Samsung announces premium Galaxy Tab S3, packs Android Nougat and an upgraded S-Pen

The Android world has been in a bit of a drought over the past year or two in regards to tablets. While we still get a handful of mid-range tablets from time to time, we rarely get any high-powered flagships. Today, though, Samsung is changing that — for now — with the debut of the Galaxy Tab S3.

Samsung pulled no punches with the Tab S3; this thing brings a seriously premium spec sheet. The tablet has a 9.7-inch, 2048×1536 SuperAMOLED display which also supports HDR video, and on that screen you’ll find Android 7.0 Nougat with Samsung’s skin over top with its various added features.

Powering the tablet is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage with a microSD card slot, and it measures in at just 6mm thick. While the Snapdragon 820 might seem like an odd choice to some, it should prove to be a very capable chipset even though newer chipsets are available.

While this new tablet will be excellent for consuming media, especially thanks to the quad-speaker set tuned by AKG audio, it should prove just as useful for productivity. Samsung has not only included support for a stylus in the Tab S3, but included one in the box. The new S-Pen doesn’t tuck away inside of the tablet, but it does feature over 4,000 levels of pressure sensitivity and many of the S-Pen features in the Note 5 and Note 7, such as taking notes on the fly or creating GIFs. Luckily, you won’t have to charge this stylus either…

Further, the Tab S3 has a set of pogo pins along the bottom which can connect to Samsung’s own keyboard, which allows the keyboard to avoid the pairing process and doesn’t need to be charged.

So, essentially, the Galaxy Tab S3 is just an iPad Pro with Android. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Galaxy Tab S3 looks like a fantastic piece of hardware and we can’t wait to try it out for ourselves. Unfortunately, it’s unclear when it will launch. Previous rumors have pinned the launch to next month with a price of $599 or so, but that’s completely unconfirmed.