It’s the world’s biggest tablet - and it works under water

You could do that too – the big screen is just perfect for reading magazines, I must say – provided you don’t mind the touch of the water on the screen acting like the touch of fingers, and flipping magazine pages for you.

So, no, we don’t really know the point of a tablet that works under water, other than that you can use it near water, and not worry about it falling into water. That’s not something you can do with an iPad, and come summer, it could be a fairly compelling feature.

Mostly, though, we’ve come to think of the Tab S9 Ultra as something you use nowhere near water, but on a desk or an airplane tray table as an ultraportable productivity device just like last year’s Tab S8 Ultra.

If desktop productivity is your thing, and you’re not a video editor or music producer, the Tab S9 Ultra is easily the best tablet money can buy. (And I do mean money! It’s expensive, especially if you add the keyboard cover required to fully unlock the tablet’s best productivity features.)

The screen is easily big enough to have two large windows open on it at the same time (each window is 9.5 inches diagonally, the same size as the entire screen on an original iPad); there’s a taskbar for easy multitasking, just like you’ll find on a Mac or Windows PC; and there’s Samsung’s DeX mode, which turns the Ultra into a machine very much like a Mac or Windows PC, albeit one that runs Android apps.

I’m using DeX mode on the Tab S9 Ultra to write up this review, for instance, and most of the time it’s barely distinguishable from using any other 14-inch-ish laptop. The OLED screen on the Ultra is sharper and brighter than on most notebooks, and the keyboard has a little less travel than I’m used to, but for the web-based tasks I mostly do for this part of my job, it’s been just another day at the office.

And it’s a long day, too. We got about 15 hours of battery life on a single charge in our tests, using it for light productivity and for watching streamed videos, which is very good indeed.

We can’t tell you the battery life for more demanding tasks because, well, we didn’t bother measuring that. Compared to last year’s Apple iPad Pro M2, the Galaxy Tab S9 shows up in our benchmark tests as being 85 per cent as fast for single-threaded apps, 60 per cent as fast for multithreaded apps, and only 21 per cent as fast for graphics processing.

Anyone looking for a high-performance tablet for tasks such as video editing or music production is going to go the iPad route, almost certainly – especially given the fact that the iPad has a much better selection of high-end creativity apps than Android does.

Anyone, that is, but a scuba diving videographer who lives near a very shallow, cold lake.

Likes: Waterproof. Huge screen. Fast enough for most tasks. Incredibly useful pen.
Dislikes: Fewer high-end Android apps. Expensive. Not so portable.
Price: Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra $1999 to $2949, depending on storage and 5G connectivity. Keyboard cover $549. Pen comes free.