Samsung Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra vs Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra: The difference one year can make

Holding up the newly announced Samsung Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra alongside its predecessor from last year, the Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra, you'd be hard pressed to spot a physical difference. The biggest and baddest of Samsung's Android tablets is still a comically large and impossibly thin slab of glass, still rocking a 14.6" AMOLED display to make it a media consumption and productivity powerhouse.

It's an iterative update from Samsung, in other words, which has been the case with every tablet in its oversized, top-end lineup. But why mess with a working formula after this many refinements? Aside from removing the ability to remote control your tablet with an S Pen, which was not brought back this time around, the Tab S11 Ultra changed very little compared to the Tab S10 Ultra, and the new Tab S12 Ultra doesn't even look that different from the original Tab S8 Ultra released over four years ago. Tablets are tablets, and it's mostly what's under the hood that makes this year's upgrade worth examining.

The Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra's laptop-sized display is once again interrupted only by a teardrop camera cutout for its single, ultra-wide lens  — a serviceable selfie and video call camera at 12 megapixels. As for the display itself, it's a 2,960 by 1,848 pixel Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel, just like every other tablet before it in this lineup including the S11 Ultra. This year, peak brightness sits at 1,600 nits for HDR content and 1,000 nits in high brightness mode, same as last year. The panels Samsung uses for this line of oversized tablets have always been impressive, and if you haven't held one in your hands, you're missing out on some true eye candy. Engadget's review of the S12 Ultra confirms that hasn't changed.

One solid upgrade this time around is support for four-channel spatial audio using the onboard four-speaker array. That's up from 2-channel spatial audio on the last-generation tablet. I can confirm that the four-speaker array on Samsung's previous Ultra tablets are second only to their displays in terms of wow factor. Watching TV and movies, especially those with good spatial mixes, I've experienced surprisingly wide soundstages and element positioning.

There is, predictably, a chip upgrade from the MediaTek Dimensity 9300+ to the Dimensity 9500 inside the S12 Ultra. Like its predecessor, the chip is built on a 3nm process. Samsung claims it represents a 19 percent increase in CPU performance and a 17 percent increase in GPU power, along with a 61 percent jump in NPU (if you're doing heavy AI tasks on your Samsung tablet, please explain what and why). There's also a new 3D vapor chamber for heat dissipation. But as 2nm mobile chips finally make major inroads into the market with the recent Apple A20 Pro and Qualcomm 8 Elite Gen 6 bringing major performance gains to the table, this processor doesn't bring enough uplift to justify the tablet's equally increased price. As is tradition at this point in the RAM-aggedon crisis, the Tab S12 Ultra starts at $1,400 for the 256 GB model with 12 GB of RAM. That's a price hike of $200 over the launch price commanded by the S11 Ultra. You'd be hard pressed to find a more expensive Android tablet from a mainstream vendor.

Sadly, there's no increase to the charging speed, which remains at 45W for the 11,600 milliamp-hour battery, which is also the same size found on the S11 Ultra. In a landscape where more nimble competitors like Redmagic are putting out tablets like the Astra 2 with much speedier charging (to say nothing of other specs), it's a bit of a letdown to see Samsung stagnate here. Again, the higher price would go down with more honey had we seen some real upgrades.

The two tablets are otherwise almost entirely identical. S12 Ultra will ship with the latest One UI 9.0 Android skin out of the box, but the S11 Ultra will get the same update before too long. Both tablets have the same IP68 water and dust resistance rating, so if you want to watch Netflix in the pool, either one will do. Both tablets have the same exact body measurements, the same thickness at 5.1 millimeters and even the same weight down to the gram  — 692 grams to be precise.

If you skipped out on the Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra because of its paltry updates compared to the S10 Ultra, there's very little here to compel you this time around. If you've felt stymied by the performance of the S11 Ultra, you won't get a lot more breathing room from the new chip, and even S10 Ultra owners may not have a compelling reason to upgrade. If you've still got an S9 Ultra or even an S8 Ultra, this will feel like a significant boost, but the price is still difficult to swallow. Samsung didn't release the Tab S12 Ultra with any great fanfare, and nor should it have  — a press release launch for an on-paper update. Even so, you're not going to find a more well-specced Android tablet at this size.