NEW YORK: iPad Air and Galaxy Tab S 8.4 are competing with each other to win the heart of any tablet lover. The Galaxy Tab S series of tablets also promises a classier look to the manufacturer’s tablets compared to Samsung’s earlier launch of tablets. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 is a later release than the iPad Air.
While iPad Air is known to be really sleek, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 proves itself to be even thinner. The difference is clearly palpable with the iPad Air measuring 240 x 169.5 x 7.5 mm as against the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 with dimensions 126 x 213 x 6.6 mm. The sleek aspect extends itself to the tablet’s weight too, with the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and the iPad Air weighing 294 grams and 478 grams respectively. Except for the screen, most of the Tab S’ body is made of plastic, giving the tablet a stippled finish and shiny look at the corners. However, the tablet features metallic bezels. The iPad Air on the other hand, like all other gadgets from Apple, features an aluminium casing for the entire body. Another noteworthy point is that the Tab S 8.4 is designed for use in portrait mode while the iPad Air is ideally used in landscape orientation.
The tablets have really big screens producing 16 million colours although the iPad Air has a larger screen of size 9.7 inches in contrast to the 8.4-inch screen in Samsung’s tablet. The Tab S 8.4 utilizes the Super AMOLED display technology as against the iPad Air that incorporates an IPS LCD display with retina display technology. However, the Samsung tablet has a higher pixel resolution of 1600 x 2560 whilst the iPad Air has a pixel resolution of 2048 x 1536. In other words, the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 has about one million more pixels than the iPad Air. The Tab S also has a greater pixel density of 359ppi in comparison to the iPad Air’s pixel density of 264ppi. Apart from the common light sensor in both tablets, the Samsung tablet encompasses a proximity sensor while the iPad Air comprises an oleophobic coating.
Each tablet has a primary rear camera and a secondary front camera. While the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 is designed with an 8-megapixel camera with LED flash, the iPad Air presents itself with a 5-megapixel camera and no flash. Both cameras have quite a few features in common like autofocus, geo tagging, high dynamic range mode, digital image stabilization and digital zoom, among others. Apart from the common features, the Galaxy tablet camera offers burst mode, exposure control, self-timer, white balance presets and ISO control. The iPad Air camera provides back-illuminated sensor, face detection and touch to focus. Both camcorders can record 1080p HD videos at 30 fps. The secondary front camera in the Samsung Galaxy tablet is a 2.1MP camera as opposed to the 1.2MP front camera in the iPad Air.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 comes equipped with an octa-core Exynos 5 processor clocked at 1.9GHz + 1.3GHz. Instead of using all eight cores for operation, it uses the four powerful cores for complicated tasks and the less powerful cores for easier tasks. On the other hand, the iPad Air utilizes a dual-core A7 processor supplemented with an M7 motion coprocessor with clocking frequency of 1.3GHz. As far as the RAM aspect is concerned; the Tab S 8.4 encompasses 3GB RAM while the iPad Air has only 1GB RAM. Moreover, the Galaxy tablet comes with 16GB and 32GB options of internal storage and provision for increasing memory up to 128GB whereas the iPad Air has 16, 32 and 64GB internal storage options without scope for expanding memory.
As far as the operating system is concerned, the Tab S 8.4 runs on KitKat, the latest version of Android. The iPad Air operates on iOS 7 that can be upgraded to the next level iOS 8.
