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- Great performance and battery life
- Stupendous 2x AMOLED Dynamic display
- Usable as a laptop in DeX mode
- A little on the large and heavy side
- Very expensive
- Android app optimisation for tablets still needs improving
The Samsung Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra is the latest in a long line of tablets that have aimed to take on the iPad Pro at its own game. But despite delivering superb hardware each time, it feels as if Samsung has been operating with one hand tied behind its back.
This year, it’s the same story. The latest Ultra is a fantastic productivity tablet that comes complete with stylus and a brilliant keyboard to turn it into a top-level laptop replacement, and yet Android, or more specifically Android Apps, seem just as unsuited to the display of a giant 14.6in tablet as ever.
Still, with Android about to get more serious about desktop use with the launch of the Googlebook OS, that could be about to change – and so could the fortunes of Samsung’s flagship tablet range.
What do you get for the money?
The Samsung Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra is certainly not cheap. It’s £1,399 for the base 256GB model, which gets you the tablet and S Pen stylus, but not a keyboard. You’ll have to pay another £399 for that, bringing the cost to £1,798. There are also 512GB and 1TB models that cost even more.
If that really is too rich for you, Samsung is also launching a 12.6in model – the Galaxy Tab S12 Plus – which is £200 cheaper.
The closest equivalent from Apple’s stable of tablets is its flagship iPad Pro 13in, and it’s even pricier. It starts at £1,499 (again with 256GB of storage), but does not include a stylus or 5G connectivity, which add another £279 to the overall price (or £329 if you want the premium Apple Pencil Pro). Adding a Magic Keyboard to the package (£349), brings the base price of the iPad Pro to a minimum of £2,127.
When it comes to premium productivity tablets, Samsung’s are clearly the better value machines. The good news is they can absolutely match Apple when it comes to hardware quality and features, too.
Build and design
The Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra is an extraordinary feat of modern engineering, a slab of aluminium and glass that is super slim at 5.1mm, weighs only 692g and yet feels incredibly stiff and robust.
At the front is a large, 14.6in, 120Hz Dynamic AMOLED 2x display, peaking at a claimed 1,600 nits of brightness. That screen is covered by scratch- and scuff-resistant Gorilla Glass 5, and the tablet is also IP68 dust- and water-resistant.
Around the edges are four speakers that are capable of delivering spatial audio. Two cameras adorn the rear – one 13MP main camera and one 8MP ultrawide – and inside is an 11,600mAh battery that delivers up to a quoted 23 hours of battery life and 45W charging.
Finally, the whole shebang is powered by a 3nm Mediatek Dimensity 9500 processor, while wireless connectivity stretches to Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and 5G, via a nano SIM card slot in the top edge of the tablet.
Accessories
The included S Pen stylus has a softer nib than the Apple Pencils do, which makes it feel a touch more natural and comfortable to write and draw with, and it’s nicely responsive and sensitive to changes in pressure.
Samsung’s Pro Keyboard is just as good to use as Apple’s Magic Keyboard. The backlit keys have a lovely light-yet-positive feel to them and they’re well spaced, so you won’t be constantly making errors.
The hinge holds the tablet firmly at a comfortable angle for working and watching. One nice touch is that, as you unfold it, a small wing extends out to the rear, helping to stabilise the whole thing on your desk so it doesn’t topple over.
The Pro Keyboard does have a couple of shortcomings, however. The first is that the angle it holds the tablet at is not adjustable, which means if you have a distracting reflection on screen, the only way to mitigate it is to move your eyes, not the screen itself. Plus, it’s on the heavy side. Together, the tablet, stylus and keyboard weigh a hefty 1.36kg.
Software
However, if you intend to use the Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra as a laptop replacement, the keyboard is going to be the least of your worries. I would say you should be most concerned about Android and whether or not it’s up to the job yet.
On the one hand, it absolutely isn’t; most Android apps still aren’t optimised for a large screen environment. If you are willing to compromise, however, you can get most of your work done. For editing photos or video, for instance, there are apps that work well. Photoshop Mobile, Lightroom and Snapseed all work well on Android and for video editing you have Adobe Premiere or LumaFusion. I would prefer it if DaVinci Resolve was available as it is on the iPad Pro.
As for the rest of the software offering, that’s a bit more solid, mostly because Samsung’s DeX – its Android-based desktop launcher software – is there to make it feel more like a laptop. With DeX in place, you can connect and extend the desktop to external monitors, run Android apps in windows, snap apps to the left and right and pin apps to a taskbar at the bottom of the screen.
Display and speakers
As with previous iterations of the Samsung Galaxy Tab Ultra, the S12’s display is the star of the show here. It’s big at 14.6in across the diagonal, it’s vibrant, super sharp at 2,960 x 1,848 and it’s very bright.
I measured it as I usually do using my X-Rite i1 Display Plus colorimeter and I saw peaks of between 1,700cd/m2 with HDR material, exceeding Samsung’s claim of 1,600cd/m2. You’ll only reach those highs with auto brightness enabled in really bright environments, though.
Native colour reproduction doesn’t quite reach the DCI-P3 standard required for the full HDR 10 experience (I measured it at about 89% with the Vivid colour mode enabled), and colour accuracy isn’t the best I’ve seen with a measured average Delta E error of 1.87 versus sRGB in the Natural mode, but it’s good enough to present truly eye-popping image quality with the right content.
I fired up Our Planet on Netflix and the Galaxy S12 Ultra presented a sharp, clear vibrant image with gleaming highlights, fully detailed shadow areas and vibrant, natural colours.The scene in a flower meadow at the beginning of episode two from season two, is a riot of colour and a real feast for the eyes. The only caveat is that the glossy screen treatment can catch the light distractingly and negatively impact on your enjoyment if you’re trying to watch in a bright room or outside.
As for audio, that’s not quite as impressive. There’s plenty of volume on offer but not much in the way of richness and bass. It’s perfectly fine for the odd documentary, though, and certainly good enough to convey the drama of the arctic fox hunt that follows the scene with the bees.
Performance and battery life
Samsung tablets have been powered by Mediatek processors for some time now and they have in the past underwhelmed with their overall performance. This year, however, the Dimensity 9500 chip inside the Tab S12 Ultra is a big improvement.
It can’t compete with the M5 in last year’s iPad Pro, or even the M4 in the 2024 model, but it is a fair chunk faster than its predecessor, to the tune of 23% and 21% in the single and multi-core parts of the Geekbench 6 test.
The GPU benchmark results show it’s still a little weak when it comes to gaming, but again the Tab S12 Ultra is faster than the Tab S11 Ultra by a margin of 9%. Samsung also says it has redesigned the vapour chamber cooling system behind the tablet.
As for battery life, that’s a lot more encouraging this year. In our local video playback test, the Tab S12 Ultra lasted 19hrs 44mins, which is more than two and a half hours longer than the Tab S11 Ultra and over two hours longer than the M5 iPad Pro 11 that I tested last year.
For a tablet with such a large display, that’s a very encouraging result and should mean you can keep on working throughout the day without having to plug into the mains. As for recharging, the tablet supports only 45W charging, which means you’ll get to 100% from empty in about 95 minutes.
Verdict
The Samsung Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra, as far as its hardware is concerned, is right up there with the very best tablets money can buy. Its raw performance still lags behind the iPad Pro and probably will do for the foreseeable, but it’s fast enough for anything you’re likely to want to do with it and the display and battery life are superb.
It’s expensive, but better value than the equivalent iPad, and the inclusion of the S Pen in the box is a very nice bonus. And Samsung’s DeX does its best to turn Android into a useable OS for desktop use. It’s largely successful, too.
The only fly in the ointment – and it’s a great big fat one – is that the ecosystem of Android apps is still a long, long way behind what’s available to iPad owners. Hopefully that will start to change with the arrival of Googlebook OS, but we’re not there just yet.
