Take a look at this brand new Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra. While it looks basically the same as the previous generations of Ultra tablets from Samsung, there are actually a lot of tiny differences. Most of them are for the better, except for one.
I have the Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra with me here to compare – and I highly suggest you watch this video instead as many things can only be shown in a video.
Design
The design of the new Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra. It has the exact same design and has the same length and height – but ever so slightly thinner than the previous generations. It’s quite mind-boggling that this super-thin tablet can still be thinner.
Let’s take a look at the buttons. Remember how our phones will have the volume rocker at the top and the power button below it? Yeah, that wasn’t what we had on all previous generations of the tablets. The Tab S9 Ultra has the power button above the volume rocker instead.
Now, Samsung inverted it back to the Tab S11 Ultra. That’s great, and I don’t have to do any mental gymnastics when I want to use this tablet in portrait mode to watch brainrot on TikTok or Instagram. Yeah, watching it on such a humongous OLED screen is a very different experience.
Screen
Let’s now talk about the screen. It’s still using a humongous 14.6-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X display with a resolution of 2960×1848 pixels and goes up to 120Hz refresh rate.
Now, what I’m showing here isn’t the highest brightness, but it’s already super bright and managed to overcome the bright studio lights. Our colorimeter did report that the Tab S11 Ultra can only go up to around 980 nits in auto brightness mode.
You see, the anti-reflection tech built into the Tab S11 Ultra is superbly good. The super bright lights create a purplish hue but that’s about it.
Also, the nits brightness is actually candela per meter square. It’s the brightess level per square meter. Since this is such a big tablet screen, 980 nits is plenty bright.
The color accuracy is actually realy good too. With the default out of the box settings at vividness level 1, it covers 100% sRGB and 91.53% of DCI-P3 color gamuts.
When we went into the settings menu and cranked it up to vividness level 3, it basically reached 100% of both color gamuts. As a quick recap, having a higher DCI-P3 color gamut coverage is going to have more saturated colors. Just head into the settings menu and play with this slider – and you can tune it to whichever vividness level that’s comfortable to you.
The bezel here is actually quite tiny, and it’s very difficult to hold with my hands. I guess that’s understandable since this tablet is mostly meant to be placed on a table with a standing case.
One thing that’s never going to be comfortable – is the under-display fingerprint scanner. I never liked under-display fingerprint scanners and it is even worse on tablets as it’s just not ergonomic to use at all. I would’ve much preferred the fingerprint scanner to be embedded on the power button.
The notch
Now, that notch is… welcome to 2019, I guess? We now have a waterdrop notch on the Tab S11 Ultra instead of a rectangular notch. Even though it has been reduced from 2 selfie cameras to one, the waterdrop notch is still quite big, in my opinion.
It would’ve been the best to not have a notch at all, honestly speaking.
Performance
Now, as for the performance – the Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9400+. I’m rather disappointed as I bleieve Samsung should have waited for a while and used the newly-announced Dimensity 9500 instead. Anyway, this is actually my third time encountering this chipset.
We’ve done an extensive gaming test for the Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra, so watch that video here.
The Dimensity 9400+ is supremely powerful. We can play Genshin Impact at the highest graphical settings at 60fps without issues at all, and that is actually to be expected since the Xiaomi 15T Pro and the Xiaomi Pad Mini, both also equipped with the Dimensity 9400+, can achieve this too.
Now, Zenless Zone Zero is much more demanding and rendering at the native resolution too. With the flower boss fight, it ran somewhere around 50fps, and the frame rate was actually very consistent. I also did Shiyu Defense from nodes 4 to 7 and have no issues at all – other than my own skill issue. It’s actually a very enjoyable experience since this is such a humongous, beautiful, OLED screen.
Wuthering Waves is going to be the most demanding game to date as it is going to run at the native resolution with a lot more fancier graphics and effects. While it was okay in certain areas, but these nests are super demanding to the point that it drops to around 20fps. That’s because the Dimensity 9400+ has already hit its limit – and we’ll have to wait for the next generation of chipsets to get a better frame rate at this render resolution with this graphical quality.
This tablet will also practically be 99% impossible to thermal throttle because the entire tablet is a giant heatsink. Throughout our gaming test, it cannot even reach 35°C.
I have also tested Destiny Rising, which is surprisingly not demanding at all. Fortnite also ran okay, though there are some microstutters here and there, but otherwise smooth.
Speakers
One thing that I want to highlight is how great the speakers sound. Even for such a thin tablet, it has 4 speakers and it sounds supremely good. Have a listen at the video at the top of this review.
Battery life
How about the battery life then? It lasts for around 11 hours and 39 minutes. That’s actually very good, mostly in thanks to the MediaTek Dimensity 9400+ chipset. You see, when we compared the battery capacity with the Tab S9 Ultra, the new Tab S11 Ultra is only 400mAh more, or 3.57142857% larger battery, yet we tested them with the same brightness.
I’m just more impressed by the MediaTek Dimensity 9400+ now.
Charging speed
As for the charging speed, the specs says that it supports up to 45W. Using our Ugreen USB-PD PPS charger and the PowerZ KM003C logger, the Tab S11 Ultra can only reach around 40W at most.
It takes about 90 minutes to charge from 15% to completion, and the temperature is waaaaaaaay down low. It barely reaches 32.5°C, and I think Samsung could push the wattage to around 65W and this tablet can handle it without any issues at all.
Software
Now, the Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra is using One UI 8.0 with Android 16. There are a lot of new features – but there are just a few that I want to highlight.
There is a new multi-desktop functionality is housed within Samsung DeX. On paper, it should work like macOS or Windows multi-desktop. And it is… kind of. It seems to have two different styles of desktops.
We start off with the usual Android interface. Then, we can head here and add a desktop. Within this new desktop, all apps are opened as floating windows. We can open more desktops to segregate our work too.
But… we cannot move the apps from – let’s say desktop 1 to desktop 2. There’s no dragging and dropping, no option to click to move the window, and also no easy keyboard shortcut to change between the desktops.
We can hit Fn+F5 and use the arrow keys to select whatever desktop we want, then hit the enter key to switch to that desktop. While this is a good idea, the execution is just not good.
Oh – there’s this new white bar thing at the top of each app while running it on the standard Android interface. If we drag it down, it’ll enter the new multi-desktop interface directly – but it’ll just go to whichever desktop that was previously selected and we cannot move it to a different desktop.
Other than that, the taskbar works as before – and it’s still the best implementation that we’ve seen so far.
Keyboard
Let’s now talk abotu the keyboard. The typing experience is actually quite okay though the travel distance is short but the keys themselves are rather stiff and responsive. I can also see Samsung trying to minimize the space it takes and the tablet can support itself even if I lift it up like this.
Now, since the tablet is thinner than before, the pogo pins for the keyboard connection has been moved to the back. This new Book Cover Keyboard will flip up its pogo pins to magnetically snap onto the tablet to make a connection. It works flawlessly, though kind of overengineered in my opinion.
S Pen
The S Pen is… what I am disappointed about. You see, the new S Pen is much sleeker than before. Instead of being a big round stylus, it’s now thinner and hexagonal in shape. It is shaped more like a conventional pencil, and I love it.
There is one grey color side to signify where the magnets are located, so we can just snap it to the tablet. And if you haven’t realized yet… I snapped it on the top right corner of the tablet on the frame, not the back. And nothing popped up on the screen when I did that.
Yeah… that’s because Samsung removed the Bluetooth LE connectivity from the S Pen. This is the one big thing that I’m most disappointed about, as I always use the S Pen as a remote control to perform swipes remotely. You can watch the video below where we showed how to do it step by step. Now, the function is gone.
Since I only use the S Pen for that feature, this will mostly just stay in the box now.
A few more things to mention
And a few more things to mention – we have a USB 3 port at the side and it can output to an external display too. This will further extend the new DeX functionality as the tablet takes on one desktop and the external display takes on another. However, there’s no way to switch between the two desktops – but we can finally drag windows across desktops.
We still have the microSD card slot here, and that’s about it.
Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra?
Now, should you buy the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra? I personally will say that if you like to watch movies on a big, beautiful OLED screen, then this is the perfect tablet for you. It has great speakers too! Gamers should also consider this tablet as the performance with the MediaTek Dimensity 9400+ is just fantastic as it basically never overheats – though we have to lower the graphical settings with Wuthering Waves.
If you like big tablets, then this is the one for you. Plus, for us here in Malaysia at least, the Book Cover Keyboard is included in the box too.
Where to buy? (Affiliate links)
Like our Facebook Page here at NasiLemakTech.com for more news and in-depth reviews! Also, join our Facebook Group for insightful information and memes!
Subscribe to our YouTube channel too!
