14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung recently launched its latest flagship tablets, the AMOLED-endowed Galaxy Tab S duo, but a few months ago the title was held by the high-end product, the Galaxy NotePRO 12.2 which was unveiled at CES 2014.
For some reason, Samsung decided business tablets weren’t big enough, so it launched a massive 12.2-inch effort, aiming to overshadow all that has been launched before it. There’s also the Galaxy TabPRO 12.2 variant of the device, but this one comes without the magic S Pen characteristic of the Note family of devices.
Certainly, the Galaxy TabPRO 12.2 is quite a tablet, bringing great performance, while being extremely well endowed in the features department. And in what follows, we’re going to take a closer look at the most important aspects of this item.
style="color: #aa3333">Design
One thing is certain: this toy is quite huge. For starters, it weighs 753g / 1.6lbs, which doesn’t seem like much at first, but when you hold the tablet in your hands for a prolonged period of time, it becomes quite strenuous on your physique.
Surely, the tablet weighs less than your average laptop, but that’s not really the point, is it? In theory, a tablet should be much lighter and you will certainly feel the weight of it if you put it in a shoulder bag or a backpack.The tablet also feels quite awkward when taking pictures with it. Photography surely isn’t why tablets were invented in the first place but, boy, is it strange to walk with a 12.2-incher around, snapping photographs. You can check out the samples made with the main (8MP with flash) camera, but using the device as a snapper is really awkward. Moving on to other physical characteristics, the Galaxy NotePRO pretty much follows the design cues of the current Samsung design formula.
The tablet’s front is sunken white plastic, while the edges are chrome and the back takes advantage of Samsung’s beloved faux-leather plastic scheme with stitching.
The Galaxy NotePRO also makes for a true Samsung device due to the single chrome-ringed physical button for Home, which sits in the middle between the Back and Recent buttons.
Above the Samsung logo located on the top, you’ll be able to spot a 2MP front camera and ambient light sensor. The top edge right is home to a number of ports and buttons, including the power/standby button and volume rocker off tone one side.
Also on the right from top to bottom, there are the S Pen slot, speaker grille, micro USB 3.0, covered microSD slot and covered SIM card slot. On the left, we find a correspondent speaker and 3.5mm headset jack. Mostly due to its size, when using the tablet we always had to find a way to prop it or had to place it on our lap. The idea is that for the best results the tablet should be used in concert with a keyboard folio, which should also double as a stand.
The addition of such an accessory would certainly make things more comfortable, especially if you’re planning to use the device as some sort of laptop replacement (Samsung wants you to) in order to get productive.
Sadly, a keyboard folio/stand will mean you’ll have to invest an extra amount of money, so you to be able to use this already expensive tablet at its full potential. Companies like Logitech have a dedicated keyboard accessory especially build for the Galaxy NotePRO 12.2, which will take you back with an additional $129 / €95.
style="color: rgb(255,102,0)">Display
One of the main attractions of the Samsung Galaxy NotePRO 12.2 is its display, which offers a beautiful 2560 x 1600 pixel resolution.
Taking into consideration most laptops today offer the bland, standard 1366 x 768 res, it makes sense that some customers might be tempted to adopt the slate and forget all about their notebook.
The screen technology on the Galaxy NotePRO 12.2 is LCD, and even if some voices out there claim AMOLED displays are better, not everybody agrees. Samsung says these screens consume less battery and the colors displayed on them look more vibrant and attractive, but others feel AMOLED offers oversaturated and unnatural colors. So LCD might go better with some tastes.
Anyway, despite the advanced resolution, the screen can look quite grainy and this aspect becomes rather obvious when you’re trying to read text.
This might be blamed upon the digitizer required for the S-Pen to work or on Samsung using a PenTile panel here, and a well-known side-effect of this system is grainy text, especially when it’s displayed in small format.
Thus, the display is divided into multiple Windows 8-like tiles that you can fill up with the content you choose, including sport, business, news, email and such.
Another nice addition of Magazine UX is that users are able to flick one screen left of the home screen and be presented with what matters to them the most.
style="color: #aa3333">Power and Performance
The Galaxy NotePRO 12.2 is quite a power house, in the sense that it embeds an octa-core Exynos 5420 from Samsung’s own garden, which is actually made of four ARM Cortex A15 cores running at 1.9GHz and four Cortex A7 cores running at 1.3GHz.
The slate is fitted with 3GB of RAM and backed up by 32GB of internal storage. Other key specifications include GPS with GLONASS, Wi-Fi b/g/n/ac, 3G data and a huge 9,500 mAh battery.
Judging by the list of specs mentioned above, you can expect performance to be excellent on the tablet, although after using it for a continuous number of hours, we noticed that slate started to overheat, but maybe it’s because we were keeping it on our laps.
After working with it for about 3 or 4 hours, the device ceased to be 100% responsive and we experienced some lags when opening certain apps, but that’s something applying to all tablets out there, isn’t it? Still, expectations are higher when you’re talking about a high-end device.
style="color: #aa3333">Software
Software is another strong point of the Galaxy NotePRO 12.2. Apart from the Magazine UX interface mentioned above, the tablet brings a whole bunch of pre-installed applications to the table, including Email, Gallery, Hancom Office, Messages, Music, S Planner, NYTimes, Samsung’s App Store and Video.
These are apps appealing to the average users, not necessary the business ones, and this is as good a time to mention that the tablet supports multiple profiles, so a business user might share the tablet with members of the family.
The slate comes bundled with business-centric apps like Cisco’s WebEx, Remote PC, e-Meeting, NYTimes and Businessweek, aimed at professionals.
Furthermore, there’s a version of Autodesk’s Sketchbook app which has been designed to work in concert with S-Pen.
Samsung throws in a two-year free subscription to RemotePC, which enables you to access a PC or Mac from your tablet.
There’s also the WatchON TV controller embedded and the Samsung Knox which creates a password and PIN-protected instance for the tablet’s interface.Another attention-grabbing feat of the NotePRO 12.2 is its ability to multitask, achieved by offering the option of opening multiple windows at once on-screen.
This is achieved by swiping on the right, which will draw about a menu from where you can select the apps you want to open in separate windows, including browser, email, YouTube, S Note and more.
The apps can be scaled down to the particular size you want and the system works quite well, albeit opening up to four windows can slow down performance a little bit, but the feature is quite useful. Imagine being able to use a browser, a video player, the Gmail app and the S Note one at the same time.style="color: #aa3333">S Pen
The S Pen is an integral part of the Galaxy NotePRO experience. Upon pulling the stylus out of the slot, Samsung floating Air Command menu will immediately pop up on screen and you will be presented with five different options to choose from.
The first one is Action Menu, which lets you write a quick email address or phone number and have it turned into an actual command. Moving on, we have Scrapbook, which will let you draw a selection on the screen to be captured in its original format. Screen Write is the way to go if you want to take a screenshot, but you can also press the S Pen against the screen for more than 3 seconds and get the same result.
S-Finder is a local and Web search app and Pen Window lets you launch apps in floating windows over any apps you might have running at the moment.
The S-Pen is quite fun to use in Evernote, the versatile note-taking app and SketchBook Pro. You can even draw quite well with it and you can covert hand-written text into computer-generated one, too.
SketchBook Pro is a great drawing app showing off the stylus benefits, including pressure sensitivity, Photoshop-style layers and a whole lot of brush options.
style="color: rgb(255,102,0)">Audio
The speaker grills on the Samsung Galaxy NotePRO 12.2 are located right and left, left and right facing, so not exactly on the back or in the front.
As the Galaxy NotePRO 12.2 might be used for presentations and video conferences, those who hope to be relying on audio should know the device falters in this department.
The volume is quite decent and loud enough to satisfy those located farther from it, but the sound quality of the stereo speakers is not so great. Most importantly, there’s too much treble and not much bass, but if you’re going to use the slate for movie watching, you should be just fine.
style="color: rgb(153,51,102)">Battery
As mentioned above, the Galaxy NotePRO 12.2 has a pretty hefty 9,500 mAh battery, which shouldn’t be a surprise, considering how large the tablet actually is and what specs it bundles on the inside.
Compared to other large-framed tablets, this is quite a lot. For example, the Sony Xperia Tablet Z has a 6000 mAh battery.
As such, you can expect to be able to use the tablet for about 8 or 9 hours without having to worry about having to go back in for a recharge.
The Good
The Bad
That’s why, the best advice we can give you is to get a keyboard companion/stand to use with it. The problem is that you’ll have to pay extra money for such items.
The tablet is quite expensive in itself, as it sells for $750 / €549. For this amount of money, there are other worthy slates available on the market, like the Apple iPad Air or the Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet.
style="color: rgb(153,51,102)">Overall Impressions
The slate is a perfect business tool for those who have some cash to spend. But the problem remains, you’ll need to pay extra for the accessories that will let you utilize the device at its full potential.
But if you’re looking to get productive on Android, the Galaxy NotePRO 12.2 might be right the answer for you, due to its huge HD display and delightful S-Pen interactivity.
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