- Okay, so I've made a Short on this and every single time people get really into them and I'm really into them. But the question that always keeps coming up every time is, Are these iPad killers? Like, is an iPad killer a real thing? So let's talk about it. So this is the newest, highest-end Android tablet from Samsung, the Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra, And it's even more ridiculous than the previous year's already crazy Ultra, and I love it. That was last year's version. And so, now, Just like the rest of Samsung's recent announcements, This new one mostly looks the same as last year's version but all of the changes they've made.
- Are in the same direction, just making it even more capable. So you've got this gigantic 14. 6-inch tablet that, I mean, It feels like I'm holding a small TV in my hands. It's somehow also razor thin with a huge battery inside And it doesn't snap in half, despite looking like It probably should be susceptible to that. But hey, watch Zack's video for yourself If you don't believe me, It survives better than a lot of other devices. This year though, a new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy inside plus a new vapor chamber cooling system under the hood, So there's going to be an even higher ceiling for performance for everything it's already good at. We've seen this thing do multitasking well for years and be quick to scroll around, and open and close apps with normal usage. And now, it'll do better at gaming and video editing, and potentially, also last a bit longer on that same 11,200 milliamp-hour battery.
- That's bigger than any battery that's ever been in an iPad. This year, the quad speaker setup is also now made up of 20% larger speakers, which is a pretty big jump. And I'm not ready to call these the best-sounding speakers in any tablet quite yet, That goes to the iPad Pro still. But these sure do get loud with very little distortion, and you can flip on Dolby Atmos audio If you want some pretty impressive surround sound effects for music videos or games. And then, this entire tablet is now IP68 water and dust-resistant for the first time, which means it's safe, not to just splash it with water, but completely submerge The whole thing underwater, and it'll be totally fine, which is crazy, I don't know any situation where you would end up with a tablet underwater, Maybe you're recklessly watching Netflix.
- Next to a pool or something, and then you drop it in, I don't know. But if you did, it would still be fine. But then on top of that, This S Pen also comes in the box again, And this thing also now has an IP68 rating of its own and it also now supports bi-directional charging, but not the bi-directional charging You're probably thinking of When you can accept a charge from the tablet, but also charge other things. No, I just mean whatever direction the pen faces When you magnetize it to the back of the tablet, It will work and charge perfectly fine, which is better than last year. What I'm surprised doesn't come in the box Is there any charging brick? I mean, for a tablet that does everything, This thing is capable of 45-watt charging, which is solid. But the only way to get that is to buy a charger.
- Something like this Anker Prime desktop charger, which I would get over any Samsung first-party charger Because it's gallium nitride, it's smaller, and then it also has multi-port charging up to 240 watts max output. So you could charge a laptop at full speed and the tablet at full speed at the same time. But then, of course, they also make a convenient battery bank option. So this is the Anker Prime 250-watt battery bank with two USB-C ports and one USB-A port. It has a built-in inductive wireless charging pad so that can charge the battery bank up to 100 watts, And then there's an app connected to it that lets you configure the display and optimize charging or even play a sound to find it. It's way more advanced than any charger that's ever come in any Samsung box.
- For you to check this one out right below that like button. But the point is, I mean, You've seen all the specs now, they're all huge numbers. It's a 14-and-a-half-inch screen in my hands, It's 120 hertz, it's an 11,200 milliamp-hour battery, It's quad speakers, it's a minimum of 12 gigs of RAM, It's a terabyte of internal storage with up to another terabyte of micro SD card storage. All these numbers are great, But it's using this tablet and holding it, It's hard to describe it to you but it's even more hilariously fun. So I'm personally partial to like media consumption on devices like this, like I would just want to watch YouTube videos on a gigantic screen, take them with me, download them offline, watch 'em on flights in my free time, like It's already amazing for that. And honestly, I think that's what.
- Most people do on tablets a lot of the time. But of course, for all the additional stuff that tablet power users are gonna be doing, There is just so much more that this thing is capable of. It's at the forefront of tablets. There are all of Samsung's multi-window multitasking features and popup windows on that 16x10 aspect ratio display, All of the stylus features, which, if you wanna use a stylus on a tablet, It feels like Samsung and Apple Are the only ones taking it seriously? But you know, I'm using it to sign documents Every once in a while, but there are some people whose entire workflows go through this thing. And then you can't forget about DeX, There's a whole clever keyboard folio case That I didn't even have here for this one but I had it for the S8 Ultra, and that adds a whole nother dimension, and DeX Mode has been super useful
- While giving you that desktop experience with independent windows and you can plug it into an even larger display, if you want to. It's more powerful than anything Apple has even tried to do it on the iPad. And all of that isn't even mentioning that This is probably the biggest camera viewfinder anyone has ever used. Plus on the front, that little notch up there, I've mentioned this before, but there are two selfie cameras, a front-facing normal camera and an ultra-wide that can do auto framing in videos or video calls, similar to what Apple calls Center Stage, except these cameras are actually in the right place on the long side of the tablet. So all that being said, can this be an iPad killer? That's the question we keep asking, and it's a real question, like this is competing against the iPad Pro,
- The biggest, baldest iPad Pro, but it's gonna have a lot of things, a lot of features, a lot of numbers to one-up the iPad Pro, right? It's got a bigger screen, it's got bigger speakers, It's got external expandable storage, it's got a fingerprint reader that the iPad Pro doesn't have, and all of that costs $100 more than the equivalent iPad Pro. This reminds me of the conversation We've had about Sony phones. Like, in the world of Android phones, Sony is out here making incredibly well-equipped, super high-end phones with a ton of enthusiast features and expandable memory and manual controls that the competition like just straight up doesn't offer. And that's only really at the expense of a little bit of automatic mode usability and price. Like they just, they're expensive, they cost more. And while it's really easy to point out all the obvious benefits and advantages to all these extra features.
- And these cool things that it does, It turns out that the number of people who will take advantage of these features is tiny. And I mean, they're everywhere on YouTube, but when it comes to actually voting with their wallets, Most people end up just going with This is sort of a more standard one. And I feel like there is A similar phenomenon happening here. For whatever reason, videos about these tablets do numbers, They're going crazy, like people love to see these on video and I like talking about 'em. But then when it comes to actually buying them, people, the ecosystem effect is way stronger than any YouTube comments would suggest. People love flocking to the iPad for iMessage and FaceTime and all these other things. But to keep it even more simple, I have this analogy that I like even better, People like bigger screens as long as it doesn't sacrifice too much
- In the other areas of the device. So take the MacBook Air, for example. That 13-inch MacBook Air was one of the bestselling laptops for years, It was Apple's number-one bestselling laptop for a long time, and people wanted a bigger screen but the only way that they could get a bigger screen and still, buy an Apple product was to move up to the 16-inch MacBook Pro, which was just dramatically more expensive, I mean, it was overkill, Most people did not need that much computer. And so, people would start to drift away and go buy a different, slightly bigger screened laptop from some other company. So much so that Apple finally this year decided to introduce a larger 15-inch MacBook Air, and it turned out that's exactly what people wanted, They just want the bigger screen. On the other end of this, Apple tried introducing a mini iPhone for two whole years,
- Which you would think is a brilliant idea if you only read YouTube comments. But again, it turns out most people want the bigger screen. And so, that ended up not selling enough, It got discontinued and today we have a Plus phone instead. This is a bigger screen tablet than the iPad Pro, which is why it's so amazing and impressive to hold and look at. But it's also a very different tablet from the iPad Pro, It's a hundred bucks more, but it's an Android tablet, It has a whole different feature set. And for a lot of people, that's too much sacrifice and a lot of people will continue to just get iPads. But for those who are not looped into the ecosystem and who don't depend on these features, This is a hell of a tablet.
.jpg)
