Samsung Galaxy Tab Active2 Review

Samsung would like to take your order.

The entirely adequate Galaxy Tab Active2 tablet ($419.99) is designed for restaurants, hospitals, delivery companies, point-of-sale systems, and other places where your business involves asking people to sign on the dotted line.

Samsung charges a premium for its rugged, pen-enabled nature, but that may pay off over time in reliability.

Physical Design

The Tab Active2's ($419.99 at Samsung) main strength is its durability.

Sized at 5.0 by 8.5 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and 14.8 ounces, it is IP68 rated against water and shock, and comes in a rubber case that includes a holder for its new, chunkier S Pen.

On the bottom, there's a single (not too loud) speaker and a USB-C connector.

The 8-inch, 1,280-by-800 IPS LCD, at 189 pixels per inch, is not particularly high-res, especially for the price.

You can see some fuzziness around the edges of text if you're used to higher-density screens.

But it's bright enough for outdoor use, and it has a Glove mode that lets it be used with heavy gloves (the standard mode works fine with latex or nitrile gloves).

On one edge, there's a pop-port connector for which there are several third-party accessories, all of them designed for mass enterprise rollouts, usually health care or public safety related.

A Portsmith five-unit charging cradle costs $299, while a RAM Mount vehicle cradle costs $59.49, for instance.

We dropped and dunked the tablet and found it lives up to its promises.

It survived five four-foot drops onto the hard rubberized floor at PC Labs without a problem, and had no trouble with 30 minutes at the bottom of a bucket of cold water.

The hard home and back buttons, along with the physical S Pen, ensure that you can do basic navigation and document signing with gloves or when the touch screen is compromised by water.

If you dunk the tablet, you need to remove the case to dry it off, and wait for the "moisture in the USB port" alert to go away.

I waited about 40 minutes for it to go away before speeding it up with a few blasts from a commercial hand dryer.

A rubber plug attachment would have been nice too.

The tablet comes with a one-year warranty.

Samsung's three-year warranties list at $69.99, or $149.99 with accidental damage coverage.

Android and Performance

The Tab Active2 runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat on a 1.6GHz Samsung Exynos 7870 processor with 3GB of RAM.

It has both 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi, along with a gyroscope, GPS, NFC (for mobile payments), and Bluetooth 4.2.

The 4,450mAh battery is removable, and under the back cover there's space for a microSD memory card to supplement the 10.9GB of available storage.

The tablet runs Samsung's Knox suite of secure management and business deployment applications.

Performance is uninspiring.

We got 3871 on PCMark and 728/3715 on Geekbench 4.

That puts the Active2's performance somewhat above Android tablets in the $100 to $200 range, but below quality midrange smartphones like the Motorola G5S Plus, and considerably behind Samsung's step-up tablet, the Galaxy Tab S3.

The Basemark Web score of 55.18 is really low, as is the GFXBench Car Chase on-screen graphics result of a mere 3.7fps.

The 3GB of RAM allowed us to flip between about a half-dozen applications before losing our place or saved state.

The S Pen, on the other hand, punches well above its weight.

Because it's a proprietary, active pen, it's lagless and pressure sensitive, it's almost perfectly reliable, and it doesn't require charging.

The experience of signing a document or taking notes on this tablet is much more accurate and less frustrating than on tablets with capacitive styluses, or which rely on fingers.

Ultimately, what this means is: Do not play games on this tablet.

Do not use it for heavy office work or creativity.

Use it to fill out forms, process claims, or take photos of injuries to send to the triage unit.

Battery life is fine.

Our battery rundown test is very intensive, streaming a YouTube video with the screen at maximum brightness.

We got 5 hours, 55 minutes, which makes it look like you'd want some spare batteries to swap in if you're going to use the tablet without charging over a long workday.

But in a dim restaurant, for instance, you'll have the screen turned way down, which will push the tablet to at least 8 hours of solid screen-on time.

Our $419.99 model has dual-band Wi-fi, which showed average performance.

There is also an LTE model for $100 more, which has category 6 LTE on bands 1/2/3/4/5/7/8/17/20/28, as well as broad 2G and 3G GSM band support.

That means it will run basically fine on the AT&T and T-Mobile networks, although both speeds and coverage will fall short of the latest smartphones.

See How We Test Tablets

The tablet has an 8-megapixel main camera, with flash, and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera.

Both are fine, for tablet cameras.

Most annoyingly, they must be held very still in low light to prevent blurry images, which could affect their use in a dark restaurant or outdoors at night.

The video functions are better, with clear 1080p video and audio at 30 frames per second, even in low light conditions.

Comparisons and Conclusions

The Tab Active2 strikes a good balance between ruggedness and value.

It's about the price of a sixth-generation iPad plus Pencil ($419 together), but Samsung's tablet is much tougher and waterproof, with a less loseable pen.

That speaks to a more reliable point-of-sale or form-filling system, as long as your software supports Android.

If you're doing a big tablet rollout, Samsung also supplies a bunch of enterprise-friendly features, such as group configuration and enrollment.

Yes, you can roll your own solution for less, but it's going to involve more work and be a little clumsy.

A Lenovo Tab4 8 starts at $129.

A decent case will cost at least $25 (Lenovo's official case is $59).

A capacitive stylus will run another $20 or so.

Then you need to think about management software.

That result will end up less rugged, less responsive, with less RAM, and more hassles than Samsung's solution, although it will cost approximately half as much.

If you can afford the Samsung tablet for your business, it will be more satisfying.

Consumers and educators in this price range should pick the iPad instead.

It's faster, with double the storage, a sharper screen, and better creative software.

The Tab Active2's small, relatively low-density screen and lack of space for apps will frustrate consumers who could have gotten a more functional iPad instead.

But for your restaurant kitchen or parking patrol, this rugged tablet is just the ticket.