Exceptional: The 10.5-inch Galaxy Tab S in bronze.
The lion's share of Android tablets are more or less the same. The hardware specs may differ, but from the software side, there isn't a great deal of variation.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 is one of the rare exceptions, combining best-in-breed hardware with a selection of software inclusions that make it better suited for productivity than most.
One of the most interesting additions to the Galaxy Tab S is the new SideSync feature. This displays a slightly less than life-sized virtual representation of a compatible Samsung smartphone (currently the Galaxy Note 3, S4 and S5) on the tablet screen, letting you browse the web, open apps, play music and even answer phone calls through the tablet. This is handy if you're using the Galaxy Tab S already and don't want to juggle between the two devices.
The Multi Window feature, carried over from previous Samsung devices like the Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Note 2014 Edition, lets you run two supported apps side by side, making it much easier to multi-task compared to Android's multi-tasking bar.
The Hancom Office suite, exclusive to Samsung tablets, includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation apps, and it's hands-down the best productivity suite we've seen for Android. The developers have managed to cram almost all of the features found in the desktop software into an interface that's surprisingly tablet-friendly.
While Samsung hasn't deviated from its usual all-plastic aesthetic, the Galaxy Tab S 10.5 still manages to turn heads with its incredibly thin 6.6mm profile, the gold piping around the border (a nice change from the standard silver), the same dimpled rear found on the Galaxy S5 and white and bronze colour options.
The 10.5-inch display is easily one of the best you'll find on a tablet, pairing Samsung's trademark vivid AMOLED display technology with a sharp 2560 x 1600 screen resolution. Nor is lag an issue. The Galaxy Tab S 10.5's Exynos 5 processor uses no less than eight cores to keep the tablet humming along smoothly (although only four are active at a time to maximise battery life), and it's assisted by a solid 3GB helping of RAM.
The Tab S 10.5 comes with a 7900mAh sealed battery, and using a mix of web browsing, Word processing and general app usage, it lasted for 7.5 hours. This isn't the best battery life we've seen on a tablet, but between the beefy octa-core processor and better than Full HD resolution, it's on par with our expectations.
The Galaxy Tab S is also the first Samsung tablet to boast a fingerprint scanner, which you can use for unlocking the device and buying things with PayPal without having to enter a password. A handful of third party apps also support it, such as LastPass for logging into websites.
Is it as good as an iPad? Samsung certainly thinks so, and has matched the Galaxy Tab S' pricing with the equivalent iPad Air. The 16GB Wi-Fi version is $599, and adding 4G increases the pricetag by $150.
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