Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra and Tab S12+ on September 30, and the headline specs read like a victory lap: a 14.6-inch 120Hz AMOLED display, the new Dimensity 9500, a chassis just 5.1mm thick, and a starting price of $1,399. After a day spent with the spec sheets, the energy label filings, and the reaction from existing owners, my take is simple. This is a gorgeous tablet built for people who don’t already own one, and a poor deal for anyone who does.
The basics, quickly. Both run Android 17 with One UI 9 and carry a seven-year update promise, still the strongest in the Android tablet space. The official announcement confirms the Ultra pairs its 14.6-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel with an 11,600mAh battery, Wi-Fi 7, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage expandable to 2TB via microSD. The Plus gets a 12.6-inch screen, 10,600mAh, Wi-Fi 6E at $1,199, and finally a proper vapor chamber for sustained loads. Both hit stores October 7 in Gray and Silver.
Here’s what the keynote glossed over. There’s no base 11-inch Tab S12 this year. Last cycle’s S11 lineup skipped the Plus. Now the S12 skips the base model entirely. That’s not coincidence, it’s a pattern, and it means each screen size effectively runs on a two-year refresh whether you like it or not. Samsung played similar tiering games with the Fold8 lineup, and the effect is identical. If you wanted a compact flagship in 2025 or an affordable one in 2026, the answer both times was buy up or buy old.
The fine print that didn’t make the keynote
The EPREL energy labels filed ahead of launch are the most interesting documents of this entire debut, and almost nobody led with them. Both tablets are rated for 1,200 charge cycles before the battery drops to 80% capacity, down from 2,000 on the previous Plus generation. The Ultra’s standardized runtime also slipped to roughly 89 hours from about 95, despite carrying the exact same 11,600mAh cell as its predecessor. The Dimensity 9500 is faster, but it’s also hungrier, and you’re paying $100 more for a battery that ages faster.
We’ve tracked this kind of quiet regression before in our S27 Ultra battery analysis, and the shape is familiar: headline numbers hold steady while the durability math worsens. The speaker story rhymes too. The Plus drops from four speakers to two and from a dual rear camera to a single 13MP shooter, while the Ultra’s slimmer frame has acoustics that early hands-on impressions already question. Add a single USB port on both models, no cellular option on the Ultra this time while the Plus keeps 5G, and a Pro Keyboard sold separately, and the premium math gets shakier.
The announcement-day threads told the rest of the story. I went through the biggest owner communities the morning after the reveal, and the mood among S11 Ultra owners was blunt. The most common answer to “any interest in upgrading?” was a flat no, with plenty of people planning to hold their tablets another full cycle. The MediaTek switch is the other sore spot. Buyers who keep a $1,400 tablet for five years tend to care about custom ROM and kernel support, and Dimensity hardware has historically been far thinner on both than Snapdragon.
Who this is actually for
Coming from a Tab S9 or older, or from any iPad, the S12 Ultra is easy to recommend. Seven years of updates, IP68 water resistance, microSD expansion, and S Pen support is a package no competitor fully matches. The software bundle is the real hook this time. Adobe’s tablet-optimized Photoshop is exclusive to Samsung for six months, and both models ship with trials of Notability, Goodnotes, LumaFusion, and Notion alongside six months of Google AI Pro. That’s a creator pitch rather than a spec pitch, and it’s the smartest part of the launch.
If you own an S11 Ultra, skip it. You’d pay $100 more for a new chip, a thinner frame, and a battery rated to survive 40% fewer cycles. That’s not an upgrade, it’s a sidegrade with a receipt.
Once units land on October 7, watch for real-world battery testing against those EPREL numbers, speaker measurements on the thinner frame, and whether India pricing ever materializes, because it was absent from the announcement. Samsung also quietly launched the SmartTag 3 alongside the tablets with longer range and iOS support, an ecosystem play that got almost no discussion but says plenty about where this lineup is headed.
I keep coming back to that charge cycle number. 1,200 versus 2,000 will never appear in a keynote, but it decides whether this tablet is still pleasant to use in 2030, and it only surfaces if somebody reads the label. Samsung is betting you won’t. Read the label.
