Back in the 1940s, multimillionaire Howard Hughes came up with the Spruce Goose, a gigantic wooden sea plane that flew one mile for a minute at an altitude of 70 feet.
No one had ever built a larger aircraft: the wings spanned 320 feet. The Goose could have carried 750 battle-ready troops. Could have. The U.S. government, Hughes’ market, ultimately decided that the size was overkill.
Could the same be said of an 18.4-inch Android table, which the SamMobile blog says Samsung is working on? Among other things, this behemoth could serve as Paul Bunyan’s e-reader—something to kick back with when the giant lumberjack wasn’t chopping down trees to make another Spruce Goose. But for an ordinary mortal?
“According to the information that we’ve received,” reports SamMobile, “the SM-T670, which is codenamed ‘Tahoe’, is an Android 5.1 Lollipop-based tablet with an 18.4-inch display. It will feature a TFT LCD screen with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, an octa-core 64-bit 1.6GHz Exynos 7580 processor, 2GB RAM, 32GB internal storage, a microSD card slot (supporting up to 128GB cards), and a 5,700 mAh battery. It will also come with an 8-megapixel primary camera and a 2.1-megapixel secondary camera. It will be 451.8 mm wide, 275.8 mm tall, and 11.9 mm thick.”
Well, actually the size makes sense if you look beyond recreational e-reading. Samsung is positioning the SM-T670 for living rooms and the office and education market, and I can see the tablet as a natural for showing videos or for helping a few people jointly discuss text, charts, images and the rest. Oh, and wait. Finally an e-book-capable machine big enough to deal with the reflowablity issues of PDFs?
The SM-T670 could also be used for creation—while keeping in mind the limitations of the chip and the amount of RAM, when it comes to tasks like the very most demanding editing of videos.
What’s more, resolution is only 1920 x 1080, as Chris Meadows points out. That’s not enough for tablet this size if you need a decent pixel count per inch.
One thing I’m curious about is battery life. The 5,700 mAh battery, as others have remarked, isn’t that big if you consider the screen size. Perhaps Samsung wanted to keep down the price and figured that this tablet would be mainly for inside use with an AC wall socket near by.
Needless to say, the 18.4 inches places the tablet in a distinctive size category, well beyond Sony’s Digital Paper tablet (13 inches) or Apple’s forthcoming iPad Pro (12-13 inches).
Size isn’t everything. It’s only got a resolution of 1920×1080? That’s worse than the 2013 Nexus 7’s 1920×1200, and that’s just a 7″ tablet.
That’s not so much a “tablet” as it is a touch sensitive desktop monitor someone flipped on its back and glued a computer to.
Agreed, Chris. Maybe decent res is for the next model—if there is a successor. Then again, Howard Hughes made exactly one Spruce Goose. Definitely not a line of them. Perhaps in a sense the comparison applies here. If the SM-T670 bombs, it could end up quite a collector’s item.
Actually, the thing about LCDs is that they’re kind of the opposite of the Spruce Goose. They’re standardized. That Tahoe probably actually is using the exact same LCD panel that would go in an 18″ notebook or desktop monitor. That’s probably why it’s a standard resolution. It was cheap. Getting a higher resolution panel of that size probably isn’t in the cards. They’d need to go with a 4K panel, and you know how expensive 4K monitors are now? Most of that cost is from the LCD panel.
Of course, Samsung could simply wait for 4K prices to drop and along the way market this as a TV as well as a monitor (at least with appropriate set-top arrangements in place).
As for standardization, yes, LCDs can be that way. But you gotta admit—this configuration stands out.