Ever since early 2020, e-learning and work-from-home have become quite popular, and along with them, devices that help in both situations have also seen a spike in buyers. Keeping that in mind, this is our review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 tablet, which helps with both e-learning and work-from-home, but also works quite well as a digital entertainment device.
Display and Design
One of the most important aspects of a tablet are the screen and how it feels to use on a daily basis, so that's where we'll begin.
The Galaxy Tab A8 sports a 10.5-inch TFT display, with a 1920x1200 resolution. The bezels are quite slim, and the front facing camera is placed on the long end, to make video calling a better experience when used in landscape mode.
The colours do look a bit washed out compared to Samsung's excellent AMOLED panels that we're more used to seeing, but for the most part, the Tab A8 offers a good content watching experience thanks to Widevine L1 certification for Netflix.
Being an LCD panel, the viewing angles aren't great, but if you're looking at the screen head on, which you will most of the time, it shouldn't be a problem.
Design-wise, the Galaxy Tab A8 is pretty lightweight at 508g, and measures less than 7mm in thickness, making it quite a portable package. Even when using for extended periods of time, we didn't feel our hands getting particularly tired holding the Tab A8, which is good.
Now despite the thin form factor, Samsung has managed to find place for a headphone jack, something we're quite glad to see in 2022. Next to that headphone jack you'll see two sets of speaker grills which are also replicated on the other end, giving the Tab A8 a quad-speaker array. The speakers also get Dolby Atmos surround sound, which is impressive for a tablet at this price point. Audio separation from them was quite good, and the speakers get very loud at max volume.
Visually, the Tab A8 sports a simple and classic design. We have the silver colour variant which adds to that classic look, and the metal back feels nice to hold.
Performance
When it comes to performance, the Galaxy Tab A8 comes equipped with the Unisoc T610 octa-core chipset with 3GB RAM on board. Now Samsung does sell a 4GB RAM model as well, but we have the 3GB RAM variant with me, and it handled day-to-day tasks just fine, with very little stutters or lag during our usage.
Also watch: Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 Review
Now, this chip isn't the best when it comes to graphic-intensive gaming, but to be fair, that's not what this device is really built to do.
3GB RAM is also just about enough, and we did notice that apps running in the background would frequently be required to reload content when re-opened after a while. If you're someone that likes multi-tasking with a lot of apps, you might need to opt for the 4GB RAM model.
Cameras
Now cameras on tablets aren't really meant for shooting high-resolution landscapes or detailed macro-shots. They're mostly used for two things--video calling and document scanning.
The front camera on the Tab A8 is a 5MP unit and and the one on the back is an 8MP unit, and in both cases, we wish they were a bit higher resolution. They'll do the job just fine, but for a device that's going to be used in a lot of video calling and scanning scenarios, a higher pixel count would have been appreciated.
Utility
We've already mentioned a few of the utilities of the Tab A8, like its quad speaker array and 3.5mm audio jack, but apart from this, it also gets Bluetooth v5.0 for connectivity, support for USB 2.0 and USB OTG, so you can connect portable hard-drives or pen-drives to the Tab A8.
There's no NFC, but this particular model of the Tab A8 does come with a nano-SIM card slot, which supports 4G LTE. Moreover, the SIM-tray also has space for up to a 1TB microSD card, which is handy, since the 3GB RAM model comes only with 32GB of storage.
Software
On the software front, the Tab A8 gets Android 11, with One UI Core 3.1, which is an upgrade over the previous model. It also gets Samsung Knox security which is a good addition.
In terms of pre-loaded apps, there are quite a few here, including a couple for e-learning.
One UI has always offered a pretty good user experience, and it'll be interesting to see if Samsung ever brings its DeX OS to the Tab A series as well.
Also watch: Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE Review: I like big Tabs and I cannot lie!
Battery
Battery life is a strong point of the Tab A8, since it comes with a 7,040mAh unit. This is more than enough to get you through a couple of days of heavy usage, and offers excellent standby time as well.
However, Samsung doesn't include a fast charging adaptor in the box, so it takes quite a while to charge back up to full.
Still, whether it's long sessions of e-learning or video calling, there's enough juice to get everything done without breaking a sweat.
Verdict
Overall, for ₹21,999, the Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 offers good value for money. You have multiple RAM and connectivity configurations to choose from depending on your budget, and all of them get a large screen and massive battery--making it a solid productivity companion.
