Month: March 2022

I multi-task. Like a lot. And I think that, when examined, so does everyone else. Flip over to Outlook to grab that meeting link as you try to bark directions to Google Maps through Google Assistant, then flip back to your task list to check a thing and then back over to the grocery list to see if you may or may not be able to get away with not dealing with Safeway this evening., then smash the fast forward button on your headphones cause this song sucks. And it’s fast. I have had phones that lagged between each step, and I noticed that, as it became increasingly molasses-y, the rhythm of my thinking slowed to accommodate it.

So performance is a pretty key piece for me, but what I need isn’t liquid graphics, what I need is a lot of RAM. Right now, I’m using a Galaxy Note 10 4G Comcast/Verizon with 8gb of RAM, and it functions beautifully. Its performance has been the standard by which I have judged many things in the two years since we have been together, and I am very grateful for its acquisition one week before the San Francisco Bay Area COVID-19 lockdowns.

I’m pleased with increasing RAM in recent tablets, which speaks to the commonality of both multi-tasking and of memory hog applications. Even then, budget tablets still have 2-4 GB of RAM, and in my old Tab S3 with 4 GB of RAM, OneNote chokes on pages with a lot of handwriting, and the launcher is routinely forced to unload the widgets. That simply won’t do. 

And I’m not really sure how processor bandwidth factors into these calculations, because, from what I’ve seen, the processors aren’t the limiting factor. This phone is spec-wise capable of running everything that I need, except perhaps a faster WWAN connection. Except the screen is tiny. And drawing and reference sketches on it are great, but it is very hard to write on. And so you can see the desire for a similar tablet. The usage performance of Galaxy Tab S8+ 5G is quite amazing, but weighing in at only 6 GB of RAM, 2 GB less than my Note 10 2019, which concerns me about its future-proofing as pixel densities scale up and we continue to build memory-hungry applications. 

Loaded up, though, I’m continuing to be impressed by the nimble agility of this tablet, and look forward to continuing to test its capabilities.

 

 

From the moment that I set eyes on my new Galaxy Tab S8+ 5G, preordered from Verizon, I knew that it was almost the tablet of my dreams. Almost. The screen is so beautiful and it looks gorgeous sitting on my small wooden-cabinet-turned-standing-desk. The stylus is so crisp and precise, and has great support in both Infinite Painter and OneNote. And with Good Lock MultiStar, windows work like some sort of real *NIX window manager! (Isn’t that what this ultimately is?) And it tasks switches without hiccup, which is ultimately why I decided to replace my very dated Tab S3 in the first place. It was truly the tablet of my dreams!

 

Or so I thought. Hefting the thing, I had déjà vu of my old Galaxy Note 12 [Tablet], also a Verizon model, from several years before. Regardless of specs or performance, it felt huge. The screen real estate could be so helpful for complex tasks, but the sheer size of it meant that I, for small tasks, often left it behind. This defeated the purpose of it as a go-to notepad for my ideas, which broke the habit, which wasn’t helpful for its otherwise productive influence in my life.

 

I wanted to love it. This tablet has been exceptional. For aforesaid reasons, I found this tablet to tick a great many of the boxes that I have been looking for. I’ve had this tablet for about fifteen days, now, and have made a great many observations about it. What I’m pretty sure about it is that it’s completely the wrong size, and will probably be returned in favor of a Galaxy Tab S8 Wifi Edition, as no LTE edition of the Tab S8 exists at the time of writing. But we still have a minute or two before it needs to be returned, so in the next few posts, I will be exploring some of the unique quirks of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8+ 5G for Verizon Wireless.