All the tablet you’ll ever need

Design

• Slimmer and lighter than S10 Ultra – but still a big tablet
• Redesigned S Pen is welcome
• Keyboard cover expands functionality, but needs a trackpad

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra might look a lot like last year’s Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra at a glance, but look a little closer and you’ll notice a range of smaller tweaks and new features that fix some of the long-time complaints with Samsung’s top-end tablet.

First and foremost, the accompanying S Pen – which still comes in the box – no longer magnetically attaches to the rear of the device. 

Instead, it snaps onto the long side of the tablet for charging and storage, just like the OnePlus Pad 3, iPad Pro M4, and pretty much any non-Samsung tablet on the market. I’ve long felt that Samsung’s rear stylus storage was a bit of an oddity, as it gets in the way when holding the tablet and also had a tendency to fall off when stored in a bag, so this is a welcome change in my book.

Speaking of the S Pen, that has also had a bit of a facelift this year. It now sports a hexagonal design like a traditional pencil, complete with a cone-shaped tip. I also feel like the S Pen is substantially lighter this year, which made doodling a little nicer.

However, with a regular slippery glass screen, it doesn’t replicate the true pen-and-paper experience for drawing and note-taking like the Remarkable Paper Pro or Amazon Kindle Scribe. 

It’s not just about a redesigned S Pen however; the tablet itself has been slimmed down, now just 5.1mm thick and weighing a pretty decent 692g considering its XL footprint. 

It’s still a big tablet that I wouldn’t exactly describe as portable, with a massive 14.6-inch screen that almost certainly exclusively requires two-handed use – but it does make a difference when carrying the tablet or storing it in a bag. 

The tablet also marks the continuation of Samsung’s commitment to offering IP68 protection in its flagship range – something we’ve yet to see from any other premium iPads or Android tablets. Like last year, it’s available in fairly muted (but still stylish) grey and silver colour options.  

There’s also the optional keyboard cover to consider. Though not a necessity like with Microsoft’s Surface Pro 12 – it’s totally usable without one – but the use of the case does elevate the experience to something akin to a traditional laptop. 

The keyboard is spacious with full-size keys and satisfying tactile feedback as you hammer away at the keys – in fact, I wrote much of this review using the tablet and keyboard combination.

I will say, though, it is a little odd that the keyboard doesn’t have a trackpad. It’s fast becoming a standard feature, available with many models of iPad and even competing Android tablets like the OnePlus Pad 3. 

I’d also love it if you could remove the keyboard section of the case when not in use – the keyboard case isn’t exactly light, but the integrated kickstand could come in handy for watching movies.

Screen

• Pixel-packed 14.6-inch Dyanmic AMOLED 2X screen
• Fantastic canvas for work and play
• Would benefit from S25 Ultra’s anti-reflective coating

The screen, by the way, is still the reason to go for the Tab S11 Ultra over many competing Android tablets – for something smaller, there’s always the regular 11-inch Tab S11.

The 14.6-inch AMOLED screen is genuinely among the best screens on any tablet, one of the very few able to hold a candle to Apple’s excellent OLED panel on its iPad Pro M4. 

It’s a sight to behold, especially with such a large panel; blacks are deep, colours are vibrant, and when combined with a 120Hz refresh rate, everything feels super smooth, no matter what I’m doing. Sure, some apps can look comically huge – using TikTok and Instagram on a screen that size is certainly an experience – but it’s more than a big screen.

The 16:10 aspect ratio employed here traditionally lends itself better to media consumption than split-screen multitasking, offering smaller black bars on widescreen movies than the square-like panels found on Apple and OnePlus alternatives. 

However, the S11 Ultra’s combination of such a large panel and Samsung’s upgraded DeX experience means it’s a rare example of a tablet that’s perfectly suited to both – more on the latter a little later. 

The accompanying bezels are delightfully slim at just 5.2mm thick, providing a more immersive experience with still enough space for your fingers to sit without accidentally tapping the screen, and there’s a much smaller selfie camera notch this year too. 

There’s also a boosted 1600nit peak brightness – 670nits brighter than last year’s 930-nit S10 Ultra – and that means it looks just as good outdoors as it does indoors, especially with an anti-reflective coating.

Cameras

• 13MP and 8MP cameras on the rear
• Only a single 12MP selfie camera this year
• Fine for occasional snaps, document scans and the like

Cameras are never a focus for tablets, which is why it was so surprising when Samsung equipped previous entries in the series with not one but two front-facing cameras. 

It meant that you essentially had a normal selfie camera and an ultra-wide alternative for video calls, but it also meant that there was a pretty noticeable camera cutout in the middle of the screen. 

Well, it seems like Samsung has decided to forego that experience this year, dropping the number of selfie cameras back down to one, with a much less noticeable camera cutout interrupting the otherwise top-end screen experience. 

The 12MP snapper acts like a hybrid of the two previous lenses, offering a standard selfie camera with a wider than usual field of view, and Samsung’s software can track your face – just like Apple’s Centre Stage tech – to keep you front and centre.

Flip the tablet over and you’ll find a familiar combination of 13MP main and 8MP ultrawide lenses, complete with an embedded flash for illuminating the environment. Despite Samsung’s camera prowess in phones like the Galaxy S25 Ultra, the cameras on the rear appear to be just fine – but again, tablets aren’t really designed for photography, so it’s not much of a surprise.

It’s still good enough for document scanning or the occasional photo, but I’d recommend using whatever phone you have in your pocket for more serious photography.  

Performance

• MediaTek Dimensity 9400+
• Up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB storage
• Phenomenal daily performance, but benchmarks trail

Unlike Samsung’s phone range, which tends to use Snapdragon-branded chipsets, the company’s tablets come with MediaTek-branded alternatives. The Tab S10 Ultra featured 2024’s MediaTek Dimensity 9300+, and that continues with the Tab S11 Ultra’s use of the upgraded Dimensity 9400+.

The amount of RAM is tied to the storage option you choose, with either 12- or 16GB of RAM at play. The 256- and 512GB models get 12GB, while the top-end 1TB model gets the full 16GB. Regardless, you’re getting a pretty powerful combination that makes light work of both everyday tasks and more demanding processes. 

In everyday use, the Tab S11 Ultra performs exceptionally well. Apps open in an instant, scrolling is smooth and stutter-free, and it can handle some of the most demanding games available on Google Play with top-end graphics enabled. Seriously, Call of Duty Mobile has never looked as good as it does on the S11 Ultra, especially with that huge screen. 

And, with such a large footprint, it manages to stay cooler over longer periods of use than smaller tablets and smartphones, which translates to sustained performance in those demanding titles.

It also makes light work of multitasking, with the tablet able to run four (or more) apps on screen at once without breaking a sweat.

That said, when it comes to benchmarking tests, the tablet falls behind the Snapdragon 8 Elite-equipped OnePlus Pad 3 – and that’s a little awkward, considering the tablet costs £479 in the UK, which is practically half the price of the Tab S11 Ultra. 

It also trails far behind the similarly priced iPad Pro and its desktop-class Apple M4 chipset, but that’s not a surprise – even laptops struggle to compete with Apple’s latest chipset offering. 

For transparency, I was sent the 512GB + 12GB model, so you could get slightly better performance from the top-end 1TB model, but it likely still won’t match the performance of the 8 Elite in benchmark testing. 

But, again, this is just synthetic benchmark testing – in real-world use, you’re very unlikely to notice a difference between the Tab S11 Ultra and much of the top-end tablet competition, so don’t put too much weight on that in your buying decision. 

Software

• One UI 8 based on Android 16
• Upgraded DeX multitasking smarts
• Galaxy AI present and accounted for

The Tab S11 Ultra ships with the same One UI 8 based on Android 16 as recent entries like the Galaxy Z Fold 7 – but with some very specific tablet-focused upgrades that separate it from much of the competition. 

It focuses primarily on an upgraded Samsung DeX experience. The tech continues to allow you to hook the Tab S11 Ultra up to an external monitor for a Windows-esque experience that brings it even closer to a desktop, but it’s now also accessible on the tablet itself.

While you don’t get a complete desktop UI overhaul, the update brings support for movable and resizable app windows on the tablet, complete with separate desktops to, for example, separate work apps and entertainment apps. It’s essentially the tablet multitasking experience on steroids.

It’s a feature present on the competing Honor MagicPad 3, and Apple just introduced similar functionality on the iPad with iPadOS 26, so it’s far from a unique experience. Still, it feels way more polished than Honor’s alternative in use, with more intuitive gestures and window resizing tools that feel Windows-inspired and, thus, instantly familiar. 

It truly shines when paired with the keyboard case and a Bluetooth mouse, allowing me to easily go between several apps at once – ideal for my workflow, which involves writing in Google Docs while keeping an eye on apps like Slack, Notion, and Gmail. It’s just a great all-round experience, simple as that.

Of course, being a flagship Samsung product, you’ll also get access to Galaxy AI, including new elements – like Now Brief – along with upgrades to existing features. Google’s Circle to Search can now work in games, and Gemini now takes up a small portion of the massive screen – and also supports drag-and-drop so you can move photos and text between it and your other apps more easily.

As I’ve said in other reviews, I don’t think any of these features will truly change the way you use the tablet, but they’re certainly nice to have – if only for occasionally editing a photo or rewriting a chunk of text. 

Battery life

• 11600mAh battery
• Solid all-day use
• Takes over 90 minutes for a full charge

Battery life is also pretty solid considering the size of the screen the tablet powers, though I must admit, I was expecting something a little larger. At 11,600mAh, it’s 400mAh bigger than the outgoing Tab S10 Ultra, but it’s also short of the 12,140mAh cell of the OnePlus Pad 3 – and that tablet is much smaller. 

That combination means it doesn’t quite last as long as the OnePlus Pad 3, which has exceptional standby times in my experience, but the Tab S11 Ultra won’t leave most wanting for more. It has more than enough juice to get me through a day’s work, with just about enough left in the tank for a movie or two in the evening.

Of course, it’ll depend a lot on what you’re up to specifically – playing top-end games will burn the battery faster than, say, writing in Google Docs, so your mileage may vary, but it certainly hasn’t been a cause for concern during my time with the tablet. 

Charge times could be a little faster though; the 45W charging on offer managed just 15% in 15 minutes and 34% in half an hour, with a full charge taking just over an hour and a half.

Should you buy it?