Galaxy Tab S9 FE Review

this is the Galaxy Tab S9 Fe it's the tab S9 with some of the features pulled out to get the price down is it still worthwhile let's find out hello my name is Brad I review tech for Creative professionals and I am so glad that this exists if you been around for a while you know I'm a big fan of the Galaxy Tab lineup and specifically the Spen and how well it works on these tablets it's been a little bit of a hole in the middle of Samsung's tablet lineup for the last few years and this fits perfectly into it if you want tablet with all the bells and all the whistles go with the S9 the S9 Plus or the S9 Ultra if you're on a tight budget check out the Galaxy Tab S6 light it's a great option but that middle ground has been kind of hit or miss last year there was the Galaxy Tab S7 Fe that was around for a while it was a little bit larger it had a a larger screen and so because of that it was a little bit more expensive where now we get two different sizes there's the tab S9 Fe which is coming in at 10.9 in that's the one that I have here and that I've been testing out and then there's the tab S9 Fe plus which is 12.4 in little bit bigger now Samsung uses the Fe on a lot of their products whether they're phones or tablets to denote something that kind of has decreased specs to reduce the price Fe stands for Fan Edition and that is exactly what this tablet does so not only do we get the two size options here we have two different price options here we're starting at $450 for the base version and then $600 for that plus version and if you're thinking hey drawing on this looks like fun you would be right I really like the S Pen if you'd like to learn how to draw I have just the place for you to start my learn how to draw in 60 days course every day new video Lesson we start at basic we build on those skills every single day after watching those 60 videos and doing 60 days worth of homework you have all of the basics you need to tackle some of those harder tutorials and video courses out there I also have my intro to digital art course which is is asking the question what do we do with those sketches once we have them how do we make them shine how do we polish them finish them off and we go over a lot of those intro to digital art things tools that you find in many of these programs more information on my website bradart school.com link Down Below in the description to learn more so in the box we have well not much really we we have the tablet and we have a USB type-c cable this is a bring your own power adapter sort of deal eh I'm kind of mixed on this this is something Samsung's been doing ever since Apple stopped shipping these with their iPhones but Apple still gives you power chargers with your iPad to me this feels more like a laptop experience that should have a power adapter than a phone but you know whatever I also got a smart cover it's not really that smart it's just a cover that connects to it magnetically it works well it's a nice little stand this is a pre-order bonus when I bought this off of Samsung's website about a week back this device also works with a type cover so if you want that more laptopy experience I've never really been a fan of Samsung's keyboard covers so I ended up skipping this one it's the trackpad that gets me the trackpad just feels kind of icky on Android I don't know they haven't quite nailed that experience yet now even though they've lowered the price this is still a very premium feeling tablet it has an all aluminum back and it comes in four colors there's mint lavender gray and the color I chose silver this is a really goodlook display it's not as good as what you may find on the S9 line step down because it's an IPS display but it's got a solid resolution at 2,34 pixels x 1,440 pixels that's a 16x 10 aspect ratio it's also worth noting that this is running at 90 HZ the top ofth line tablets are running at 120 most devices most phones in this price range only run at 60 HZ so that little bump is kind of nice adds to some cool animations and just kind of generally a smoother experience when using the tablet inside we have an exos 1380 processor it comes in two configurations ations one was 6 GB of RAM 128 GB of storage for $70 more you can get it with a little bit more ram8 GB with 256 GB of storage and if you end up going with the fe+ you're going to be getting more RAM there but the same storage options still apply and if you decide to be cheap and not go for the more storage like I did down the road you can always use the micro SD card slot that's included here to expand the storage on your own on the cheap performance-wise this feels fine you know drawing moving around between apps consuming content it's it's hard to tell the difference for me between this and the standard S9 Ultra I've been using for the last few months even though if you go online and check out the benchmarks the S9 is a whopping two times faster in CPU performance and in gaming performance it's one of those things that over time you might notice you might get an extra year or two out of a standard S9 product before it starts slowing down or if you're doing video production or if you're doing a lot of gaming that's where that performance is going to come in but for drawing you're good step doog has still included a lot of features even though a few of them or maybe a step down from the standard S9 for example there's a fingerprint scanner on the button instead of underneath the screen there's only two stereo speakers although they do sound really good still there's a USB type-c port that's for charging you can also transfer files that way it's only a V2 version of USB type-c so there's no video out here unlike a phone they've saved the best camera for the front this is a 12 pixel ultrawide which makes sense because most people use the front-facing camera on a tablet for video conferencing more than they use the back cameras which is only an 8 megapixel wide angle for taking photos and scanning QR codes now if you do go with the plus they've added a second lens there so that's going to give you a little bit more camera power on the larger tablet another thing that Samsung has added here is is water resistance not something that I would expect in a tablet this size but you know nice addition now I talk about the SP pen all the time it comes in the box so you don't have to drop a lot of extra money on that it's got a little bit of a rubber tip on it so it provides a little bit of drag on that smooth glass screen and the lines I get out of it are really smooth they're really accurate side by side I do still prefer the apple pencil experience it just has better Palm rejection I like the wider tip of the apple pencil it just feels more organic especially when you add like a textured screen protector in there I love love the feel of that that something this doesn't have you can get harder do tips for this pen and you could add a screen protector too even though it's still going to be a smaller surface area you're going to get a similar experience but you're not giving up a lot with this Espen it's lightweight it's easy to adapt to and use after a few minutes of sketching it just feels like home it's using wacom's Tech under the hood so yeah it's really nice stylus more than enough to get the job done now I will admit I am a SPO spoiled little brat here I have been using the giant Galaxy Tab Ultra for the last few months so I'm used to drawing on a really big screen and when I decided to get the smaller version of this tablet I was wondering you know am I really going to miss that real estate and I and I didn't really I think it's because most Android apps are designed to be lightweight without a lot of interface elements so it was just absolutely fine it's probably more comfortable to hold for a long stretch of time if I'm being honest than the larger S9 it's definitely easier to read on consume content on I played around a little bit in CR which is now available for Android that is a straight up Port of the desktop app and it's still very usable here one of the main things that I'm looking for is okay there's a lot of interface elements can I hit them can I navigate them and even on the 10.9 in screen yeah I was fine clip Studio paint has something similar going on this one of my personal favorites what I've been drawing with throughout this video it also has a lot of interface stuff but they just introduced a new simple mode that's available for IOS and Android and drawing in that is a freaking dream gives you all the tools you need you go to the main interface if any tools aren't available to you there uh I love it I made a whole video on it just like fanboying about this mode but anyway back to what we're talking about like I said at the top this is a great price range as much as I love the S6 light it's not really a great processor it's going to be slowing down only after a few years of use now the S9 line is going to last a really long time but it's also significantly more expensive and I think for a lot of creatives this is really going to be this sweet spot that affordability area $500 $450 like that's where it's at I think if you can afford this over the S6 light this is the way to go whenever a company asks how do we reduce the price of our Flagship device they have to cut features right and what features you cut are really important this is fresh in my mind cuz just earlier this week Apple announced that their new apple pencil is is not going to have pressure sensitivity that's the way they've decided to save money they they removed that and to me that's the wrong feature to remove Samsung here for my needs is removing all of the right things a good but not a great processor a good actually better than good display it's not the top-of-the-line screen that they have it's not one of their Super AMOLED displays but this is really nice LCD panel there's little tweaks like they've downgraded the fingerprint reader they've downgraded the speakers but they still sound good it still works well so yeah this gets two thumbs up for me if you were looking at the S9 and thinking man I really want that but I can't quite afford that the S9 Fe and the Fe plus really filled that space perfectly but what do you think let me know Down Below in the comments thank you all for watching and I'll talk to you in a couple of [Music] days [Music] oh

Channel: Brad Colbow

Views: 420,772

Keywords: tech, technology, art, illustration, drawing, wacom, ipad, apple pencil, procreate, review

Id: 8Pb7OAERdZg

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2023