Samsung's New Flagship

At a launch event yesterday at New York City's storied Madison Square Garden, Samsung unveiled what it repeatedly referred to as its new flagship, the Galaxy Tab S. This light and paper-thin tablet is available in two sizes and is the first device of this size to employ Samsung's Super AMOLED panel, which it says is brighter and displays more colors more vibrantly than any of its competitors.  While it didn't mention archrival Apple by name, it seems clear that Samsung is taking aim squarely at Cupertino's latest, the super-thin and light iPad Air. Is this a valid comparison? The CRN Test Center breaks it all down in this head-to-head comparison: Samsung Galaxy Tab S vs. Apple iPad Air.

The App Processor

Samsung's latest tablets, like the Galaxy Note Pro 12, pack Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa 5420 SoC. This eight-core powerhouse has four ARM A15 Cortex processors running in at 1.9 GHz and four A7 cores at 1.3 GHz. The iPad Air contains Apple's A7 custom SoC, which incorporates two 64-bit ARMv8 application cores running at 1.3 GHz plus Apple's M7 processor to handle data coming from the device's accelerometer, gyro and compass.