Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra review

Display

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra features a 14.6-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X display with 2,960 x 1,848 pixels (239ppi, 16:10), 120Hz refresh rate and HDR10+ support.

The screen has a small notch for the front camera.

Samsung's official pages list 1,000 nits for maximum high and 1,600 nits for peak brightness.

Our measurements confirm those numbers. We captured a maximum manual brightness of 452 nits and a maximum automatic brightness of 1,058 nits when using a white test patch that occupied 75% of the screen. By reducing the white patch to 10% of the screen area, the maximum brightness increased to approximately 1,600 nits.

The screen supports up to 120Hz refresh rate and there are two options for smoothness - adaptive and standard. Both are refresh rate ceilings - adaptive allows for up to 120Hz, while standard - up to 60Hz.

The Adaptive mode is the default one and offers a wide range of refresh rates.

The screen drops to 1Hz for static content, no matter the mode, and will boost up to 120Hz when browsing, working with most apps and HRR-compatible games. We tested with various videos - 48fps ones are shown at 48Hz refresh rate, 30fps - 30Hz, 60fprs - 60Hz, etc.

Finally, the screen is HDR10+ certified and all popular streaming services readily served high-resolution HDR10 content in our testing.

Battery life

The Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra is powered by a 11,600mAh battery, which is a modest 200mAh increase over the Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra.

In our battery tests, the S11 Ultra scored 13:25h of Active Use Score, among the best across the tablets we've tested so far. The S11 Ultra aced all our tests and posted some impressive numbers for a tablet with such a large screen.

Since tablets rarely have cellular connectivity, we use Whatsapp for the call test in our tablet reviews. If you prefer, you can easily turn it off from the calculation of the Active Use Score by moving its slider to zero.

Charging speed

The Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra supports up to 45W fast wired charging. The tablet ships without a charger and it is bundled with Samsung's EP-DW767 3A cable.

We used Samsung's TP4510 45W original power adapter with its own 5A cable for our charging test.

Using the said adapter, we clocked 21% of charge at the 15min mark and 38% at the 30min mark. The full charge took 95 mins, though the last 10% took almost 20mins to fill up.

You can enable or disable the fast charging, and battery protection options like adaptive charging and charging limit are available.

Speakers

The Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra packs four large speakers placed 2x2 across the shorter sides. They support Dolby Atmos (off by default). Using the enhancement gives a slight vocal boost but doesn't increase or decrease the loudness.

The 4-speaker setup scored an Excellent mark on our loudness test, and we can confirm the tablet has impressively loud speakers with deep and rich sound. The audio quality is very good with great vocals, deep bass and acceptable high frequency range.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.