Samsung outdoes itself with a super-early surprise for the aging Galaxy Tab S6
If you thought Samsung's software support efforts these past few months were impressive, wait until you hear what device the company is bringing up to date now. Because our headline already gave the Galaxy Tab S6 name away, you might be wondering exactly why this latest Android 11 promotion is so surprising.
By no means a pushover, even by 2021 standards, the aforementioned 10.5-inch slate was commercially released all the way back in August 2019. Nearly two year-old Android tablets don't usually get updated to the newest OS version less than six months after said build is delivered in stable form to Google's own Pixel handsets, and indeed, Samsung initially scheduled the Tab S6 for an Android 11 rollout in May.
Yet here we are, checking out screenshots of the very real, very big, and very neat One UI 3.1 goodie pack making its way over-the-air to the Snapdragon 855 powerhouse in Germany as we speak. Keep in mind that this is the second major OS enhancement ever sent out to a device that ran Android 9 out the box at its launch, and yes, Samsung is skipping over One UI 3.0.
In other words, the world's second-largest tablet vendor is giving this popular veteran almost the same treatment as the newer and significantly more impressive Tab S7 and S7+ recently received. Tipping the scales at roughly 2.2GB, the fresh collection of tasty UI tweaks, performance improvements, and security tweaks seems to be currently rolling out to a single LTE-enabled variant of the Galaxy Tab S6 in a single European market.
Of course, knowing Samsung and considering all of the company's incredible work spreading the Android 11 love around the world to more devices than we frankly care to remember, we fully expect a global Tab S6 expansion to be right around the corner.
In the meantime, we can't think of a single Android tablet from a different brand to have scored the same update (minus those One UI 3.1-specific enhancements, obviously), which might explain why Samsung feels like the only company capable of challenging Apple's industry supremacy... at some point in the future.
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