Testing Android Emulators and Devices: A Hands-on Review

As an enthusiast of retro gaming and mobile technology, I've been eager to test out the latest Android emulators and devices on my latest gadget, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra. In this article, I'll share my hands-on experience with the PlayStation Portable (PSP) emulator PPSSPP, the Nintendo Wii emulator Dolphin, and the Sony PlayStation 2 (PS2) emulator EtherSX2, as well as my thoughts on the new Samsung tablet.

Testing PPSSPP

I started by testing PPSSPP, the standalone PSP emulator. I was pleased to find that it ran smoothly, with abort chains of "Olympus" at a resolution of 5x and Vulcan rendering back in action. This is really great performance for a device as powerful as the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra.

Next up, I tested the Dolphin emulator on a Wii game, Tatsunoko vs Capcom, which ran beautifully in 1080p with Vulcan rendering. The frame rate was consistent at 60 FPS, making this a great experience for a Nintendo Wii game on an Android device.

Testing Dolphin

I also wanted to test the Dolphin emulator, and I chose a Wii game, Tatsunoko vs Capcom, as my test title. I was pleased to find that it ran smoothly in 1080p with Vulcan rendering back in action. The frame rate was consistent at 60 FPS, making this a great experience for a Nintendo Wii game on an Android device.

Testing EtherSX2

Finally, I tested the EtherSX2 emulator on the PS2 game Gran Turismo 4. To my surprise, I was able to run it smoothly with 3x resolution and OpenGL rendering. However, when I tried to run it at 4x resolution on longer draw distances, I had to drop down to 3x due to performance issues.

Keyboard Case Review

I also wanted to take a look at the keyboard case that came with my Tab S8 Ultra pre-order. The device is designed to turn your tablet into a 14.6-inch Android laptop. The trackpad works really well, and the keys feel nice under the fingers. While I would have preferred a mechanical keyboard, overall this is a great experience.

Samsung DeX

One of my favorite features on Samsung devices is Samsung DeX, which allows you to run an Android desktop environment on your tablet. With the Tab S8 Ultra, I can press the function key and the Dex button, and it will bring up the built-in screen with Samsung DeX. This feature is really useful for multitasking, as I can open multiple apps at once and navigate easily with a keyboard and trackpad.

Multi-Tasking and Display Over USB

With Samsung DeX, I'm able to run multiple apps simultaneously and navigate easily using the keyboard and trackpad. However, I also want to make sure that this device supports Display over USB Type-C, which allows me to use an external monitor with my tablet. To test this feature, I connected a USB Type-C to HDMI hub to my external display and ran Samsung DeX on one screen, while having Android running on the tablet screen.

Conclusion

In conclusion, my experience with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra has been overwhelmingly positive. With its powerful processor, large 14.6-inch screen, and great battery life, this device is perfect for gaming, media playback, and other activities that require a big screen. While I do wish it had a higher-resolution display, the larger screen makes up for it.

However, if you're looking for an Android tablet with a smaller screen, I would recommend the Tab S8 instead of the Ultra model. The Tab S8 has the same specifications as the Ultra model but with a smaller 11-inch screen, which might be more suitable for your needs.

Overall, I'm really impressed with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, and I'm excited to continue testing it in future videos. Stay tuned to my channel for more content, and let me know what you want to see in the comments below!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at an absolutely amazing android tablet known as the samsung galaxy tab sa ultra if you're a regular viewer of the channel you know i love these android tablets and this is definitely the most powerful one that i've been able to test on the channel and when i pre-ordered this from samsung's website they did throw in the keyboard cover case we'll also be taking a look at this but really what makes this the most ridiculous android tablet on the market right now is the powerful cpu and the massive screen this is coming in at 14.6 inches it's a 120 hertz super amoled display and it's absolutely beautiful but as you can see i mean this thing is massive in my opinion it is a bit too big to be a carry around tablet but they also offer the tab s8 and the tab s8 plus the regular tab s8 has an 11 inch screen and the plus has a 12.4 inch screen but they both pack the same snapdragon 8 gen 1 cpu along with these tablets samsung does include an s pen which comes in handy for a lot of people but personally i'm not an artist or a graphic designer so i really don't use it that much there are other videos on youtube of artists using this tablet i'll try to find one and leave a link in the description so you can see how well it works and the only other thing in the box here besides the user manual is a usb type-c cable they do not include a charger anymore with their tablets but this does support up to a 45 watt quick charger so the first thing you're gonna notice when you take a look at this tablet is the massive screen and how beautiful it is super amoled 14.6 inches with a resolution of 1848 by and real quick i just wanted to give you a size comparison here on the left hand side we have the samsung galaxy tab s7 plus which has a 12.4 inch amoled display on the right hand side we obviously have the tab sa ultra with this tablet the s pen will magnetically attach to the side or the back of the unit and it's right here underneath the camera really easy access to that s pen if you're going to use it a lot so overall when it comes down to it as making this video this is definitely the most powerful android tablet that's ever hit the market i'm sure there's going to be more powerful units in the future but right now this is packing the snapdragon 8 gen 1. we've got eight cores with one prime x2 core running it up to three gigahertz three a710 cores running at 2.5 gigahertz and four a510 cores running at 1.8 gigahertz when it comes to the gpu it's using the arduino 730 you can get this in a couple different ram variants and storage variants from eight gigabytes up to 16 gigabytes of ram and when it comes to storage 128 gigabytes up to 512 gigabytes but all of them do support a micro sd card it's got quad speakers with dolby atmos wi-fi 6e bluetooth 5.2 an 11 000 milliamp hour battery with 45 watt quick charging capabilities and this is running android 12 with one ui 4.1 right out of the box so i've had a couple days mess around with this tablet and the whole user experience is super smooth i really expected it to be it's using android 12 with samsung's new one ui 4.1 it's got some great new features built in and since this tablet does utilize wi-fi 6e i mean it is very very snappy to load everything up from cold when you need to get online via emails web pages or even videos and speaking of video playback since this is officially from samsung we do have widevine level one which allows us to do hd content from our favorite apps netflix hbo max hulu all the apps that need drm to work properly in hd will function perfectly fine on this tablet and real quick i just wanted to give you a little taste of some 4k video playback even though we don't have a 4k screen we can still take it up to 4k 60fps also turn stats for nerds on and yeah definitely does 4k video really well we had seven drop frames on the initial load in but that's about it this little chip can definitely handle 4k and the built-in quad speakers with dolby atmos activated get incredibly loud and it actually has a lot of bass for how thin this thing is and keep in mind this display does support hdr 10 plus and if you've got a youtube video with hdr it'll automatically activate or you can go into the advanced settings and turn it on and off from there it's really up to you but if you're looking for a huge tablet for media playback it's really hard to go wrong with something like this awesome speakers and an amazing screen but now i want to move over to some performance benchmarks and we're going to be facing this off against samsung's last tablet the samsung galaxy tab s7 plus the s7 plus is powered by a snapdragon 865 plus and on single core we got a 937 multi 2822 and as you can see the new tab s8 ultra beated out in single and multi-core coming in with a really good multi-core score of 3 500. moving over to a gpu benchmark we have 3dmark wildlife and this is where the new snapdragon 8 gen 1 really shines on the 865 plus 4156 on the new s8 ultra 9515 i mean we have a massive jump in gpu performance when it comes to this new chip and the final benchmark i ran was antutu 640 845 on the s7 plus 947 997 on the new tab a ultra and taking a look down the list you can see that the cpu and gpu performance is way ahead of that 865 plus in the tab s7 plus now it's time to take a look at some native android game performance here we have call of duty mobile highest settings highest frame rate and we're at 60 fps now on lesser cpu gaming phones i've actually seen this run at 90 fps and hopefully they do enable that down the road but it really comes down to this tablet just coming out we've got that 120 hertz display and i'm sure that the cpu would handle it next up we've got grid autosport now this is the pc port that's come to android absolutely amazing if you have a device that can support it it looks really really good i've got all the high quality textures enabled we're at the highest graphics quality but i can only get this to run at 30. i guess it's locked at 30. i personally can't find a 60fps setting in any of the settings so if you do run this on your device and you know how to get it to 60 let me know in the comments below and finally for native android gaming we have ginger impact if you've ever tested this out you know how hard it can be to run we're at high settings 60 fps and it's running really well but going up to very high settings we only get an average of around 47 fps at very high that's with everything enabled with that preset in the future i do expect this to run much better on the snapdragon 8 gen 1 but right now high 60 is definitely the way to go still looks really great and plays fine on this tablet now it's time to move over to some emulation and when it comes to emulation on an android tablet i haven't seen anything like this this huge screen looks really great with basically everything that i've tested here we have psp using the standalone version of ppsspp got abort chains of olympus 5x resolution vulcan back in running really really well next up i also wanted to test the dolphin emulator and i just went with a wii game here we have tatsunoko vs capcom 1080p vulcan back in again running at 60fps this is really great performance for gamecube and wii when it comes to an android device and the final emulator i'm testing at least in this video because i will have a full emulation video coming up uh there's a ton of stuff that i want to test so stay tuned to the channel let me know what you want to see but here's ps2 using ether sx2 gran turismo 4 3x resolution opengl and on the rally stages i was actually able to go up to 4x resolution but on these tracks with longer draw distances i had to drop it down to three and before i wrap this video up i wanted to take a look at this keyboard case like i mentioned i did a pre-order on the tab s8 ultra and it came with it but basically this is going to turn it into a 14.6 inch android laptop as you can see we do have a trackpad built in and it works really well keys feel nice on this i mean i would rather have like a mechanical keyboard but overall this is actually a really good experience now when it comes to these samsung tablets one of my favorite features that they have built in and the samsung galaxy s line of phones is samsung dex and with this here we actually have a hotkey we can press function and the dex button and it'll bring up samsung decks on the built-in screen and if you're not familiar with samsung dex basically it's an android desktop environment and it works really well with a mouse and keyboard and since we have such a massive screen i really have no need to connect this to an external monitor but it is totally possible i'll show you that in a second but with dex we've got multi-tasking multi-windows we can open up several apps at a time and you can navigate really easily with a keyboard and trackpad like this or you could just connect a bluetooth mouse and keyboard or even a usb mouse and keyboard and one thing i always like to just make sure of is this does support display over usb type c so i've got a usb type c to hdmi hub here and on one screen we have samsung dex running we've got the big 32 inch monitor here samsung dex is over there we've got android on the tablet screen and we can use these at the same exact time or you could just set it up to mirror the tablet screen to the external display but keep in mind since the display on the tab s8 ultra is 16 by 10 it's not going to fill the full screen on a 16x9 monitor so overall the samsung galaxy tab s8 ultra is a monster of a tablet i mean we've got plenty of power here a big beautiful 14.6 inch screen and battery life is actually really great i've been able to run one test so far because it does take so long but with the screen brightness set to 60 and a 1080p youtube video plan i got 10 hours and 14 minutes of battery life out of this thing i will be doing some more testing but you know if you're doing high-end gaming i would suspect around four to five hours of battery life something like inch and impact at high settings 60 fps that's really how it goes it's just gonna pull a lot more power than a video but to tell you the truth if i had to do this over again i probably just would have went with the samsung galaxy tab s8 with the 11 inch screen you can get it with 8 gigabytes of ram and the same cpu the snapdragon 8 gen 1 which is going to give you the same exact performance with a lower resolution screen i mean you might even be able to benchmark a bit higher than the ultra model but if you're looking for an android tablet with a ridiculously large screen for media playback emulation gaming and just even work then the tab s8 ultra is definitely for you but if you can live without that giant screen then i would just go with the tab s8 but that's gonna wrap it for this one really appreciate you watching i will have a couple more videos coming so let me know what you want to see running in the comments below and i'll get that made or put in the next video if you're interested in learning more about samsung's new galaxy tab s8 line from the s8 plus sa ultra and regular essay i'll leave links in the description but that's it for this one like always thanks for watchingwhat's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at an absolutely amazing android tablet known as the samsung galaxy tab sa ultra if you're a regular viewer of the channel you know i love these android tablets and this is definitely the most powerful one that i've been able to test on the channel and when i pre-ordered this from samsung's website they did throw in the keyboard cover case we'll also be taking a look at this but really what makes this the most ridiculous android tablet on the market right now is the powerful cpu and the massive screen this is coming in at 14.6 inches it's a 120 hertz super amoled display and it's absolutely beautiful but as you can see i mean this thing is massive in my opinion it is a bit too big to be a carry around tablet but they also offer the tab s8 and the tab s8 plus the regular tab s8 has an 11 inch screen and the plus has a 12.4 inch screen but they both pack the same snapdragon 8 gen 1 cpu along with these tablets samsung does include an s pen which comes in handy for a lot of people but personally i'm not an artist or a graphic designer so i really don't use it that much there are other videos on youtube of artists using this tablet i'll try to find one and leave a link in the description so you can see how well it works and the only other thing in the box here besides the user manual is a usb type-c cable they do not include a charger anymore with their tablets but this does support up to a 45 watt quick charger so the first thing you're gonna notice when you take a look at this tablet is the massive screen and how beautiful it is super amoled 14.6 inches with a resolution of 1848 by and real quick i just wanted to give you a size comparison here on the left hand side we have the samsung galaxy tab s7 plus which has a 12.4 inch amoled display on the right hand side we obviously have the tab sa ultra with this tablet the s pen will magnetically attach to the side or the back of the unit and it's right here underneath the camera really easy access to that s pen if you're going to use it a lot so overall when it comes down to it as making this video this is definitely the most powerful android tablet that's ever hit the market i'm sure there's going to be more powerful units in the future but right now this is packing the snapdragon 8 gen 1. we've got eight cores with one prime x2 core running it up to three gigahertz three a710 cores running at 2.5 gigahertz and four a510 cores running at 1.8 gigahertz when it comes to the gpu it's using the arduino 730 you can get this in a couple different ram variants and storage variants from eight gigabytes up to 16 gigabytes of ram and when it comes to storage 128 gigabytes up to 512 gigabytes but all of them do support a micro sd card it's got quad speakers with dolby atmos wi-fi 6e bluetooth 5.2 an 11 000 milliamp hour battery with 45 watt quick charging capabilities and this is running android 12 with one ui 4.1 right out of the box so i've had a couple days mess around with this tablet and the whole user experience is super smooth i really expected it to be it's using android 12 with samsung's new one ui 4.1 it's got some great new features built in and since this tablet does utilize wi-fi 6e i mean it is very very snappy to load everything up from cold when you need to get online via emails web pages or even videos and speaking of video playback since this is officially from samsung we do have widevine level one which allows us to do hd content from our favorite apps netflix hbo max hulu all the apps that need drm to work properly in hd will function perfectly fine on this tablet and real quick i just wanted to give you a little taste of some 4k video playback even though we don't have a 4k screen we can still take it up to 4k 60fps also turn stats for nerds on and yeah definitely does 4k video really well we had seven drop frames on the initial load in but that's about it this little chip can definitely handle 4k and the built-in quad speakers with dolby atmos activated get incredibly loud and it actually has a lot of bass for how thin this thing is and keep in mind this display does support hdr 10 plus and if you've got a youtube video with hdr it'll automatically activate or you can go into the advanced settings and turn it on and off from there it's really up to you but if you're looking for a huge tablet for media playback it's really hard to go wrong with something like this awesome speakers and an amazing screen but now i want to move over to some performance benchmarks and we're going to be facing this off against samsung's last tablet the samsung galaxy tab s7 plus the s7 plus is powered by a snapdragon 865 plus and on single core we got a 937 multi 2822 and as you can see the new tab s8 ultra beated out in single and multi-core coming in with a really good multi-core score of 3 500. moving over to a gpu benchmark we have 3dmark wildlife and this is where the new snapdragon 8 gen 1 really shines on the 865 plus 4156 on the new s8 ultra 9515 i mean we have a massive jump in gpu performance when it comes to this new chip and the final benchmark i ran was antutu 640 845 on the s7 plus 947 997 on the new tab a ultra and taking a look down the list you can see that the cpu and gpu performance is way ahead of that 865 plus in the tab s7 plus now it's time to take a look at some native android game performance here we have call of duty mobile highest settings highest frame rate and we're at 60 fps now on lesser cpu gaming phones i've actually seen this run at 90 fps and hopefully they do enable that down the road but it really comes down to this tablet just coming out we've got that 120 hertz display and i'm sure that the cpu would handle it next up we've got grid autosport now this is the pc port that's come to android absolutely amazing if you have a device that can support it it looks really really good i've got all the high quality textures enabled we're at the highest graphics quality but i can only get this to run at 30. i guess it's locked at 30. i personally can't find a 60fps setting in any of the settings so if you do run this on your device and you know how to get it to 60 let me know in the comments below and finally for native android gaming we have ginger impact if you've ever tested this out you know how hard it can be to run we're at high settings 60 fps and it's running really well but going up to very high settings we only get an average of around 47 fps at very high that's with everything enabled with that preset in the future i do expect this to run much better on the snapdragon 8 gen 1 but right now high 60 is definitely the way to go still looks really great and plays fine on this tablet now it's time to move over to some emulation and when it comes to emulation on an android tablet i haven't seen anything like this this huge screen looks really great with basically everything that i've tested here we have psp using the standalone version of ppsspp got abort chains of olympus 5x resolution vulcan back in running really really well next up i also wanted to test the dolphin emulator and i just went with a wii game here we have tatsunoko vs capcom 1080p vulcan back in again running at 60fps this is really great performance for gamecube and wii when it comes to an android device and the final emulator i'm testing at least in this video because i will have a full emulation video coming up uh there's a ton of stuff that i want to test so stay tuned to the channel let me know what you want to see but here's ps2 using ether sx2 gran turismo 4 3x resolution opengl and on the rally stages i was actually able to go up to 4x resolution but on these tracks with longer draw distances i had to drop it down to three and before i wrap this video up i wanted to take a look at this keyboard case like i mentioned i did a pre-order on the tab s8 ultra and it came with it but basically this is going to turn it into a 14.6 inch android laptop as you can see we do have a trackpad built in and it works really well keys feel nice on this i mean i would rather have like a mechanical keyboard but overall this is actually a really good experience now when it comes to these samsung tablets one of my favorite features that they have built in and the samsung galaxy s line of phones is samsung dex and with this here we actually have a hotkey we can press function and the dex button and it'll bring up samsung decks on the built-in screen and if you're not familiar with samsung dex basically it's an android desktop environment and it works really well with a mouse and keyboard and since we have such a massive screen i really have no need to connect this to an external monitor but it is totally possible i'll show you that in a second but with dex we've got multi-tasking multi-windows we can open up several apps at a time and you can navigate really easily with a keyboard and trackpad like this or you could just connect a bluetooth mouse and keyboard or even a usb mouse and keyboard and one thing i always like to just make sure of is this does support display over usb type c so i've got a usb type c to hdmi hub here and on one screen we have samsung dex running we've got the big 32 inch monitor here samsung dex is over there we've got android on the tablet screen and we can use these at the same exact time or you could just set it up to mirror the tablet screen to the external display but keep in mind since the display on the tab s8 ultra is 16 by 10 it's not going to fill the full screen on a 16x9 monitor so overall the samsung galaxy tab s8 ultra is a monster of a tablet i mean we've got plenty of power here a big beautiful 14.6 inch screen and battery life is actually really great i've been able to run one test so far because it does take so long but with the screen brightness set to 60 and a 1080p youtube video plan i got 10 hours and 14 minutes of battery life out of this thing i will be doing some more testing but you know if you're doing high-end gaming i would suspect around four to five hours of battery life something like inch and impact at high settings 60 fps that's really how it goes it's just gonna pull a lot more power than a video but to tell you the truth if i had to do this over again i probably just would have went with the samsung galaxy tab s8 with the 11 inch screen you can get it with 8 gigabytes of ram and the same cpu the snapdragon 8 gen 1 which is going to give you the same exact performance with a lower resolution screen i mean you might even be able to benchmark a bit higher than the ultra model but if you're looking for an android tablet with a ridiculously large screen for media playback emulation gaming and just even work then the tab s8 ultra is definitely for you but if you can live without that giant screen then i would just go with the tab s8 but that's gonna wrap it for this one really appreciate you watching i will have a couple more videos coming so let me know what you want to see running in the comments below and i'll get that made or put in the next video if you're interested in learning more about samsung's new galaxy tab s8 line from the s8 plus sa ultra and regular essay i'll leave links in the description but that's it for this one like always thanks for watching\n"