The Tab S feels well made, with no flex in the chassis. At 6.5mm, it's not as slender as the iPad Air 2 or Xperia Z4 Tablet, but there's not much in it when you hold each of them in your hand. Likewise, the Galaxy Tab S 10.5 is a fraction heavier at 465g, but this isn't surprising given its larger screen.
Samsung's superb Galaxy Tab S range has just been replaced by its pair of brand-new Tab S2 tablets, but if you don't want to pay full price for the Tab S2 9.7 or want something a little larger, then the Galaxy Tab A 10.5 is still a great bargain. With its high-resolution 2, 560x1, 080 Super AMOLED panel, the Galaxy Tab S 10.5 continues to have one of the best screens around, putting up serious competition to the iPad Air 2, Nexus 9, and even the Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet. It's also received a £100 price drop since it first launched, too, making it a bit of a big screen bargain.
The Tab S 10.5's screen uses a slightly different AMOLED technology to Samsung's smaller Galaxy Tab S 8.4, as the 8.4 has a pentile pixel arrangement, where there are two subpixels per pixel ( red and green or blue and green) instead of three ( red, green and blue) . The Tab S 10.5, on the other hand, has what Samsung calls S Stripe, where each pixel has a rectangular red and a green pixel and a longer, thinner stripe blue pixel, so The Galaxy Tab S uses Samsung's eight-core Exynos 5 Octa system-on-a-chip, which consists of four ARM Cortex-A15 cores running at 1.9GHz and four Cortex-A7 chips running at 1.3GHz. The trick is that the less powerful, and therefore more energy-efficient, cores can take over for less intensive tasks, helping to prolong the tablet's battery life. It certainly seems to do the trick, as the Tab S 10.5 lasted an excellent 13h 27m in our continuous video playback test with the screen brightness set to our standard 170cd/m2 brightness. This surpasses both the iPad Air 2 and the Nexus 9, so even the most power-hungry users should be able to get a full day's use out of the Tab S 10.5 without having to return to the mains.
