What needs work
It’s more than just the price that needs work, because while it’s a good feature set, Samsung hasn’t nailed everything.
There is a nice keyboard here that you grow to like, though it does need backlighting amongst other things, and if you prefer gutter space, it won’t be a fast adjustment to make.
More frustrating than the keyboard is the trackpad, and it’s because that rectangle under the keyboard is just so sensitive. We use it, scroll down, and all of a sudden we had clicked on something without realising it, and that’s due to sensitivity.
So many times we ended up touching the trackpad to scroll only to find that we’d inadvertently clicked something and our page was changing. And sure, you might argue that this is a minor inconvenience, but with how often it happened, we’d start to argue that it’s a little more major than minor.
Fortunately, turning off the trackpad is pretty easy, with a function key that will get the software to switch off this thing and let you go with touch and only touch on that screen, but it’s still an annoyance all the same.
The occasional Windows bug is also an issue, and while you might be quick to point out that Microsoft can take the blame, we’ve never seen shut down issues where a flick down to shut down doesn’t work consecutively on any other machine, but it happened here on the TabPro S.
And the case just doesn’t have enough angles, with two not likely to serve every position you need the tablet to operate in. That’s the thing that works about a tablet with a stand built in: you can switch the angle based on your needs, usually with a fine degree of control.
Unfortunately as good as the folds in the keyboard case are, they’re still only two positions, with no middle ground between standard laptop and lying down laptop.
For us, though, storage is the worst annoyance, simply because there’s so little on what constitutes a full computer.
Let’s just get this in the open, because no matter how much Samsung wants to suggest that the TabPro S is made for cloud computing, it is still a laptop replacement, and that means files are stored on it. In fact, Microsoft’s OneDrive gives you cloud storage, but it still stores many of these files on your computer, and that’s because having files available locally for access is always going to be faster than having to connect to the cloud to retrieve them.
Unfortunately for the TabPro S, however, you don’t get much storage.
Granted, it’s not as dire as the 32GB or 64GB amounts left on a student computer, but that’s no shock as they’re made to be cheap, and cutting down on storage and letting parents buy microSD and SD cards to make up for it is a good workaround.
But the 128GB in the Galaxy TabPro S isn’t enough, especially when you only get 85GB left out of that when Windows is installed with the few Samsung items sitting on top.
That is less than 128GB, which is to be expected because storage sizes are rarely what they seem due to the maths of data amounts, but this is also far less.
Samsung hasn’t helped matters by excluding a microSD slot, something we thought the company would have moved past when it introduced this omission in last year’s Galaxy S6 series and brought it back this year.
And that’s the thing that bugs us: 128GB is fine when you have the option of increasing it, like you do in the Microsoft Surface machine. If not, go for the larger sizes, which is what Apple has done with its MacBook, starting out at 256GB and offering as high as 512GB. There’s no SD card slot there, so the company has made it large enough to be a laptop you can take with you, without forcing what it thinks the computer should be used for on the buyer of that computer.
If Samsung had included a microSD slot, we wouldn’t be quite so aggressive with this, because at least we could upgrade the storage ourselves if need be, and that’s the way it is on pretty much every other tablet trying to be like this form-factor.
But not the TabPro S. Here you get a measly 85GB when all is said and done, and it won’t take long or many apps for you to cull that back to 50, either.
This is a very lightweight computer, sure, and it has been made for on the go activities, we’ll grant Samsung that, but the company hasn’t helped it become anything more or anything more in tune with what a customer might want it to be by limiting the storage size.
Conclusion
There’s no doubting that Samsung has built a lovely laptop replacement in the TabPro S, and we love that the company has thought to include things that would be premium accessories, but it just needs more.
It needs a Bluetooth stylus, and it desperately needs more storage as either a minimum or a microSD slot. And Windows 10 needs to be finessed a little more, with less of these “Galaxy Settings” stuff that feels like it dents performance.
But we’re more than halfway there to making a total Surface beater, which for a first attempt is very impressive.
If you like the look of the machine and can handle the lack of memory because you work in the cloud already, it’s definitely worth a look, especially since this is a tablet made for Galaxy S7 owners, offering S7 and S7 Edge owners a fitting device. If you don’t own one, though, it’s only the tablet if thin is a must have, because this is about as thin as it gets, even if there are some compromises being made.
