Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro arrives this weekend
The Galaxy Tab Pro is big. It's powerful. But how does it hold up against the Apple iPad?
The 12.2-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro is slated for launch this weekend.
Samsung
On Sunday, Samsung is slated to release its latest tablet, the 12.2-inch Galaxy Tab Pro.
The device, which the Wall Street Journal has compared in terms of size to a "school cafeteria lunch tray," is closely related to the 12.2-inch Samsung Galaxy Note, a sister device that ships with a stylus, and comes slapped with a $749.99 price tag. By comparison, the Galaxy Tab Pro has no stylus, and will sell for a more budget-friendly $649.99.
Otherwise, the devices are very similar, from the Android 4.4 KitKat operating system to the 8-megapixel camera and quad-core processor. Meanwhile, there is the 12.2-inch screen, a display that Samsung claims has more than 4 million pixels.
Although Samsung is positioning the Galaxy Note Pro as a machine for "enterprise" – i.e. professional – users, the Tab Pro seems more in line with an iPad Air: A high-end machine with a lot of firepower and a big, colorful screen. That's on paper, anyway. How does the device measure up in real life? Well, Darrell Etherington of TechCrunch took both the Note Pro and the Tab Pro for a spin in January, and he likes what he saw.
"[T]he really impressive thing about these new tablets aren’t found on a specs sheet; instead, it’s the new Magazine UX, which reimagines the basic home screen of an Android tablet with a design that has more in common with Windows Phone or even individual apps like Flipboard," he writes. "There’s also a Multi Window mode that allows users to play with up to four different windows of separate active content on the same screen."
In related news, a new report from Gartner indicates that the iPad, long the king of the global tablet market, may finally be taking a back seat to Android tablets such as the Tab Pro. Approximately 195 million tablets were sold in 2013, a full 62 percent – or 121 million – of which were running a version of Google's Android operating system.
Apple, on the other hand, snagged 36 percent of the market last year.