The Galaxy Tab S10 FE is a nicely built tablet, but it’s worth considering your Android tablet choices at its asking price.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Sturdy build | Ordinary cameras |
| Good battery life with 45W charging support | No included charger |
| Choice of colours for Wi-Fi models | No choice of colours for 5G models, because…? |
Score: 3/5
 |
Buy The Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE! | Buy On Amazon |
In this review
Specifications
Design
Camera
Performance
Battery
Conclusion
Ethical disclosure: The Galaxy Tab S10 FE used in this review was loaned to me by Samsung Australia for the purposes of review.
Not shockingly, that gets it… reviewed, and it will go back to Samsung. This makes no difference to the review, and Samsung has had no editorial input or oversight over this review. I know disclosure isn’t seen as needed by some journalists, but I feel like it’s important to be upfront and honest with readers. For more on ART’s ethics position, see here.
Design
Samsung’s design language is very much set in place now, and the Galaxy Tab S10 FE doesn’t buck the trend, even though it’s the “Fan Edition” of the Galaxy Tab S10 series.
If you’re not familiar with what makes a Samsung product a “Fan Edition”, it’s essentially Samsung’s way of having a budget line adjacent to its full-priced premium offerings.
This means instead of Tab offerings that quickly go north of $1,500+, the Galaxy Tab S10 FE starts at a slightly less alarming $849 and upwards, depending on the screen size you want and whether you want just Wi-Fi connectivity or a 5G “Cellular” option.
Note to Samsung: “Cellular” is an Americanism, and you’re a South Korean company. Ahem.. I digress.
Also read:
Samsung Galaxy Tab S10+ Review
The model Samsung Australia loaned me was the entry level Wi-Fi model, which means it comes with a 10.9 inch 90Hz capable LCD display with a resolution of 2304 x 1440, all wrapped in a simple rectangular casing that does really make it look like a massive Samsung Galaxy Phone.
With a thickness of 6mm, it’s also only slightly thicker than the recently announced Galaxy S25 Edge, though at 497g, it’s quite a bit heavier!
The display on the Galaxy Tab S10 FE is decent, though one of the ways that Samsung’s dropped the price relative to the S10+’s more professional look is by eschewing an AMOLED display in favour of a cheaper LCD display instead.
That won’t matter too much if you’re looking for a tablet for more consumption-based idling rather than professional work, though dabblers in that field might find it less appealing as a result.
Samsung sells the Galaxy Tab S10 FE in Grey, Silver or Light Blue finishes. It’s always nice to have a splash of colour choice, and it’s interesting here to note that you do get choices as long as you want the basic Wi-Fi model.
If you opt for the 5G models, they’re available in Grey only. Quite why incorporating a mobile modem strips your colour choices is a mystery for the ages, it seems.
The model that Samsung Australia sent my way was literally just the tablet, nothing else at all, but if you buy a retail model, you should also get a USB charging cable (but no charger) as well as an S-Pen stylus for jotting down your notes or sketching or altering photos as you please.
While I didn’t get to test out the included S-Pen, I can confirm that it will work with S-Pens from phones such as the Galaxy S25 Ultra, but not the specific S-Pens that work with Samsung’s Galaxy Fold devices.
Camera
The Galaxy Tab S10 FE has a rudimentary camera array, with just a simple 13MP rear sensor and 12MP front-facing sensor to take photos with.
Then again, I’ve long argued that tablets are about the worst way to indulge in a little mobile photography; while you do get a nice large viewfinder, you’re also left grappling with an overly large actual camera, making it harder to frame shots. In essence, it’s a camera that you’d largely just want to use if you had no other options.
Camera output is workable, but not in any way enticing.
The Tab S10 FE’s portrait mode struggles with my lack of hair.
That being said, it does work nicely for video conferencing and family video calls, and within the scope of the way it is pitched and priced, that’s going to be a better way to utilise its camera for most.
Performance
The Galaxy Tab S10 FE runs on Samsung’s own Exynos silicon, specifically the Exynos 1580 alongside either 8GB of RAM on the 128GB version or 12GB on the 256GB variant.
Given its position in the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 family, I was very much expecting it to run slower than the Galaxy Tab S10+ I’ve previously tested – but the question of course is by how much?
To give that some context, even though most Android benchmarks tend to think in terms of Smartphone performance rather than tablet ones, I ran it through Geekbench 6’s CPU test. Here’s how it compares against both the Galaxy Tab S10+ and the Google Pixel Tablet:
No surprise that the Galaxy Tab S10+ outpaces the pack here; given its asking price there would be something seriously wrong if it didn’t!
The comparison with the Pixel Tablet is an interesting one, as Google’s recently started selling that model without its Pixel dock for quite a bit less than the asking price of the Galaxy Tab S10 FE.
Google Pixel Tablet Review
I am still struck by the fact that some Android apps still aren’t all that tablet friendly, and some really oddly just didn’t want to work with the Galaxy Tab S10 FE specifically. In an attempt to relax, I tried loading up the very popular poker game Balatro on the Galaxy Tab S10 FE, only to be told by Google Play that it wasn’t supported!
That’s not a straight tablet deal – it runs just fine on a Pixel Tablet, for example – and it’s down to the developer to work out any compatibility issues, or whether it’s just a flag for supported models that the Galaxy Tab S10 FE is somehow missing – but it’s still less than an ideal situation when arch-rival Apple has rather more rigidly enforced a “it just works” methodology between iOS and iPadOS apps.
In 2025, you can’t have a device without some level of AI embedded within it, but you don’t get Samsung’s “Galaxy AI” suite of features on the Galaxy Tab S10 FE – those are effectively exclusive to the higher-tier Galaxy Tab S10+.
Instead you get what Samsung calls “Intelligent Experiences”, which broadly translates out to the kinds of apps you see on most mid-tier and above Android phones these days.
So you get circle to search on the main UI, as well as best face and object eraser in the photos app, for example. They’re… fine, I guess, though not exactly something that makes me excited per se about the Galaxy Tab S10 FE in that respect.
Battery
The size of the Galaxy Tab S10 FE does give Samsung more space to pack in battery capacity beyond a standard Android phone, though not as much as you might think.
Where the standard for Android phones these days is 5,000mAh and you could stack at least three Android phones over the screen space of the Galaxy Tab S10 FE, it’s only sitting with an 8,000mAh battery, not something larger.
Still, in broad anecdotal terms over a couple of weeks of testing, it has has stood up well to my consumption needs (Balatro not withstanding) without going flat particularly quickly.
My standard here is for a YouTube video test, and while it’s not a directly comparable matter, it could easily manage an evening’s YouTube browsing only getting through around 40% of the battery for more than 4 hours of video playback, which is fine.
As noted, the model loaned to me was just the barebones tablet – not even a box – but even if you do buy the full retail unit, you’ll have to provide your own power supply. The Galaxy Tab S10 FE supports charging at up to 45W, which is pleasingly fast.
Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE: Alex’s Verdict
Within the Samsung ecosystem, the Galaxy Tab S10 FE makes a lot of sense. It’s the broad consumer appeal play where the Tab S10+/Tab S10 Ultra is the professional play, priced considerably cheaper and with enough power to run most Android consumer-level apps without too much trouble at all.
However, while the Android tablet space isn’t exactly what I’d call vibrant with true competition the way it is with every tier of smartphone pricing, the comparison against the Google Pixel tablet – especially now that Google sells that tablet standalone at a price point several hundred dollars cheaper than the asking price of the Galaxy Tab S10 FE if you don’t want its speaker/charging dock – isn’t one that favours Samsung’s fresher tablet.
If I was buying a consumer-level tablet right now, that’s the model I’d plump for.
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Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE: Pricing and availability
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