Samsung announces 8-inch and 9.7-inch Galaxy Tab S2 tablets with new form factor and 4:3 2048x1536 displays, available in August
Samsung Announces The 8.0" and 9.7" Galaxy Tab S2 Tablets — Today Samsung announced the Galaxy Tab S2, the followup to last year's Galaxy Tab S tablets.
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung's follow-up to last year's Galaxy Tab S abandons the widescreen shape of its predecessor: both the 8-inch and 9.7-inch Tab S2 use 4:3 2048x1536 panels, aligning the tablets with a squarer page-and-app layout rather than the 16:9/16:10 video-first format most Android slates used.
The 4:3 bet proved short-lived — three years later Samsung was back to 16:10 on the Galaxy Tab S4 — while the line's ambitions drifted the other way, toward ever-larger and pricier OLED flagships like the $1,100-plus Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra.
First-order effects
- Buyers shopping in August get two distinctly shaped options — an 8-inch and a 9.7-inch slate whose 4:3 screens favor reading, web browsing, and magazine-style apps over widescreen video.
Second-order effects
- Samsung's own next moves reveal the trade-off: when it announced the Tab S4 in 2018, it reverted to a 16:10 Super AMOLED panel, effectively retiring the 4:3 experiment after one generation.
Third-order effects
- Across the decade that follows — from the $649 Tab S6 through the 14.6-inch $1,100 Tab S8 Ultra — the Tab S line consolidates around big OLED screens and flagship pricing, leaving compact mid-size slates like the 8-inch Tab S2 behind.
The trend: Samsung's annual Tab S refresh has cycled through form-factor experiments before settling on a single template: large, expensive OLED slates pitched against laptops as much as other tablets.