Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra - The Overachiever

When it comes to tablets, I'm biased.

Against them.

Personally - and this really is just me - I struggle to come up with a genuine use case for a tablet that isn't something I could do just as well, if not better, on a laptop.

Or even a phone.

Often tablets end up the poor stepchildren in any given range of tech... under-powered, aesthetically anonymous and usually running an operating system that's been half-heartedly ported across from something that was initially designed for a handset.

Well, it's safe to say, Samsung obviously doesn't feel the same way.

The Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra is definitely not just a giant phone with worse specs. 

For starters, it'd be a particularly giant phone, with a display that measures in at an unbelievable 14.6-inches. That's huge. When I got married (a million billion years ago) someone gave us a 14-inch TV for the bedroom. The Tab S11 Ultra is wider than that - especially given its cinematic 16:10 aspect ratio.

The display itself is a magnificent, 120Hz Dynamic AMOLED 2X with an anti-reflective surface - just like you might find on the latest flagship Samsung TVs. The toned-down reflection paired with a searing peak brightness of 1600 nits makes for fantastic viewing, whatever the lighting conditions.

There's a booming, yet accurate, quad speaker setup to match, which really does make this a genuine contender for a second TV in your house, be it in the kitchen, bedroom or study.

The study might be the most useful option because Samsung has now tweaked DEX mode, which essentially transforms the user experience of the Tab S11 Ultra into a PC-like desktop, complete with multiple windows and a taskbar along the bottom. The latest version now allows you to share your DEX mode setup to other external compatible displays to create a genuine multi-screen environment.

This means you now have the ultimate portability of this high-powered tablet complete with the option to display your big presentation in the office boardroom - no bulky laptop or messy cables required.

And I do meant "ultimate" when it comes to portability. The Tab S11 Ultra is a mere 5.1mm thick (or thin). Think about that for a minute. That's a 14.6-inch display on a tablet slimmer than any non-folding phone on the market. Talk about jaw-dropping design. What's more, it feels perfectly rigid and robust in your hands - probably due to its enhanced Armor Aluminium chassis. It's even rated IP68 against water and dust. Only weighs in at 692grams, by the way.

I've called it powerful, so let's talk a few geeky details. The chip is MediaTek's Dimensity 9400+ - a true flagship by anyone's standard, based on TSMC's 3nm process which is pretty much as nano as it gets. This also means high-end graphics for premium gaming performance and speedy rendering of video and 3D animations.

Not to mention Samsung's latest neural processing power to bring you all the cutting-edge tools and tricks from Galaxy AI and Gemini.

The Tab S11 Ultra ships with an S Pen stylus in the box but unfortunately, because I was reviewing a pre-release device, I wasn't sent an S Pen and couldn't fully test some of the cleverest AI features, like Drawing Assist, which literally cleans up your rough sketches and turns them into shareable works of art.

The S Pen makes for a more accurate Circle to Search too - simply circle anything on screen and let Google Gemini find out all about it for you.

In a short time, we've come to expect this kind of enhanced productivity from Samsung's flagship handsets, so it's only natural to find it all enlarged for our convenience on this device.

Even the camera setup out-performs almost any other tablet. The rear shooter is a dual-lens affair comprising a 13MP main lens backed up with a 10MP ultra-wide. Need to capture some UHD 4K footage for your next project? No problem. I don't fully understand why the 12MP selfie-cam is also ultra-wide, although it does tend to mitigate the trap many users often fall into when joining online meetings via a portable device; exposing the other attendees to an extreme closeup of your nostrils. The ultra-wide selfie shot immediately drops you back into context.

So, despite my protests in the introduction, it's starting to sound like the Tab S11 Ultra has won me over, right? 

And here's what unexpectedly, really brought it home. Fitness. Or my lack of.

I've recently been forced to acknowledge I'm overweight, out of shape and have lost almost all my flexibility. So I've been using the Samsung Health app as a catalyst to make some changes. Apart from all the other things it excels at, the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra is the most comprehensive health tracker I've used to date and I've already made improvements to my sleep routine and found a way to deal with my snoring (much to Domestic Manager's relief).

So what's that got to do with the Tab S11 Ultra? Well, the Samsung Health app can link you to a comprehensive selection of guided workouts, specifically tailored to your unique fitness goals. I've never really paid much attention to this feature before because I've usually come across them on my watch or phone and couldn't quite see the point.

But with the Tab S11 Ultra mounted in a stand, suddenly I was back at the gym, working out with a professional instructor. The 14.6-inch screen is plenty big enough for me to see exactly how to perform each exercise correctly and the quad-speaker sound system pumps out the beats plenty loud enough to push me through those last few sets. At the risk of sounding like an infomercial, I've already lost 2kg in two weeks. Still a way to go though. Wish me luck.

So there you have it; the device that converted me from tablet agnostic to relying on one for my general health and wellbeing. It's flagship fast and the screen is huge while the rest of it is super slim. Even the battery life is great. There's simply no way to mark this tablet down.

    

Click here for more information on the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra.