Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 battery: fully prepped for binge watching

Over the past three days, I’ve covered the hardware, software and performance of the Galaxy Tab S 10.5. And believe it or not, I’m not even to the most important part yet. The battery is what drives the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5, what keeps it going through whatever task you may throw at it. With a high resolution of 2560×1600, I was excited to see how the 7,900mAh battery performed in everyday usage.

The answer is: quite well. With moderate usage and auto brightness, it’s not at all hard to make it through a full day from 7:00AM to 11:00PM, maybe even part of the next day. Heavier usage brings you within a single day, but you shouldn’t need to charge during the middle of the afternoon or anything. If you’re using the Tab S 10.5 lightly, you could probably get a full three days out of it.

Screen-on time with auto brightness came to about four hours, which is decent. Better screen-on times can be found, but four hours is plenty for binge watching some TV shows. That’s about four episodes of House of Cards or perhaps 12 episodes of The Office. And if you’re at all like me, those kind of figures are important when figuring out what tablet to buy.

If you’re really looking to conserve battery life, Samsung has a power saving mode that should garner you a bit more time. And if you’re in a desperate pinch, Samsung has thrown in Ultra Power Saving Mode that turns the screen to grayscale and severely limits what the device can do, all at the sake of several days, possibly even weeks, of battery life. But let’s be honest, you’ll never use this unless it’s an emergency.

The charging process of the Galaxy Tab S 10.5 is notable. The tablet charges through microUSB, and I’ll give a fair warning that it takes a long time to charge. When I received the tablet, it was entirely dead, and it took several hours to get it back to 100 percent. It’s certainly something to consider if you generally rely on a lot of short, quick charges.

All that said, the Galaxy Tab S 10.5 performs reasonably well in the battery department. Very few tablets can match its battery life and performance. It takes a while to charge, sure, but that’s to be expected with a large battery that charges via microUSB. In the end, the Galaxy Tab S 10.5 passes with good grades on the battery front.

source: androidandme