Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 review: Compact and capable, but not groundbreaking

Table of Contents:

Galaxy Tab S11 Specs

A proper flagship tablet

Here are the Galaxy Tab S11 hardware specs at a glance:

Galaxy Tab S11 Design and Display

A sharp-dressed tablet

A fairly compact tablet that’s easy to love (Image Credit – PhoneArena)

Both employ the same flat design language that’s now pretty much universal in the industry. The Galaxy Tab S11 is made of Armor Aluminum and features Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5 at the front. 

Just like all of Samsung’s previous tablets, the Galaxy Tab S11 boasts a very media-friendly 16:10 aspect ratio, which is unlike the more productivity-oriented 3:2 aspect ratio you’d get on an iPad. It’s exceptionally comfortable to hold, carry around, and use. The tablet is water- and dust-resistant as per the IP68 rating, so you may even use it by the pool.

Size-wise, the Galaxy Tab S11 is fairly compact for an 11-inch slate with a thickness of just 5.6 mm. The latest iPad Air is just as thin, but it’s wider yet narrower. The Galaxy Tab S11 is also fairly lightweight at less than 500 grams, which is significantly less than what an iPad Air weighs. 

In terms of colors, the situation with the Galaxy Tab S11 is pretty boring: it only comes in Gray and Silver. A pretty conservative selection that lacks any colorful hues.

Inside the box, you will find the tablet itself, a charging cable, an S Pen, and the usual leaflets and manuals that are required by law. 

A lovely screen (Image by PhoneArena)

The Galaxy Tab S11 features a lovely 11-inch display, a Dynamic AMOLED 2X one. It’s a 1-120Hz HDR screen with improved peak brightness that now reaches a peak of 1,600 nits. 

According to our tests, the Galaxy Tab S11 boasts one particularly awesome display. Aside from the near-perfect default color temperature calibration and viewing angles, the tablet reaches nearly 1,500 nits, which matches Samsung’s specification. An iPad Pro is slightly brighter and has better grayscale color accuracy, but for most people, the differences would be totally marginal. 

The Galaxy Tab S11 comes with an optical in-display fingerprint scanner as well as facial unlock. The fingerprint is mostly fine, but it’s a bit slow and sometimes requires a second touch to successfully register your fingertip, so definitely not the best one around. 

Galaxy Tab S11 Keyboard and Stylus

However, the S Pen has been slightly downgraded in comparison with the S Pen on the previous generation. First up, we no longer get Bluetooth connection, limiting some extra features. You no longer can use the stylus as a camera remote. 

Another downgrade, at least for me, is the shape of the stylus. The new one has a hexagonal shape and is a bit less comfortable to hold and use for prolonged periods of time as opposed to the mostly circular S Pen of before. 

Galaxy Tab S11 Performance & Benchmarks

MediaTek power

The Dimensity 9400+ is a 3nm powerhouse (Image by PhoneArena)

The Galaxy Tab S11 comes with MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400+ 3nm chipset, which is pretty much a pound-for-pound rival to the Snapdragon 8 Elite. This chipset performs exceptionally well in both real life and synthetic benchmarks, and I never felt the need for “more” performance.

GPU Performance

In terms of graphics performance, the Galaxy Tab S11 and the MediaTek chip are performing very well, with a rather high peak performance. The sustained performance is also very decent, even surpassing the latest iPad Air. This means you’d be able to retain higher framerates for longer on the Galaxy tablet. 

The tablet comes with 12GB of RAM in all three storage versions: 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB. There’s also a microSDXC card slot on deck for storage expansion, which is definitely a rarity these days.

Galaxy Tab S11 Software

One UI is a pleasure to use thanks to the multitude of customization options and features on board, and it wouldn’t be an overstatement to crown it one of the best custom Android skins right now.

 
You no longer can access Samsung DEX on the tablet itself (you have to connect to a monitor), which can definitely be perceived as a downgrade by many. Instead, you can use a new on-device DeX mode which lets you put your apps in a dedicated workspace by going into your recent apps and enjoying a slightly more desktop-like experience. It’s certainly a bit more confusing than the on-device DeX of old.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 comes with a pretty decent set of quad speakers on board. These deliver loud, room-filling sound with no distortion, excellent bass, rich mids, and lovely highs. The sound is not as powerful as on the Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra but is exceptional nonetheless.

One thing to know about the Galaxy Tab S11 range is that Samsung has gotten rid of haptic feedback. Granted, the vibrations were never great on the company’s previous tablets, so the loss isn’t that big, but it’s still worth noting that this tablet won’t vibrate, no matter what. 

Galaxy Tab S11 Battery and Charging

There’s an 8,400 mAh battery inside the Galaxy Tab S11, a decent capacity for a compact slate, and it turns out that it pairs exceptionally well with the Dimensity chipset on board. The two successfully deliver a pretty decent battery life, all things considered, and the Galaxy Tab S11 holds its own against larger and more capable tablets even. 

In our custom battery tests, which are conducted with the display manually set at 200 nits of brightness to ensure a level playing field, the Galaxy Tab S11 achieves almost 10 hours in the web browsing test, nearly seven hours in the video playback one, and eleven and a half hours in the gaming test. Those figures are pretty great when compared against the larger Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra and Apple’s latest iPad Pro and iPad Air. Great!

PhoneArena Battery Test Results:

The tablet supports up to 45W wired charging. A quick 30-minute charge brings the battery up to 40%, while a full charge takes 97 minutes, which is comparable with most Galaxy flagship phones, for example. 

As usual, no wireless charging here due to the all-aluminum design.

Galaxy Tab S11 Camera

Decent enough

Let’s be real, cameras on tablets are an afterthought, as they hold significantly less value than the camera system on a smartphone, for example. 

The Galaxy Tab S11 comes with a 13MP wide and a 12MP front-facing camera hidden in the bezel. No unsightly v-shaped notch like on the Galaxy S11 Ultra here, which is great. 

In terms of image quality, the tablet delivers okay results. It won’t wow you, but it won’t disappoint you either, provided that you know what you’re in for.  

Photo Quality

The quality of both the rear and front cameras is more than acceptable. Photos taken with the tablet deliver good details, ample sharpness, and okay dynamics. Sure, if you start pixel-peeping, you will quickly start noticing issues that we normally attribute to non-flagship cameras, but for what it is, the Galaxy Tab S11 delivers okay image quality. 

 

Should you buy it?

Viewed in a vacuum, the Galaxy Tab S11 is an excellent tablet. Compact, lightweight, and powerful, it is one of the better ways to consume media at home in a practical way. It boasts some very decent battery life and has one of the better displays on a compact Android tablet. 

However, when you consider previous Galaxy Tab S devices, it’s not an enormous improvement. In fact, you should probably not consider upgrading from the older Galaxy Tab S9, especially if you experience no outstanding issues with that one. 

Overall, we’d recommend the Galaxy Tab S11 to anyone willing to experience Android and Samsung’s latest One UI on a slightly larger screen than the average Samsung device and especially to users who enjoy experiencing media in the best way possible.