In context: Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra has received mostly excellent reviews, with many hailing it as the best Android tablet available today. But does its massive 14.6-inch screen and roughly 0.24-inch thickness make it susceptible to breaking in half?
The excellent YouTube channel JerryRigEverything has made one of its famous durability tests on the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra. For something that feels quite flimsy, it took the abuse very well.
Samsung has positioned the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra as the Android rival to today’s best tablet, the iPad Pro. The Tab S8 Ultra has a larger screen than its Apple competitor, a thinner screen, and is only marginally heavier.
Zack Nelson of JerryRigEverything begins by noting the difference in size between the S Pen stylus that comes with the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra and the one that comes with some Samsung phones, noting that it’s the same hardware packed into a larger package.
After a series of scratch and burn tests, following which the in-screen fingerprint reader continues to work, Nelson moves on to the folding phase. This is an area where previous generations of iPad Pro have failed miserably, easily snapping in half. That changed with the M1-powered tablet (below), but would the larger, thinner Tab S8 Ultra survive as well?
Although Samsung’s slate bends, it doesn’t break, defying Nelson’s belief that it would crack in half – he attributes it to Samsung’s “physics-defining dark magic”. The Tab S8 Ultra still works even following being subjected to what feels like great force. It also seems to hold up better than the iPad Pro M1, which saw its screen pull away more noticeably from the frame during testing, and it retained the more prominent curved shape.