The Galaxy Tab A8 is Samsung’s entry into the low-cost tablet industry; it is a far cry from the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra’s premium features. If you splurge on this smartphone, you’ll receive a 10.2-inch screen and a massive 7040mAh battery for a reasonable price. However, does it do its essential activities well, or is it less than the sum of its parts? Let’s begin with the Samsung Galaxy Tab A8’s display, as this is one of the most crucial components of a tablet. And unfortunately, this year Samsung is offering a downgrade compared to its predecessor. With a screen size of 10.5″, the Galaxy Tab A8 is slightly larger than the Tab 7.
It has a 1920 x 1200 pixels resolution, so everything appears sufficiently sharp. Additionally, viewing angles, contrast, and colours are satisfactory. As you would expect from a low-end tablet, nothing spectacular. Even though Samsung updated the 8MP rear camera, it remains a tablet camera. Especially indoors, colors are pretty subdued and muted, but unless you’ve lost your phone, you’re probably not utilising this camera to snap still images. The front is 5MP camera performs similarly; it’s adequate for brief video calls but not much else. The Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 is powered by a Unisoc Tiger T618 processor and 3GB or 4GB of RAM.
[content-egg-block template=offers_logo hide=price]This is not a common chip on the market, and you might have expected Samsung to use one of its own Exynos chips, but it performs adequately for a cheap tablet. Its Geekbench 5 multi-core score of 1250 places it slightly above the Nokia T20 and on par with the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite. GPU-wise, it consistently outperforms the Nokia T20 and the earlier Galaxy Tab S6 Lite and Galaxy Tab S5e by one or two frames. That is not to suggest that general navigation is flawless; there are occasional pauses or stutters while switching between apps, home screens, and menus. It is by no means unusable, but I never doubted that I was using a low-quality tablet, so sometimes patience is required.
When it comes to more taxing jobs, such as games, it will run Slay the Spire without issue, with the exception of a short wait just before your character dies. Indeed, the Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 is superior to any £1,000 premium phone for playing such 2D games as well as titles like Kingdom Rush. Do not anticipate the tablet to function as well with 3D games. I was unable to conduct my typical Genshin Impact stress test, as there was insufficient storage space remaining on the 32GB device after Samsung and Google had removed a significant system slice. Samsung does not make absurd claims regarding the Galaxy Tab A8’s battery life, but it is pleased to brag about the 7,040mAh battery. After all, it takes a very large battery to power the 10.5-inch display for an entire day.