Samsung Galaxy Tab S10+ review: the best of both worlds

Far more than just being a device you can switch on to stream movies or to second-screen while on the couch, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10+ is a good-sized Android tablet for productivity tasks and digital painting. Smaller, less powerful and cheaper than its big brother the Ultra, the S10+ nonetheless hits something of a sweet spot, allowing you access to Samsung’s latest AI tools, and with a stylus in the box, for less cash.

The Galaxy S10+ is likely to find its way into the bags of travellers who want something usable but smaller and slimmer than a laptop. Where once they might have reached for the 11-inch MacBook Air, today it’s larger tablets like this that fulfil that need, and Samsung has produced something very capable indeed.

Design & build

There's very little you can do with tablet design before you make the thing unusable, so Samsung has stuck with a traditional rectangle for the Galaxy Tab S10+. The 12.4-inch screen puts it between common tablet sizes, smaller than the larger iPad Pro model or the 14.6-inch Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra, and as a result, it’s about the same size as a page from a printed magazine (remember those?). You lose a bit of the screen to the interface in a lot of apps, as there's often a header bar and the OneUI footer in place, but you’re still left with enough to work with.

Samsung has dropped the base-level slate from its previously three-tier tablet lineup this year, which means the S10+ is now the entry-level. This doesn’t mean it loses anything in terms of build quality or spec, and at less than 600g it’s pretty light too.

It’s a comfortable tablet to hold, even without a case, thanks to some flat sides and rounded corners. The screen is coated with Gorilla Glass, and there's a distinct groove in the back for magnetically attaching the stylus to top up its battery. Unusually for a tablet, you get two camera lenses, though neither the wide nor ultrawide cameras are anything special. Alongside the standard USB-C port at the base, there are pin connectors for accessories on the side, a sliding tray for a microSD card, and some distinctive antenna cutouts on the back. The lock and volume buttons are low-profile but have a positive click when you press them, with little room for ambiguity about whether you’re pressing the right one or not. There's even a fingerprint reader under the screen, though this is less useful in a tablet than it is in a phone due to the way they’re held, and you’re more likely to use the facial-recognition feature.

Features & performance

Without a Snapdragon on the specs list, you might expect the Galaxy Tab S10+ to feel underpowered, but the updated Dimensity processor in the S10+ makes itself known in benchmarks, pulling ahead of the older Tab S9+ but not reaching the heights of the S9 Ultra. It’s slightly ahead of the Galaxy S24 Ultra phone too, though this may be because there's more room inside the tablet for the processor to shed its heat and avoid throttling. In iPad terms, it scores somewhere between the old A15 Bionic chip (iPad mini 6th gen) and the M1 from the 5th-gen iPad Air. The M4 iPad Pro naturally stomps all over it, despite costing about the same.

The tablet comes with an IP68 ingress resistance rating, as does the S-Pen, which is included in the box rather than being an optional extra. It doesn’t slide inside the device in the same way the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s stylus does, and the magnetic charging dock on the back of the frame is an imperfect solution that means it’s likely to get dislodged. However, if you’re carrying a tablet you’re more likely to keep it in a bag than a pocket, so perhaps you’ll be able to keep it somewhere else when not charging.

The 16:10 AMOLED display has good brightness and resolution that turn it into a decent digital-art platform if you have a favoured Android painting app. Its (variable) 120Hz refresh rate helps keep things smooth, and an anti-reflective coating has been applied that does a good job of keeping stray light at bay without making the surface feel rough. This all has the effect of making it a good tablet for gaming, and if paired with a Bluetooth controller and the appropriate game streaming app or Google Play haul can make a pleasant way to pass a few hours. The same goes for video streaming, with the screen’s colour reproduction well saturated and its maximum brightness of 650 nits enough to give good contrast and detail to dark scenes.

Scoring less well are the tablet’s cameras. We’re not sure who’s using the larger slates for photography rather than a smartphone, but they are useful for simple visual notes and snapshots when there's nothing else at hand. You don’t get wide apertures or high pixel resolutions here, and while Android’s portrait mode can create soft backgrounds, the camera that’s going to get the most use here is the 12MP front-facing lens, which can record video up to 4K/30fps.

With a battery life of over eight hours (with the screen on and apps running), the S10+ easily has enough juice to keep going all day. It beats plenty of other tablets and can juice up again at 45W, though there's no charger included in the box so you’ll either want to use a laptop charger or put up with a slower charge from a phone charger.

As it's a Samsung tablet, you get the One UI with its excellent multitasking capabilities (three tiled apps and one in a pop-up window), sliding panels (docks, essentially) and DeX mode for when you connect an external screen, turning it into a kind of Chromebook. There's also Galaxy AI, which brings Sketch to Image and Portrait Studio for quickly developing creative ideas. Almost everything can be controlled with the stylus, though you can still draw with your finger if you want to.

Price

At $/£999 this is not a budget or even mid-priced tablet, but with the Samsung Galaxy name attached, you'll approach it knowing it's not going to be a cheap device. While it lags behind similarly priced Apple devices in terms of raw performance, it never feels slow or laggy, and if you're invested in the Android ecosystem, it makes a great upgrade from an ageing tablet.

Buy it if

• You want a top productivity tablet
• A stylus would come in useful
• You want to do more than just browse or read

Don't buy it if

• You just want to browse or read
• You don't want to spend that much
• You really want an iPad

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