I got my pre-ordered Galaxy Tab S6 128GB LTE today and here are some initial thoughts:
-Build quality seems fine, definitely nothing to complain here.
-The groove for the S-Pen at the back is somewhat awkward now that I'm still without a case. One of the reasons I bought this tablet is the Book Cover keyboard that has an actual touchpad embedded into it (finally!). I will be getting the aforementioned Book Cover keyboard, but for whatever reason Samsung made it so that I couldn't bundle the cover to be delivered with the device itself. I had to wait until the tablet was delivered so that I could register it, and then I'll be soon getting a -50% discount code for the cover which I then can finally order. Phew. This could have been a lot simpler.
-Another major reason I went for the Tab S6 is the standalone DeX mode, which seems promising but which also waits for the Book Cover to arrive before I'll be using it a bit more regularly.
-The S-Pen has a nice feel to it and the latency is non-existent enough for my use. Then again, I'll be using the pen mostly for note-taking and annotation as I'm not much of a graphic artist.
-The display looks great and the built-in fingerprint scanner (sadly it's just an optical one, so a bit of a downgrade from the S10+) works fine.
-With the discounts I got the Tab S6 seems great value for the money. When I placed my pre-order, there was an additional -160€ discount shown on the Samsung site. It might have been a leftover from Tab S4 sales as the discount disappeared quite quickly after I had ordered mine. That combined with the -50% discount for the book cover means that I'll be paying 720€ total for the tablet + keyboard case + pen combo, something which would be 1413€ for the smallest LTE iPad Pro with a keyboard cover and the pencil (1333.9€ with the Logitech case instead of the Smart Keyboard). Even without the discounts the Samsung combo is "only" 960€, which is hundred of Euros less than the iPad Pro version. While tablet-optimized apps are still better on iOS, it seems like even the iPadOS 13 changes aren't going to match the productivity boosts offered by the trackpad in the keyboard cover and DeX mode (especially if they expand Linux on DeX to the tab S6), so unless I hit a deal-breaker on the S6, spending the iPad Pro money isn't that enticing. You may wonder why I excluded the cheaper iPad options, but for me at this point of 2019 it's USB-C or GTFO.
-Security updates are on June 2019 level. If I recall correctly, Samsung tablets are on a quarterly pace instead of monthly. A bit of a bummer, but I think I'll live with it thanks to other protections included in a modern Android.
-Build quality seems fine, definitely nothing to complain here.
-The groove for the S-Pen at the back is somewhat awkward now that I'm still without a case. One of the reasons I bought this tablet is the Book Cover keyboard that has an actual touchpad embedded into it (finally!). I will be getting the aforementioned Book Cover keyboard, but for whatever reason Samsung made it so that I couldn't bundle the cover to be delivered with the device itself. I had to wait until the tablet was delivered so that I could register it, and then I'll be soon getting a -50% discount code for the cover which I then can finally order. Phew. This could have been a lot simpler.
-Another major reason I went for the Tab S6 is the standalone DeX mode, which seems promising but which also waits for the Book Cover to arrive before I'll be using it a bit more regularly.
-The S-Pen has a nice feel to it and the latency is non-existent enough for my use. Then again, I'll be using the pen mostly for note-taking and annotation as I'm not much of a graphic artist.
-The display looks great and the built-in fingerprint scanner (sadly it's just an optical one, so a bit of a downgrade from the S10+) works fine.
-With the discounts I got the Tab S6 seems great value for the money. When I placed my pre-order, there was an additional -160€ discount shown on the Samsung site. It might have been a leftover from Tab S4 sales as the discount disappeared quite quickly after I had ordered mine. That combined with the -50% discount for the book cover means that I'll be paying 720€ total for the tablet + keyboard case + pen combo, something which would be 1413€ for the smallest LTE iPad Pro with a keyboard cover and the pencil (1333.9€ with the Logitech case instead of the Smart Keyboard). Even without the discounts the Samsung combo is "only" 960€, which is hundred of Euros less than the iPad Pro version. While tablet-optimized apps are still better on iOS, it seems like even the iPadOS 13 changes aren't going to match the productivity boosts offered by the trackpad in the keyboard cover and DeX mode (especially if they expand Linux on DeX to the tab S6), so unless I hit a deal-breaker on the S6, spending the iPad Pro money isn't that enticing. You may wonder why I excluded the cheaper iPad options, but for me at this point of 2019 it's USB-C or GTFO.
-Security updates are on June 2019 level. If I recall correctly, Samsung tablets are on a quarterly pace instead of monthly. A bit of a bummer, but I think I'll live with it thanks to other protections included in a modern Android.
