[Samsung Galaxy Tab S8] knosso:
Dear XDA community I am very tempted to buy the tab s8 but i may need your help to understand whether this device is for me.

I bought a Tab S 8.4 waaaaay back in 2014 and I have been using it happily ever since. Before buying a tablet i thought that tablets were mostly productive devices rather than glorified phones with a bad camera. The tab s was an amazing device for what it was (especially at 350€) but i quickly found out that it couldn't do most things that I wanted it to do.

It couldn't be truly used to write documents due to the castrated mobile office apps

It couldn't be used for true multitasking (multi window worked only for selected special apps which most of the time where not the one I used)

External monitors could go only up to 1080p 30Hz and had way worse colors and i couldn't charge my device while displaying something on a TV

There is no concept of "running apps" infact every app except for the one i was using was just closed after a while, it has happened to me to actually loose edits on documents or comments.

Laggy alt tab and more in general laggy UI (yes even when it was new. In fact I'm quite sure it's more responsive now without all the Samsung bloats)

Instant throttling due to extremely poor thermal solution

Updated only twice and each update gave me worse and worse performance.

Now the reason why I didn't upgrade so far is because tablets just didn't inspire fun anymore. I tried iPads but they were not even capable of coping some files in background without errors. Windows tablets unfortunately have just eighter bad performance or impossible prices (really you could spend 3000+€ on a flimsy quad-core just to have as little as 16gb of ram, which truly i the minimum for windows). Chrome os tablets just don't exist, most have 4gb of ram and the ones with a decent build qualty like the HP x2 have massively under-powered internals. This is a shame because they are now supported for 8 years and i really value long term support. Then i took a look back at android and saw a graveyard of devices built to be trashed after one year and never updated.... except for one that suffered from chronic underfuned development: the tab S. Even that though was not as impressive as the original version. It had barely more ram, extremely inflated price, still no decent apps.

Now i wonder has all of this changed for the Tab S8?

I write less documents so may be able to withstand a crappy office suite.

8gb of ram finally a decent size although the phone i have in my pocket already has 8gb of ram and i bought it 6 years ago so i wonder if that little amount of ram will doom the tab S8 to be trashed in a couple of years.

External monitors seems to be decently handled by dex but I've read that it supports only 1440p60....... which seems strange because 4k monitors are very cheap..... like I litterally bought mine for 250€ to replace an old 1280x1024p75 and the difference is amazing. That alone if it is true is a reason to not buy the tab. I don't pretend to do video editing on it but device that costs as much as a semi decent laptop and cannot fulfill basic computer tasks like browsing on a big screen would be a no go. Also it is not clear whether dex supports window snapping, fast alt tab, and persistent applications that don't close without my permission.

Is the UI still bloated? I've read some reviews that when switching from one app to the other the animation can drop a lot of frames and the alt tab stutters. I was really hoping that after so many years that would not be even thought to be possible anymore.

Also about throttling: i've read that samsung gave up on not making it throttle so they under-clocked it to keep the thermals within a controlled range.

For what concerns the 4 years of support i wonder: does that mean true support and updates or i will receive updates 9-10 months later than google devices with a final bloated update that cripples the device?

NO HEADPHONE JACK? really? on a device that is supposed to be productive?

16/9 aspect ratio..... so they put a screen to watch cat videos on a 700-1200€ product....it makes me wonder why not a more normal 3/2 or 4/3.

Also it seems that if i want a screen that is not worse than the one i already have in my very old tablet I need to pay 200€ more and have a bigger device that is heavier and less confortable to hold. Also i've seen online that when you activate the night mode on the TFT display the colors become way worse.

One thing that really interests me is the S pen.

The idea of properly taking notes and drawing on a device like this puts me in a position where I am very willing to try and see how the experience of using it is.

Are there some decent drawing apps? Paid ones as well as long as it is a one time payment and not a lifelong rental.

Do you know if there are some programs that recognize hand writing to transform it to computer words?

Guys sorry if I am criticizing a bit. I really don't want to offend anyone. I was just looking for some help to select a decent device. Thank you, i hope you understand.