Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Plus

Verdict

It’s not much of an advance on the Galaxy Tab S9 Plus, but the Galaxy S10 Plus gets you a similarly comprehensive tablet experience to the Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra, for a little less money.

Introduction

For whatever reason, Samsung appears to have dropped the regular Galaxy Tab S10 option this year. That leaves the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Plus as the one and only option for those who don’t want to spend the really big bucks on the Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra.

Which rather begs the question: what is the ‘Plus’ for if this tablet doesn’t exist in relation to a lesser or smaller model? Perhaps a smaller Galaxy Tab S10 will follow further along the line, but for now, we’ll register a mild protest and move on to the matter at hand.

Like the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Plus before it, the Tab S10 Plus is a large premium tablet with a vibrant 12.4-inch AMOLED display, a sizeable 10,090mAh battery, a dual rear camera, flagship-level performance, and a bundled-in S Pen stylus.

Indeed, from the very outset, we’re not seeing an awful lot of difference between the 2024 and 2023 models of Samsung’s mainstream super-sized tablet. The Tab S10 Plus even shares the same £999/$999 starting price.

Of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Given how highly we rated the Galaxy Tab S9 Plus, and the fact that no one in their right mind upgrades their tablet every year (or even every other year), an iterative update could well be all that’s needed.

Design

• Almost identical design to Tab S9 Plus
• S Pen attaches to back
• IP68 rated
• Four loud and clear speakers

Samsung speaks about “a touch of innovation in every detail” of the Galaxy Tab S10 Plus’s design, but that seems to be a bit of an overstatement. It really does look and feel a lot like the Galaxy Tab S9 Plus.

Its footprint of 285.4 x 185.4mm is literally identical to that of its predecessor, while a thickness of 5.6mm is only 0.1mm thinner. The basic look of the tablet is very familiar too, with the same uniform display bezels on the front, the same flat-edged aluminium frame, and exactly the same layout on the back.

Once again you have two discrete circular camera units situated side by side in the default landscape orientation, with a flash situated to the left of them. You also get the same extended plastic strip for the S Pen stylus to magnetically attach to, though one tweak to the formula is that it’s now bright white.

Not that Samsung should be singled out for sticking to a gameplan here. Glance around the wider tablet landscape, and you’ll notice that most major Android tablet makers have gone with a similar look, which in turn broadly approximates Apple’s peerless iPad design language.

Comparisons aside, this is a beautifully built tablet in either Moonstone Gray or Platinum Silver (the model featured here), with a solid hand feel in spite of its thinness. You also get IP68 certification, which is more than any iPad offers. True, you’re unlikely to be using your tablet out and about in the rain, but you might just want to prop it up while in the bath or when you’re poolside on holiday.

Another eye-catching feature is an in-display fingerprint sensor. Most tablets will go with a power button-based solution, which can be tricky to find in a pinch. Apple’s Face ID system continues to be the best biometric authentication system for tablets, but Samsung’s offering takes second place in terms of sheer accessibility. It’s also quick and reliable.

There are four speakers dotted along the left and right edges, one of which flanks a USB-C port. These provide loud, clear stereo output, making them ideal for watching movie and TV content and playing games when headphones aren’t required. Not that there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack here, which is a bit of a shame given the size of the tablet, but is also far from unusual.

There’s a dedicated microSD slot on the top edge of the tablet, which is always welcome, even if most people won’t need to use it.

We’ve mentioned that there’s a spot to affix the S Pen to on the back of the tablet, and that relates to the fact that you get one of Samsung’s compact styluses with every Galaxy Tab S10 Plus. It’s a point of distinction that continues to serve Samsung well in its fight against the iPad.

The S Pen is a brilliant stylus, offering a responsive and tactile writing action and a well-judged streamlined design, about the size of a biro or pencil. From scrawling notes to composing pictures and signing off PDF documents, it’s a genuinely useful tool to have on such a large tablet. I’d argue it’s of way more practical use here than on a smartphone such as the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.

Screen

• 12.4-inch OLED display
• HDR10+ compatible
• 120Hz refresh rate

If you’re spending the best part of £1,000 on a Samsung smart device, you can rest assured that the screen is going to be outstanding. That’s undoubtedly the case with the Galaxy Tab S10 Plus.

It might be exactly the same panel as the one used in the Galaxy Tab S9 Plus, but when that means a 12.4-inch 1752 x 2800 OLED with a 120Hz refresh rate, you won’t hear any complaints from me.

This is an absolute beauty means for viewing all manner of media and web content, with deep blacks and rich colours, aided by HDR10+ compatibility. Samsung goes with a slightly more pumped-up Vivid screen mode by default, but it still looks great to my eyes. If you prefer your colours to look a little more true to life, as I do, you can flip that over to a more muted Natural mode.

Samsung takes a different approach to Apple when it comes to aspect ratio, with a 16:10 balance supplying a wider screen better suited to video playback. You’ll still get borders on YouTube and streaming content, but far less so than on any iPad.

Conversely, the Galaxy Tab S10 Plus feels a little odd when consuming content in portrait perspective, and even a little constricted when attempting productivity tasks in either orientation.

That’s a small note, however. The Galaxy Tab S10 Plus display remains a beautiful canvas, especially if entertainment is your main use case.

Performance

• Mediatek Dimensity 9300+
• 12GB of RAM
• 256- or 512GB of storage

In an interesting switcheroo, Samsung has dropped Qualcomm for this year’s flagship tablet models, and has moved over to Mediatek’s Dimensity 9300+. This is likely to be a cost-saving measure.

It’s the exact same chip that powers the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra, backed by the same 12GB of RAM. We found Samsung’s top-end tablet to sport decent performance, though it was perhaps a little underwhelming for its £1,200 asking price.

Even though the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Plus costs a good £200 less, our view is pretty much the same. It’s largely thanks to Apple, which offers the iPad Pro with its outstanding M4 chip for around the same price, and which decimates the Galaxy Tab S10 Plus across most benchmarks.

Perhaps more damaging is the presence of the latest iPad Air (2024) with Apple’s M2 chip, which still hands out a sound performance beating. Geekbench 6 scores of 2158 single core and 6660 multi-core fall well short of the iPad Air (2024) 13-inch, the 256GB model of which happens to cost £100 less.

In Android tablet terms, the Galaxy Tab S10 Plus proves faster than the Galaxy Tab S9 Plus, with a 20 percent (ish) increase in the multi-core score stakes. However, it falls a little behind the gaming-focused RedMagic Nova Tablet and indeed the Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra, both of which burst through the 7,000 multi-core mark.

The graphical benchmark results are pretty decent, if not the best in class. Sure enough, the Galaxy Tab S10 Plus runs high games smoothly and consistently. I was able to play a good hour or so of Wreckfest on maxed-out graphical settings with a reasonably solid frame rate that hovered around the 60fps mark. It didn’t heat up too much, either.

Samsung’s tablet is generally speedy, without any hitches when running multiple apps side by side and layered in multiple floating windows. It should prove to be a capable productivity tool, should that be your intended aim. Again, though, productivity hounds will be better served with Apple.

The Tab S10 Plus comes in either 256GB or 512GB storage capacities, and that can be extended via the aforementioned microSD card slot. There’s no Wi-Fi 7 support, unlike the Ultra, but you do get Wi-Fi 6E instead.

Camera

• 12MP & 8MP cameras on the rear
• 12MP selfie camera
• Decent for video calls

You know the score with tablets by now. If you’re relying on such a device to handle your day-to-day photography, you’re doing it all wrong.

Not only are tablets too unwieldy for such a task, their cameras are invariably several orders of magnitude inferior to those of a smartphone worth even half the price.

So it proves with the Galaxy Tab S10 Plus, which has exactly the same dual-camera set-up as the Galaxy Tab S9 Plus – a 12MP main and an 8MP ultra-wide. And to be fair, that’s still above and beyond what most people will need from their tablet camera.

For what it’s worth, image quality is just fine in good lighting. Samsung’s usual punched-up colour science covers a multitude of photographic sins, which is probably welcome on such a limited setup.

Far more consequential is the Galaxy Tab S10 Plus’s 8MP front camera, which is what you’ll be relying on for video calls. It’s an adequate selfie cam, and a decent video call camera – not least for its ultra-wide perspective, which makes it much easier to stay in view.

If you’re after a hardcore video calling machine, the Tab S10 Ultra gives you a pair of 12MP front cameras for even greater clarity and shooting options. But this cheaper tablet will handle your calls well, and certainly better than a mid-range laptop.

Software & AI

• Android 14 with One UI 6.1
• Galaxy AI smarts
• Seven years of OS upgrades promised

The Galaxy Tab S10 Plus runs on Samsung’s bespoke One UI 6.1 skin running on top of Android 14. It’s a fully featured, easy-to-navigate OS that many of you will be broadly familiar with, especially if you’ve used Samsung phones at all in the past.

Samsung’s split-screen implementation makes it nice and easy to run three apps side-by-side-by-side, as well as additional apps in floating windows on top. They all run smoothly, too, as we’ve already discussed.

Aside from Samsung’s own applications, of which there are many, there isn’t too much in the way of bloatware here. There’s a folder containing three Microsoft apps, which may be quite useful if productivity is important to you, and you also get Netflix preinstalled. All justifiable inclusions.

Samsung’s own additions vary in usefulness. You’ll never convince me that we need a secondary web browser, especially one as banal as Samsung Internet – though the ability to quickly summarise a website using the handy AI tool might be useful to some.

Elsewhere, Samsung Notes is a genuinely powerful note-taking app, especially if you’re looking to get up and running with the S Pen stylus. You can use this app to draw a picture using a wide selection of pen tools, or scrawl down handwritten notes. You can even have the app recognise your writing and turn it to digital text.

It’s in Samsung Notes that you’ll find one of the company’s most showy AI tools, as well. Sketch to image will turn your childish sketches into fully-fledged works of art with uncanny intuitiveness. Is it useful? Not really, but it’s a great way to show off the power of modern-day AI.

Elsewhere, Galaxy AI lets you do things like remove and resize people and objects in images, transcribe and summarise voice recordings, and more. Google’s Circle to Search is here too, letting you initiate a powerful contextual Gen-AI search of whatever’s on screen at the time with a press and hold of the home key.

The various Gen-AI tasks available here vary in their usefulness and effectiveness, as with all of Samsung’s 2024 smartphone and tablet output. However, they’re as well integrated here as on any other Android tablet, and we’re fascinated to see how they develop.

It’s also possible to make use of Samsung’s DeX software, which turns the tablet into a full-on Android desktop, though you’ll need a keyboard case to take advantage of this. We weren’t supplied with one for this review.

Together with Google and Apple, Samsung has some of the best software support in the business. The Galaxy Tab S10 Plus will get seven years of OS updates and security patches guaranteed. That’s as good as it gets in the tablet business.

Battery Life

• 10,090mAh battery
• 45W fast charging
• No charger in the box

You’re probably picking up a bit of a trend here, but the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Plus has exactly the same battery and charging specification as its predecessor, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Plus.

Once again you get a reasonably sizeable 10,090mAh battery, though in testing I found hints that Samsung might have improved its energy consumption somewhat. Perhaps we can thank that new Dimensity 9300+ chip.

An hour of HDR video streaming over Wi-Fi here sapped 7 percent of a charge, which would appear to be an improvement over the Tab S9 Plus’s 10 percent, albeit accepting that the test environment was far from identical between the two. Meanwhile, 30 minutes of light gaming on Slay the Spire sapped a mere 4 percent.

Together with other practical and benchmark tests, I found that the Galaxy Tab S10 Plus will probably last you through a light work day on a single charge. If your usage is more mixed and intensive, you might want to pack a charger.

Not that Samsung will supply you with that charger. The Tab S10 Plus will once again support up to 45W wired charging, should you have such a brick to hand. Using a 65W Samsung laptop charger, I was able to get the Galaxy Tab S10 Plus from empty to 100 percent in a little shy of 90 minutes.

That’s not the fastest on the market – the RedMagic Nova Tablet can do it in about an hour, for instance – but it’s not the worst either.

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