Samsung's Galaxy Tab S3

If you have been looking for a tablet, the common consensus thus far has been to get an iPad. Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S3 aims to change that perception, with its bundled S Pen stylus and optional keyboard alluding to some serious productivity chops. Gone is the plastic of yore, replaced by a premium metal-glass combo. At 434 grams and 6mm thin, the tablet is easy to hold in a single hand, and with a quad-speaker arrangement on both the top and bottom, you’ll likely never block all of them, no matter how you hold the device.

On paper, the Tab S3’s 9.7-inch screen lines up alongside the iPad Pro’s sharp 2048 x 1536 resolution display, but the punchy OLED panel really stands out and makes videos and games look that much richer than the iPad’s LCD panel. There’s even support for high dynamic range (HDR) video, so you’ll be able to stream Amazon Prime video and Netflix with a wider, more lifelike, colour range... once the apps support HDR streaming, that is. The quad speaker setup is tuned by audio experts AKG, and are plenty loud for group consumption even if you’re outdoors.

Powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chip and 4GB of memory, the Tab S3 isn't a pushover by any means and matches last year’s flagship smartphones on performance. Battery life is safely in the 11-12 hour zone, and fast charging will juice up the 6,000mAh battery to 20 per cent in 30 minutes, or all the way in under three hours. While I didn't get to try the optional keyboard, the bundled S Pen is pretty handy — you can write over screenshots, select and move content, and use the pen’s 4096 levels of pressure to draw and sketch, if you’re so inclined. It all comes together well on the Tab S3, yet the Android tablet experience still pales in comparison to the polished software on the iPad (even more so when iOS 11 rolls along). Sure, it’s the best tablet for multimedia consumption, and is clearly the best Android tablet around, but between dwindling tablet interest and its Rs 47,990 price point, even being the best may not be enough for it to move sufficiently large numbers.