Galaxy Tab A announced instead of Galaxy Tab 5

John Cusack

April 20, 2015

Yesterday we reported that TENAA, the Chinese certification authority, has published specs and images for the alleged Galaxy Tab 5 tablet line-up from Samsung. It turns out that those were not the Galaxy Tab 5 specs, rather an entirely new Galaxy Tab line-up, namely the Galaxy Tab A. Samsung Canada announced today that they would be starting sale of the new Galaxy Tab A tablet line-up which is targeted at families and is supposed to be a budget friendly option.

Since Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab A is focused at entertainment and acts as a family solution, you would expect large screens which can be used by all the family with high resolution for optimal media viewing. Instead, the specs that we thought were inferior for the Galaxy Tab 5 yesterday are actually spot-on the specs for the new Galaxy Tab A brothers. According to the press released, the Galaxy Tab A will be available in wo different variants, as predicted: one 8 inch variant and one larger 9.7 inch variant. The 8 inch Galaxy Tab A will be available in either white or titanium color schemes and will come with a 1024*768 resolution TFT display, which is way less than you would expect for a media viewing and entertainment oriented tablet. It’s supposed to be a compact tablet fit for family use, although it might be more appropriate for social media than videos with that resolution.

The larger 9.7 inch Galaxy Tav A comes with a few extra benefits, but it actually has an ever worse ppi pixel density as it has the same resolution as the 8 inch version. The added feature for the larger Galaxy Tab A is the S-Pen Stylus, otherwise it comes with the same specs and color schemes as the smaller slate. The hardware specs for these two tablets coincide, the only differences being size, display size and battery size. In terms of hardware, both seem like pretty solid slates compared to the competition, which acts like a plus for them.

Both versions of the Galaxy Tab A come with 1.2 GHz quad core processors and 16 GB internal memory, but the larger variant has 2 GB RAM while the 8 inch Galaxy Tab A comes with only 1.5 GB RAM. Both slates support microSD cards up to 128 GB in size, which plays into the media-oriented nature of the devices. Further on, they both run Android 5.0 Lollipop with a slew of Microsoft apps included, which is once again a plus for the tablets in my opinion. The cameras measure 5 MP on the rear and 2 MP on the front, which sound pretty neat, although they are definitely not top-notch.

Samsung promises 13 hours of autonomy with Wi-Fi and 12 hours of continuous video playback on the 8 inch Galaxy Tab A which has a 4200 mAh battery and 15 hours of autonomy with Wi-Fi and 14 hours of continuous video playback on the 9.7 inch Galaxy Tab A which has a larger 6000 mAh battery incorporated. Both these tablets are already available in the Samsung store, but pricing has not been disclosed yet. The press release says that sales should open up today and we will update this post with pricing information as soon as that happens.