Apple's iPad Air was recently updated. Not with fanfare or a huge announcement — just a silent drop, as the Airs now have an M3 chip inside. This is more probably due to Apple cleaning the M2 out of the production lines than anything. The screen, camera, speakers, and overall capabilities of the iPad Air M3 don't seem to offer anything new or upgraded. The only new thing that dropped with it, actually, is a new Magic Keyboard for iPad Air — it's the same rubbery one that the iPad Pros used before, but now has a function key row.
Samsung's Galaxy Tab S10+ also didn't stir up much excitement when it launched in October 2024. If anything, it caused confusion, as the flagship Galaxy Tab S series suddenly switched to a MediaTek Dimensity 9400+ chip, instead of a Snapdragon. And it was released at a time when devices with the improved, 3 nm MediaTek Dimensity 9500 were already launching.
For what it's worth, these are the current de-facto "almost flagship" tablets from Apple and Samsung. The iPad Air is a cheaper iPad Pro, the Galaxy Tab S10+ is a step below the Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra (but also smaller and more manageable). The question we are here to answer is — which one is the better buy?
The modern flagship tablet design language is pretty uniform across brands nowadays. There's only so many ways you can design a rectangular slab with a screen on the front of it. Any deviation from the current trend would make the tablet less practical or harder to fit in with accessories, we imagine.
So, both of these contenders are just flat metal tablets with thin bezels and all-screen fronts. And both of them have protruding camera rings, which is a bit perplexing. Considering a tablet's main camera isn't used often, we would take a downgrade in this department if we can get a tablet with a fully flat back, so it would lie flat on a table without needing a case. But alas, the industry thinks different.
The iPad Air M3 does offer you two different sizes. The 11" model is the everyman's tablet. It has a wide-ish 16:11 aspect ratio and is compact enough to always carry around, stick into every nook and cranny and keep consuming media or doing some light work. The 13" model expands into a bigger canvas for designers that want to get serious with their tablet work. It's also worth noting that the 13" model has a 4:3 aspect ratio, and that vertical space is often used by well-optimized apps to give you more toolbars and quick brush access.
The Galaxy Tab S10+ has a more media-oriented shape with a 16:10 aspect ratio. It only comes in the one 12.6" display size and there's no "regular" Galaxy Tab S10 tablet for a smaller size. The good news is that, thanks to the slim bezels, the Tab S10+ doesn't feel too huge, but it's still less compact than the iPad Air M3 11".
Both of these tablets use fingerprint scanners to unlock. Apple's Touch ID is in the power button of the iPad Air M3, Samsung's optical fingerprint scanner is under the display of the Tab S10+. Honestly, both are equally awkward to use, but the physical button of the iPad is much easier to find with touch and muscle memory. To see the location of Samsung's hidden fingerprint scanner, you need to tap the screen or move it around first, unless you can pinpoint it exactly via memorizing its exact location (or just looking for the spont where it has collected the most fingerprint smudging). The Galaxy Tab S10+ does support face unlock, but it only uses the selfie camera and is not considered extremely secure.
Screens are incredibly important in these modern mobile devices, as they are the thing we keep looking at and our only means of interacting with the device. The Galaxy Tab S10+ does have the better screen, hands-down. Not only is it Samsung's excellent Dynamic AMOLED 2X with a 650 nit peak brightness, it also has a 120 Hz refresh rate.
The iPad Air M3 screen does not look cheap at all — it's a laminated panel, so the glass is super thin and the image pops out of the frame of the device as much as it possibly could. However, it's locked down to 60 Hz refresh rate, and you will definitely feel it if you are used to and spoiled by 120 Hz. It is also an LCD panel, so it doesn't have the infinite contrast of AMOLED and you can still see some backlighting with dark content. Peak brightness is 500 nits on the 11" and 600 nits on the 13", so it's not far from the Samsung in that area.
Lastly, the new anti-glare coating that Samsung uses in its tablets is excellent — it's the same one used on the Galaxy S24 Ultra and S25 Ultra and it really reduces those annoying glares down to blue-ish blurs. The iPad Air M3 does have anti-glare coating as well, which is pretty effective, but not as good.
iPad Air M3 vs Galaxy Tab S10+ Keyboard and Stylus
On the stylus point, both of these support excellent digital pens. With the iPad Air M3, you have a choice between Apple Pencil USB C and Apple Pencil Pro. If you are serious about your graphics work, you should pick the latter, as it adds a tap control, squeeze control, and barrel roll detection for better brush control. But that's a separate purchase at $129.
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The Galaxy Tab S10+ comes with the S Pen in the box and it's a very good stylus in its own right. Samsung has been working with Wacom tech and perfecting its stylus experience for multiple years now, first with the Galaxy Note phones and with the Galaxy Tabs later. The S Pen doesn't have barrel roll, but it does have a physical button on it to help you call up and navigate extra toolbar menus. It will also feel more natural at first, because it has a rubber tip that adds some friction and resistance when drawing on a glass screen. The Apple Pencil has a plastic tip, and it's slippery and awkward until you get used to it.
Both the Apple Pencils and the S Pen do support hovering over the screen to get a tiny cursor that kind of acts as a computer mouse. How that cursor interacts with the software is down the UI and individual apps.
Both of these tablets have 1st party keyboard accessories, but also have some 3rd party manufacturers offering solutions, and they do support Bluetooth keyboards if that's the way you want to go. As for the accessories, we have the Magic Keyboard on the iPad Air M3's side, and the Book Cover Keyboard for the Galaxy Tab S10+.
Magic Keyboard
Of those two, we very much prefer the Magic Keyboard. It sticks to the iPad magnetically, so it's an easy on-and-off. It also lifts the tablet up like a laptop screen and feels very natural and easy to use in different positions — on your lap, on a low desk, on a high desk, et cetera. The Book Cover Keyboard is a clunky two-part accessory — you need to have a back panel always on your tablet, so it can magnetically attach to the keyboard front whenever you need it. And it utilizes a kickstand, making it awkward to use in the lap or on less-than-ideal working desks.
Book Cover Keyboard
Plus, the keys and trackpad on the Magic Keyboard feel excellent, or at the very least — much, much better than the plasticky, spongy feel of the Book Cover Keyboard.
iPad Air M3 vs Galaxy Tab S10+ hardware
Desktop chip vs mobile chip
The Apple M3 is a pretty impressive piece of tech — it's more impressive that it powers tablets now, especially the Air, which starts at $599. You can find these in MacBook Pros and iMacs across the world, and now — in an iPad Air. They top benchmarks, they have hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and plenty of power to make it far, far into the future. Many argue that Apple doesn't make full use of the M3's power in its tablets. That's sort of true, as iPadOS' multi-tasking is still kind of clunky, but it does get pro apps now.
They've been trickling in slowly, but now we have video editors, digital audio workstations, and a plethora of pro image editing and designing apps. They don't necessarily need an M3 to use, but you will enjoy the speed and future-proofing of it.
The Galaxy Tab S10+ has a MediaTek Dimensity 9400+, which is more of a smartphone-class chip. The 9000 series is MediaTek's flagship, and it's not a wimpy chip, no worries there. But it's definitely not in the class of the M3. On the flip side, the UI is better at utilizing it for multitasking, and Android has been getting pro apps from Adobe and — thanks to Samsung in particular — the excellent Lumafusion video editor (last we tried it, it was still pretty rough around the edges, though).
iPad Air M3 vs Galaxy Tab S10+ Software
Apple's iPads currently run iPadOS 18 and — of course — the iPad Air M3 supports the full Apple Intelligence suite. Or what was released of it. So, generative image editing, text rephrasing and composing, ChatGPT integration, Visual Intelligence — they are all here.
Of course, Samsung has a response with the Galaxy AI suite, which more or less has the same features. It also relies on Google's Gemini instead of ChatGPT though that point is moot — there's a ChatGPT app for both Android and iPadOS, so it's all about customer choice here anyway.
This far into tablet development, it was high-time that these things started becoming light laptop replacements — all the keyboard accessories for them suggest as much. But, Apple being Apple, it refuses to give us an exact desktop-like experience on iPadOS. Instead, Cupertino developed this whole different style of UI to give you multi-tasking — you may have heard of Stage Manager.
It was introduced as a new feature to MacOS first, then shown off on iPadOS to sort of give it that messaging of "this is just like our laptops now". But no, Stage Manager is clunky and a bit confusing, and we are willing to bet that nobody willingly uses it on a Mac. It has your active apps all lined up vertically on the left of the screen, and you swap between them by tapping on them.
Stage Manager
You can also create a scene of a few apps in floating windows, and that scene becomes selectable on the left side of the screen. It sounds great, but it's a bit clunky when trying to group apps together in a scene, or worse — to separate one from a scene.
Samsung's One UI on the Galaxy Tab series has the much more intuitive DeX. It literally means "Desktop Experience" and it transforms your otherwise Android-looking tablet into a laptop that works a lot more like a Windows machine. You have your desktop with app shortcuts, you open apps in floating windows, you can shuffle them around and resize them as you will. It also has its awkwardness — text selection feels weird if you are using a mouse, because it's been designed for finger-tapping, and you often can't highlight the right word. Scrolling also suffers from the same. Some apps will crash or not run great.
DeX
In general, both of these are a bit weird to use as multi-tasking research machines. You can get used to either one of them, and you can definitely do it. But both tablets excel at doing one thing at a time, focused work. And, for the latter, we kind of prefer the iPad Air M3 with smoother apps, more support, and faster hardware.
iPad Air M3 vs Galaxy Tab S10+ Audio Quality
The iPad Air M3 offers two speakers in landscape stereo orientation. Despite having four grilles — half of them are for show. The sound is pretty good, a bit grungy in the mids, but otherwise it has a good amount of bass and its highs are not grinding.
The Galaxy Tab S10+ speakers have more pronounced mids and slightly less deep bass, but are completely fine to listen to as well. Both tablets work for media consumption.
iPad Air M3 vs Galaxy Tab S10+ Battery and Charging
The iPad Air M3 11" has a 7606 mAh battery, the 13" has a 9705 mAh cell. The Galaxy Tab S10+ has a much bigger 10,090 mAh battery. All of these tablets will give you ample working time — 8 to 10 hours per day with mixed work. Of course, swapping to a heavy workload app or an intensive game can bring that time down to between 5 and 6 hours, but that's still a lot of battery life if you are looking at it as a hendhold gaming console.
For charging, the iPad Air M3 will top up with a 20 W wallplug — not included. The Galaxy Tab S10+ will also not have a power adapter in the box, but does support slightly more powerful 45 W wallplugs. But make no mistake, all of these tablets will need at least 2 hours to top up, so plan accordingly.
iPad Air M3 vs Galaxy Tab S10+ Camera
Wide angle selfie shots for everybody
Both of these tablets feature a 12 MP selfie camera under an ultra-wide lens. They are situated on the right frame of the device in both cases, so when the tablets are positioned in landscape, the selfie camera ends up on top of the display — that's more convenient for video calls. And both use those ultra-wide lenses to crop in and follow your face around. If another person enters the frame — they will zoom out.
Apple calls this Center Stage, Samsung calls it Auto Framing. It serves the same purpose — you are not awkwardly tied in one spot during a long video call or meeting, you can move around somewhat. It's pretty neat.
On the back, they have a 12 MP camera on the iPad Air M3, and a 13 MP main camera on the Galaxy Tab S10+. The latter also has an 8 MP ultra-wide camera, though we don't see much use for it. The main cameras are good enough for quick snaps or document scans, but not really as good as flagship phone cameras. Just there to be useful when needed.
Which one should you buy?
The iPad Air M3 offers superior power and also comes in a 13" variant if you want an extra-large tablet to work on. The drawback is that the Apple Pencil Pro is a separate purchase, but then again, the Galaxy Tab S10+, which does include the S Pen, still costs more.
The display of the Galaxy Tab S10+ is better, with AMOLED tech and a 120 Hz refresh rate and it does have the better desktop-replaced expereince. But as an overall package, we lean towards the iPad Air. It has a better software ecosystem of 1st party and 3rd party apps, better hardware, and better keyboard accessory if you want to get one of those too. Now, the discussion whether buying a tablet with an expensive keyboard instead of a pretty good laptop that will cost about the same is left for another time...
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Preslav, a member of the PhoneArena team since 2014, is a mobile technology enthusiast with a penchant for integrating tech into his hobbies and work. Whether it's writing articles on an iPad Pro, recording band rehearsals with multiple phones, or exploring the potential of mobile gaming through services like GeForce Now and Steam Link, Preslav's approach is hands-on and innovative. His balanced perspective allows him to appreciate both Android and iOS ecosystems, focusing on performance, camera quality, and user experience over brand loyalty.
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