Which tablet is the better choice for consumers? The iPad Mini 2 or the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4.
In terms of display and design, the iPad Mini 2 has a single-piece aluminum backplate that stretches toward the front panel which is protected with oleophobic coating. The screen is surrounded by a thin metallic bezel and at the bottom side there are two rows of speakers with round holes. It weighs 331 grams/WiFi or 341 grams/3G-LTE and it measures 200×134.7×7.5 mm.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 is lighter and thinner, weighing 294 grams, and its dimensions are 212.8×125.6×6.6 mm. The frame that surrounds the body is made of plastic, but imitates metal.
The Galaxy Tab S has a bigger display of 8.4 inches Super AMOLED and supports a higher resolution and pixel density of 1600×2560 pixels and 359ppi. The iPad Mini 2 comes with a 7.9 inches LED-backlit IPS LCD screen, with a resolution of 1536×2048 pixels, and a pixel density of 324ppi.
For the hardware and memory, the Samsung Tab S 8.4 features an Exynos 5 Octa 5420 chipset created by Samsung, which supports an octa core processor consisting of a quad-core 1.9GHz Cortex-A15 processor and a quad-core 1.3GHz Cortex-A7 processor, which work in perfect harmony with a Mali-T628 MP6 GPU and 3GB of RAM. The iPad Mini 2 is powered by a 64bit A7 chip with a dual-core 1.3GHz Cyclone processor and a M7 co-processor, coupled with a PowerVR G6430 GPU and 1GB of RAM. The iPad Mini 2 comes with four variants of storage with capacities of 16, 32, 64 and 128GB, but it doesn't have a microSD card slot. The Galaxy Tab S 8.4 has variants of 16 and 32GB, with the possibility to expand them up to 128GB.
In terms of battery and camera specs, the iPad Mini 2's battery last 9 hours, with one hour and a half more than Samsung Galaxy Tab S’ battery. Also, the capacity is bigger on Apple’s battery: 6470 mAh (24.3 Wh), compared to 4900 mAh.
The Galaxy Tab S 8.4 doesn’t have the same camera from the Galaxy S5, having half of its number of pixels, so the images look less crisp and don’t have the same color balance, but the photos are brighter than the ones taken with iPad Mini 2’s 5MP back camera. Also, the shutter speed is faster on the Tab S. The front camera on the Samsung tablet is 2.1MP and Apple provides a 1.2MP secondary camera.
The iPad Mini 2 cost $225 for the 16GB variant with WiFi, while the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 16GB variant cost $350.
Which tablet is the better purchase? Sound off in the comments section below.
