Five high-end tablets to make your laptop or desktop feel a little inadequate

Once upon a time, the tablet occupied a very strange niche. It was cool, but you weren’t really sure what to do with one. Then streaming came along, and tablets had a serious use, basically built in. But that wasn’t enough for manufacturers. The advent of the high-end tablet meant that these devices could actually threaten laptops for versatility.

We’re not quite there, despite what Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung really want you to think. But we’re awfully bloody close to a situation where you can use a single device to go from work to play to load shedding. And the gap is narrowing every year.

This crop of high-end tablets, currently available in South Africa, is as close as you’ll get to a single-use device in 2022. If this isn’t properly mobile computing, then it’ll do until the real thing shows up and nudges one of these devices over the finish line. Here, in no particular order, are the best high-end tablets available on the local market today.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra | R28,000

Samsung’s devices take more than a little inspiration from anime in one very specific way. The longer it takes you to say its name, the flashier and more powerful it’s supposed to be. That’s certainly the case with the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, which is the current pinnacle of the Android tablet. There’s a brilliant 2,960 x 1,848 AMOLED display covering a 2.99GHz octa-core processor, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. For all intents and purposes, the Tab S8 Ultra is a computer. It’ll out power some dedicated machines, and more than a few desktops still kicking around South Africa. Perhaps best of all, slapping on a keyboard book cover (which is surprisingly difficult to source locally) turns this from a high-end tablet to a really capable notebook PC.

Apple iPad Air M1 | from R11,900

So you’re looking for a powerful-enough Apple tablet but aren’t keen on dropping R20k? That’s fine. The iPad Air, the most recent version with Apple’s M1 hardware on the inside, is a high-end tablet that justifies the title. The 10.9in Liquid Retina display, speedy processor, dual 12MP cameras, and WiFi 6 support equal the best tablet you can get for just over ten grand. But while it is certainly powerful enough to dislodge your computer from the charts, if not your heart, there is one fault. Finding a keyboard cover that supports it in South Africa is a little trickier than we’d like for such a spectacular little device. That’s a pity. Still, as a pure tablet, it’ll make mostly anything else back down a step or two.

Asus Vivobook 13 Slate OLED | R10,000

Many of these are tablets that can also function as computers. Asus’ Vivobook 13 Slate is perhaps the only one on this list that seems to be a PC first and a tablet second. And it’s got the lowest price of the lot. Still, that doesn’t keep it from playing in the high-end tablet pond. There’s a spectacular 13.3in OLED display running the show here, making this one of the most attractive options on offer. Visually, anyway. There’s an Intel N6000 processor doing duty in the middle of this thing — this is the slowest tablet here, for what it’s worth. 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage round out the internals, and the Vivobook 13 Slate runs Windows 11. That’s… not a bad day’s work for a 13.3in tablet. Except that it’s also a PC, because it includes the keyboard you need to operate it as a fair notebook by default. Asus, you sneaky buggers, you.

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 | R17,500

This one has been around for a while, but the lineup took its sweet time getting to South Africa. When it turned up, we were asking ourselves exactly why it had taken so long. The Surface Pro 7 is a 12.3-inch IPS LCD touchscreen (2,736 x 1,824) in a magnesium chassis. It packs one of several Intel chipsets, from an i3 to an i7, with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The Pro 7 isn’t really a tablet pretending to be a PC, it’s a PC pretending to be a tablet. In order to get it all the way across the finish line, though, you’ll have to add a Type Cover to the mix. That’ll set you back another R2,500, but it’s definitely a worthy addition to your mobile office arsenal.

Apple iPad Pro 12.9 | from R21,000

If we were going to list the five best high-end tablets on the planet, we could have just used the last five models Apple released and called it a day. They’re all great across the board. Speedy and clean, with excellent build quality and software support. Even with a catalogue of greatness like that, Apple still has a 300kg gorilla sitting on top of the pile. That’s the iPad Pro 12.9, which features enough power crammed into its 1.46kg frame to make Windows machines very, very sweaty. There’s enough grunt to edit photos on the screen, while software smarts mean it’ll play nice with any other modern Apple device you happen to have lying around. The new M1 power-plant has a lot to answer for. If you’re looking for the best Apple tablet (so far), you’re looking at it.