after a couple of weeks if not a months after release.

Regardless, the Shield Tablet is running a pretty stock version of Android to begin with the main difference being that Nvidia has pre-loaded the tablet with its Shield Hub, which is a 10-foot UI for you to purchase, download, and launch your games.

Arguably the real star of the tablet is Nvidia's new Tegra K1 mobile superchip. The 2.2GHz quad-core A15 SOC features Nvidia's Kepler GPU architecture and 192 CUDA cores along with 2GB of low power DDR3. K1 supports many of the graphical features commonplace in GeForce graphics card including tesselation, HDR lighting, Global illumination, subsurface scattering, and more.

In our performance benchmarks, the K1 killed it. Up until now, the original Shield's actively-cooled Tegra 4 is arguably one of the most if not the most powerful Android SOC on the market, but the K1 slaughters it across the board. In Antutu and GeekBench benchmark, we saw modest gains of 12% to 23% in Shield versus Shield Tablet action.

But in Passmark and GFX Bench's Trex test, we saw nearly a 50% spread, and in 3DMark's mobile Icestorm Unlimited test, we saw an astounding 90% advantage for the Shield Tablet. This is incredible when you consider that the tablet has no fans and a two-watt TDP. Compared to the second-gen Nexus 7, the Shield Tablet benchmarks anywhere from 77% to 250% faster. This SOC is smoking fast.

In terms of battery life, Nvidia is claiming you'll get 10 hours watching/surfing the web and about five hours from gaming with its 19.75 Wh battery. This is up 3.75 Wh up from Google's Nexus 7 equivalent and from our experiential tests, we found those figures to be fairly accurate if not a best case scenario. It will pretty much last you all day, but you'll still want to let it sip juice every night.