Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 review

Gallery

The gallery on the Galaxy Tab S 10.5 offers various sorting and viewing options. Pinch zooming in or out will increase or reduce the size of the thumbnails. The album view shows a stack of photos with a navigational bar on the left with all the albums.

The Gallery app

The app supports bulk actions and photo notes. There are lots of sharing options as well, as well as a powerful embedded image editor. It supports highly customizable slideshows, too.

Music player

The music player relies on a customizable tabbed interface rather than the previous split-screen UI. Playlists are supported as well. The bottom of the screen has the basic music controls.

The music player

The Now playing screen gives you the usual options - a timeline scrubber for the track, playback controls, and an AllShare shortcut. A coverflow-like list of album art lets you know what the next song will be and is an easy way to skip to it. The music player will also try to find the lyrics for the song you're listening to.

Now playing screen

Samsung has implemented several audio-enhancement features. The equalizer presets (called SoundAlive) are cleverly organized into a square similar to the Music Square. The presets balance between Treble and Bass, Vocals and Instrumental. You can also just tap the Auto toggle or enable a Tube amp effect.

Video player

The video player has three tabs - Personal, Downloads and Nearby devices - complete with a search field. The available videos show up as a grid of animated thumbnails, but list and folder view are also available.

The video player

Unfortunately, the video codec support is quite subpar. Most videos we tried resulted in an "audio codec not supported" message and even some basic video codecs don't work (i.e. DivX). MKV, AVI (XviD) and MP4 videos do play, but anything beyond MP3 or AAC sound is no-go.

An interesting feature of the video player is the ability to have a video running in a pop-up, which is visible throughout the user interface.

The same SoundAlive audio-enhancing technology from the music player is available here too. There are additional settings for the brightness, playback speed and feeding the audio through Bluetooth (if you have wireless speakers).

If subtitles are available, the video player will automatically find and load them. You can also manually load subtitles, if the video and subtitle file names don't match. You can change the zoom mode (100% or fit to screen with and without affecting the videos aspect ratio) and there's a pinch zoom too, in case you want to get close to a specific part of the action.

Solid audio quality

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 performance in our audio quality test was identical to that of its little brother - the Galaxy Tab S 8.4. When docked to an active external amplifier, it produced stellar audio, scoring greatly in every part of the test. Its volume levels were above average too, rounding up an excellent overall performance.

The stereo crosstalk degradation when you plug in a pair of headphones is rather big, but the good news is none of the other readings are affected. It's not a perfect performance here, but one that should please the vast majority of users.

Check out the table and see for yourself.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5	+0.05, -0.01	-95.8	92.8	0.0030	0.0092	-96.4
Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 (headphones attached)	+0.04, -0.02	-95.8	92.7	0.0098	0.013	-43.6
Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1	+0.02, -0.08	-93.2	92.6	0.0022	0.011	-94.4
Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1 (headphones attached)	+0.21, -0.13	-93.5	92.3	0.030	0.049	-66.9
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition	+0.01, -0.04	-95.5	90.6	0.015	0.016	-97.3
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition (headphones attached)	+0.01, -0.05	-95.2	90.5	0.0086	0.043	-70.1
Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2	+0.04, -0.01	-95.1	90.9	0.0028	0.0085	-92.4
Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 (headphones attached)	+0.03, -0.04	-95.1	90.9	0.013	0.041	-65.1
Sony Xperia Tablet Z	+0.11, -0.10	-87.0	89.2	0.033	0.030	-87.8
Sony Xperia Tablet Z (headphones attached)	+0.21, -0.36	-86.6	88.8	0.114	0.233	-45.4
Apple iPad 4	+0.04, -0.00	-85.7	85.7	0.0019	0.0017	-85.2
Apple iPad 4 (headphones attached)	+0.00, -0.07	-85.7	85.6	0.0027	0.093	-81.0
Google Nexus 10	+0.03, -0.04	-82.3	82.2	0.011	0.022	-81.4
Google Nexus 10 (headphones attached)	+0.09, -0.24	-82.7	82.7	0.067	0.204	-77.9
Apple iPad mini 2 (headphones attached)	+0.11, -0.00	-93.6	93.6	0.0023	0.030	-62.2

Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.

Loudspeaker

While our Galaxy Tab S 10.5 doesn't have telephony features, we still tested the stereo speakers performance as the slate will be used for music and videos. It scored a Good score and we can confirm the stereo speakers are indeed loud enough.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overal score
Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet	62.5	62.1	60.7	Below Average
Apple iPad mini 2	65.7	62.1	72.3	Below Average
Google Nexus 10	68.3	66.1	67.8	Average
Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1	67.7	66.2	69.8	Average
Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5	70.1	65.8	75.7	Good
Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4	68.7	66.5	75.8	Good
Apple iPad Air	67.9	65.9	76.6	Good
Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4	75.7	66.6	76.8	Very Good
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014	75.7	66.6	77.2	Very Good
OnePlus One	74.8	73.5	80.2	Excellent

You can find more on the testing procedure here.