Samsung doesn’t do subtle with “Ultra.” Never has. Across its lineup, the word has come to mean one thing first: the biggest one. And on the Galaxy Tab, that means 14.6 inches. A tablet with a bigger screen than most laptops, mine included.The Ultras before it have all worn that number, and so does the Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra. Same 5.1mm frame, same 692g, same grey and silver. Put it next to last year’s S11 Ultra and you’d need the box to tell them apart.So, what’s new? Not much you can see. The few days I’ve had it have mostly gone into finding the rest.
The size still sets the terms
Everything about the S12 Ultra is arranged around those 14.6 inches, and the thinness is what makes them liveable. It slipped into the 15-inch sleeve of my backpack with room to spare, came out without the aluminium frame giving at the corners, and sat on my desk slimmer than the phone next to it.Holding it is a different negotiation. Portrait on the couch, bottom edge on my palm, lasts about twenty minutes before the wrist objects, and landscape is a two-hands job, which is how you’ll end up watching things on it anyway.Watching things is where all that glass makes sense. Samsung has left the AMOLED panel exactly as it was, and a film shot mostly under streetlights showed why, with the shadows staying dark and the faces inside them keeping their detail. The 16:10 frame leaves slim bars on films and barely any on shows, the four speakers keep dialogue clean but thin out when things blow up, and the selfie-camera notch that dips into the landscape view stopped registering after the first night.The 1,600-nit peak held up on the balcony in the afternoon, though glass this glossy will show you the sky if you tilt it wrong. Even unlocking fits the scale: the fingerprint reader sits under the display, right where my thumb lands on the right edge.
The new part sits out of sight
The changes only show up once you give it work.MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500 replaces last year’s 9400+, a bigger vapour chamber sits behind it, and Photoshop arrives on an Android tablet for the first time with four months free. Add the S Pen, still in the box, still free of charging, still clicking onto the edge, and that combination gave me the best hour I’ve had with it so far, cleaning up a batch of long-lens shots without the brush ever lagging behind the nib. It’s the mobile Photoshop scaled up, so a few desktop tools are missing, but a pen on this much screen makes fiddly work a lot less fiddly.RAW files eat space quickly, which makes the 512GB model at Rs 1,69,999 a tempting step up from the Rs 1,49,999 base with 256GB.The same chip and cooling took forty minutes of Call of Duty: Mobile at 120fps without a drop I could spot, with the back turning warm and going no further, on a map big enough to make the phone version feel like playing through a keyhole afterwards.Between those sessions and the Photoshop ones, the 11,600mAh battery, also carried over, went two days without me reaching for a charger. Just as well, since the box doesn’t have one; a 45W brick fills it in about an hour and a half. Mine is the Wi-Fi model, and one cab ride spent tethering to my phone made a quiet case for the 5G version, which starts at Rs 1,64,999.Software is where the size runs into Android. One UI 9 on Android 17 kept Photoshop, a browser full of reference shots, a YouTube tutorial and a floating chat window open at once without a stutter, and Samsung is promising seven years of updates behind it. Then Instagram opens, stretches a phone layout across 14.6 inches, and leaves wide empty strips down either side of every post.The Pro Keyboard Cover, a Rs 27,999 add-on with backlit keys and a trackpad, is still to be tried, and so is Samsung’s DeX desktop mode with it attached.
It’s big on purpose
Samsung kept the size because that’s what people come to an Ultra for. Nobody buys one hoping for the tablet that fits on a lap.The difference this year is in how much you can ask of all that screen. Forty minutes of a shooter left the back only warm, an hour in Photoshop with the S Pen cleared a backlog of edits I’d been putting off, and two days later the battery still hadn’t asked for a charger.There’s more to try yet, starting with whether 14.6 inches can carry a full workday as easily as it carried a film.