Samsung Galaxy Interface A 8.4

The Samsung Galaxy Interface A 8.4 for T-mobile is a light, sharp, 4G-enabled tablet with unfortunate Wi-Fi issues.

The petite Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.4 is the right size and cost to get a go-anywhere, colour e-reading tablet.

At $265 using T-Mobile provider, it comes in at a much lower price than its primary rival, the iPad mini, which costs $399 with $ or Wi-Fi529 for a cellular model.

But I experienced difficulties with the Galaxy Tab A's Wi-Fi performance in analyzing, which leads me to give it a far poorer recommendation than that I otherwise would.

Layout

Samsung mainly has got the build quality right here. There are power and volume buttons on the right side, a combo microSD/SIM card slot on the rear, a normal headphone jack at the top, and a USB-C jack and dual speakers on the bottom.

The tablet is plastic all around, with a black front along with a matte gray back. It isn't waterproof, and while it supports fast USB-C charging, it doesn't support wireless charging.

The display here's 1,920-by-1,200 pixels at 8.4 inches, which makes it 270 pixels per inch, sharper than plenty of competing tablets, but maybe not the 324ppi iPad mini.

This mainly pays off when studying comics or magazines, or watching movies. Cheaper 8-inch tablets frequently can't display a complete 1080p video frame, while this one can.

Cheaper 8-inch tablets might also have trouble displaying the small text in certain comics or magazine pages, while they look razor sharp.

That is by and large a press consumption tablet rather than a creator's tablet. Once it supports Bluetooth keyboards and mice, it's a little small for primary computing, also it does not encourage a smart stylus like Samsung's S Pen or Apple's Pencil; therefore, you need to step up to the $349 Samsung Galaxy Interface S6e.

Processor and Software

The Galaxy Tab A 8.4 runs Android 9.0 on a Samsung Exynos 7904 chip with 3GB of RAM.

Having a PCMark Work score of 5341 and a Basemark Web score of 142.71, it works similarly to the LG G Pad 5 10.1, which utilizes a 2016-era Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 chip, along with the Moto G7 Play, which utilizes a more contemporary midrange Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 processor.

Samsung has stated that the Tab An 8.4 should get an Android 10 upgrade in Q2 2020 or so, but I wouldn't necessarily count on that. In any case, it is unlikely to get Android 11.

Samsung's skin is lighter than it was, but there is still some bloatware. Samsung adds its own programs, clearly, as well as three Microsoft programs and one T-Mobile program. It's not really bothersome, since the Microsoft programs (Outlook, OneDrive, and Office) are extremely good.

The tablet doesn't encourage Samsung's new Your Phone/Link to Windows or Dex pairing with notebooks, but it does have Samsung Flow, which hooks your laptop and tablet computer up so they can share documents and alarms.

Samsung should find a way to unify all these confusingly duplicative options.

GPU performance here is not up to high-end gaming standards.

This tablet computer got 5.2fps about the GFXBench Car Chase offscreen benchmark and 25fps on the T-Rex offscreen benchmark; that's similar to apparatus utilizing the Qualcomm 600-series processors, but way short of, say, the two-year-old Snapdragon 845, which gets 35fps and 152fps respectively.

Programs adapt to this better than the UI as a whole does. Playing Asphalt 8 was more manageable, though there was a bit of oversteer; the tablet will do fine with fundamental casual matches.

The Android UI, on the other hand, was janky and lethargic in testing, with sudden pauses and jittery animations.

Connectivity

The Exynos 7904 has a Category 12 LTE modem encouraging 3x carrier aggregation and speeds up to 600Mbps. With LTE rings 1/2/3/4/5/7/20/25/26/ / 41/66/71, the tablet supports all the LTE networks which T-Mobile and Sprint need to offer, but it does not do so very fast.

I got 35Mbps down at a place where a OnePlus 8 Pro telephone got 69Mbps down in 4G-only style and 99Mbps down in 4G/5G mode. So in case you've got a higher-end smartphone, then you could discover that using it in hotspot mode provides better performance than using the LTE right with this tablet.

I ran into a practically showstopping problem with poor Wi-Fi functionality, though. I hooked the pill up to some 802.11ax router on a 100Mbps connection.

With 5GHz Wi-Fi, I just got 54Mbps down on this tablet where I have a full 100Mbps in my laptop, my cellphone, and the LG G Pad 5. At 2.4GHz, I got a mere 1Mbps of wobbly connectivity for this tablet while the other apparatus got 30Mbps or more.

This is a large problem; you are going to be using this pill on Wi-Fi most of the time, and inferior Wi-Fi operation will make for a frustrating experience.

Battery life on the 5,000mAh battery is typical. I have 6 hours, 27 minutes of video rundown time at maximum screen brightness, which means approximately 10 hours with moderate brightness. That is an hour better on high brightness than we got with the iPad miniature.

Looking Good on Your Zoom

The 8-megapixel main camera and 5-megapixel front-facing camera aren't bad. In the current world, tablets are fairly heavily utilized for video chat, and the front-facing camera did a far better job of handling mixed lighting scenarios compared to LG G Pad 5 10.1 did. Indoor, relatively low-light shots taken with the principal camera turned out better than the grainy G Pad too.

Video extends up to 1080p resolution, albeit shakily with no optical image stabilization, as well as the tablet supports HDR to equilibrium difficult lighting. Video looks good on the bright, sharp screen.

Harsh and tinny, they create movie dialogue quite intelligible, but require a good deal of pleasure from music. It is a better idea to use wired or Bluetooth headphones, which provide a much richer audio.

At $264, the Galaxy Tab A 8.4 suits e-reading, movie, and basic gaming needs for under the iPad mini. . .as long as you are willing to put up with truly lousy 2.4GHz Wi-Fi functionality. If all you're searching for is the most elementary color e-reader and video player, you can pay a lot less.

Walmart's Onn 8-inch tablet costs a mere $64, and Amazon's Fire HD 8 is $89.99. The most important dilemma is that those pills' screens are 1,280-by-800, which makes it more challenging to read full-color magazine and comics pages.

Ultimately, that means there is still space available on the market for a convenient and colorful, handheld, high-res Android tabletcomputer.

PROS

Affordable tablet with 4G

CONS

Tinny speakers
Sometimes sluggish performance

Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.4 Specs

Operating System: Android 9.0
Dimensions: 7.95 by 4.93 by 0.28 inches
Weight: 10.93 oz
Screen Size: 8.4 inches
Screen Resolution: 1,920 by 1,200 pixels
CPU: Samsung Exynos 7904
Storage Capacity: 32 GB

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