Samsung Galaxy Tab S8+ Tablet, Silver

This is a nice tablet. It boots up fairly quickly, the battery life is good, the charging time is reasonable. The screen is very clear and the sound is very good for such small speakers. Once you configure it, it connects automatically to wifi and to your Google Drive or Microsoft Onedrive accounts. Updates to the operating system are provided automatically. Now for the caveats. There’s no charger! The USB port is used for charging, but the USB-C port on the tablet is slightly larger than the USB connection on other Galaxy devices, so you can’t use the same cable you used on your cell phone or an earlier version of an Android tablet. You’ll need a cable to adapt from USB-C to USB-A to hook up to a charger but some USB-C cables won’t fit. Be sure to get the right size USB-C connector. Even with an adapter for USB-C to USB-A you can’t attach an ordinary USB memory stick, USB external drive, USB keyboard, USB mouse, or externally powered USB hub. You can’t use a wireless keyboard or wireless mouse. I mean a full-sized keyboard with a number pad, not the dinky keyboard with chicklets Samsung wants to sell you. I tried Enable Developer Options to open the USB connection, but it doesn’t work. There are USB drivers online but they’re for phones, not for this tablet. It looks like the hardware was simply wired, or not wired, this way and can’t be changed in software. This was a REALLY STUPID design decision. There’s no 3.5 mm headphone jack. The audio appears on the USB-C port, the same port used for charging. To listen to music, you need either a USB-C to 3.5mm audio adapter or a Bluetooth connection, like earbuds. The problem with Bluetooth, of course, is there’s a slight delay in the audio caused by the Bluetooth, so if you’re listening to a conversation online, the video and the audio will be out of sync. The audio output on the USB-C port is digital so if you use the USB-C to 3.5mm audio adapter the adapter has to include digital-to-audio conversion (DAC) built into the cable. Amazon and others have adapter cables. Search for “USB-C to 3.5 mm Headphone Jack Adapter.” In the U.S., the tray that comes with the tablet has a single space for a micro SD card. To use a SIM card you need a tray with two two spaces, one for the SIM card and one for the micro SD card. This is a different tray from the one on your phone – the tray from the phone won’t fit in there unless you jam it in. You can buy a longer tray, but it’s the same as the one in the phone and can’t be used on the tablet. On the tablet the SIM card is installed with the contact surface facing one way and the contacts for the micro SD card facing the other. I haven’t found anyone who sells a tray with openings for both cards that fits the tablet. Nobody seems to know if you can swap the SIM card from your phone or another tablet to the S8+ and connect to a cellular service without going through your cell phone carrier and adding the tablet as an additional device on your contract. This seems like restraint of trade to me. The Samsung web site has an icon for a User Manual but when you get there, there’s no User Manual available. The user manual is available on the device, after you finish setting up. (How hard would it be to copy it over?) The setup is pretty straightforward. Just follow the prompts and skip the services you don’t want. I can’t figure out how to get rid of pre-installed apps, bloatware, that I don’t need. I’d like to remove the icons for some of the pre-loaded programs & make room for icons for other programs. The instructions I’ve found on-line for doing this don’t work. Ordinarily you could use Android Debug Bridge and connect from a PC, but it won’t work if the USB port isn’t available. Way to go guys! You saved 50 cents manufacturing cost per unit. I can’t figure out how to move the icon for one of my installed programs from page 2 to the main page. The instructions I’ve found on-line don’t work. Sliding the icon to the edge of the page simply opens the program. In spite of the smiling faces on the web page, Samsung support is completely useless. Instead of responding to my e-mails they send me cheerful ads telling me how great the company is. It’s a nice tablet, the screen is beautiful, the sound is good, but the functionality is needlessly limited and the asking price is too high. You’d think someone would start making a competing product. Samsung is a large company with lots of resources. It would be nice if, instead of hyped-up, overblown ads Samsung could put some more time and technical skill into developing this product. If you could use an external USB keyboard and mouse with it, combined with the programs available from Google Play it would just about be a substitute for a desktop computer.