Our digital navigation courses always come round to the question of the right device. An outdoor tablet that’s genuinely “rugged” scores highly there. Does that mean it has to cost north of 1,000 euros? No, there are cheaper options too. Today we’re looking at one of them, the Samsung TabActive4 Pro 5G.
It’s more or less a given. Anyone out and about in a 4×4 needs suitably tough electronics to go with the outdoor clothing. Is that just a quirk of ours? No! Even if the car only ever sees graded tracks and never gets buried in mud up to the headliner, a hardened outdoor tablet makes sense. More often than not we’re dealing with dust, damp and grubby hands. Plenty of people also use the device out and about, camping, on tours, out in nature. And then there’s the commercial side, where tablets are needed for work under open skies.
It’s exactly that commercial crowd the 10-inch Samsung TabActive4 Pro 5G outdoor tablet is aimed at, which is what makes it such a good fit for us too. It offers just the level of protection that’s enough for the vast majority of trips, and that’s the key to a sensible price-to-performance ratio.
The Samsung TabActive 4 Pro 5G is almost a normal tablet
The Samsung TabActive 4 Pro 5G is first and foremost a perfectly ordinary tablet running Android 12.0, with a few extra qualities baked in. When it comes to outdoor use, the ones that matter are the IP68 protection rating and the military MIL-STD-810H standard. Thanks to IP68, the insides of the tablet are protected against dust and water, the latter for up to 30 minutes at a depth of 1 metre. MIL-STD-810H is a standardised test procedure covering altitude, humidity, immersion, salt fog, dust, vibration, drops and a good deal more. According to Samsung’s own tests, the TabActive4 Pro 5G is meant to survive drops from up to 1.2 metres when it’s wearing its protective cover. That’s roughly the height a Landy driver sits at.
A matching protective case comes in the box too, which improves both drop resistance and handling, especially with gloves on. You really have something in your hands here. There’s also a touch pen, which makes operation easier, or handy if you’d rather write and draw by hand than use the on-screen keyboard.
Naturally we had to put that to the test straight away:
Gloves, thick or wet fingers? No problem!
You can adjust the sensitivity of the special hardened Corning Gorilla glass. Wearing gloves? Are your hands wet or dirty? That’s no problem either. The display can be set for those conditions and keeps working regardless. Even when the display itself is wet, it registers your inputs reliably.
No Battery Mode
When you unpack the outdoor tablet, you’re holding it and its protective case in your hands. The case can be taken off to swap either the memory card or the battery. But the battery can’t just be swapped, it can be removed entirely. The tablet then runs in “No Battery Mode” purely off the power supply. That’s really useful, either when the tablet spends most of its time in the car or on a charging adapter, sparing the battery’s lifespan. It also prevents the overheating that can crop up in warm surroundings while the battery is charging. Anyone whose tablet has ever bailed out with an overheating warning while navigating and charging at the same time knows what I mean.
The outdoor tablet’s technical details win us over too
A look at the basic specs shows the device is a great fit for navigation in a 4×4 and plenty of other jobs.
- Dimensions in millimetres: 242.9 x 170.2 x 10.2
- Weight in grams: 674
- OS and version: Android 12.0
- Display protection: Corning Gorilla Glass 5th generation
- Drop-proof up to: 1 metre, or 1.2 metres with the case
- Dual SIM
- Storage: expandable via microSD
- Mobile standard: 5G
- Removable 7,600 mAh battery / POGO fast-charging
- Additional No Battery Mode, running without a battery
- USB-C
- Satellite navigation GNSS: GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, Beidou, QZSS* — GPS/GLONASS
- Protection rating: dust/water IP68
- Meets the military protection standard: MIL-STD-810H
- Protective case and stylus included
Pick your outdoor tablet from two versions
The outdoor tablet comes in two variants. One offers WiFi only, the other adds a 5G mobile connection. Take your pick:
- Samsung Galaxy Tab Active4 Pro 5G Enterprise Edition 10.1“ / 6 GB / 128 GB / Black
- Samsung Galaxy Tab Active4 Pro WIFI 10.1“ / 4 GB / 64 GB / Black
FAQ on the Samsung Tab Active Pro
In principle, yes. It has an IP68 protection rating, so it survives 30 minutes at one metre of water depth. We tried it ourselves. Rain, splashing water, a river crossing with the window open (in which case you’ve got rather different problems), none of it fazes it. You shouldn’t go diving with it, though, that’s not what it’s built for.
Yes, and that’s actually one of the points where the tablet sets itself apart from normal devices. You can change the sensitivity of the touchscreen, and then it responds even with gloves on or with dirty or wet hands. Anyone who’s ever tried to drop a waypoint on a normal iPad with clammy fingers knows why that’s handy.
Yes, and that’s exactly what Samsung built the No Battery Mode for. You simply take the battery out and the tablet runs purely off the power supply. That spares the battery and heads off overheating. Anyone who’s had a heat warning shut their tablet down mid-navigation out in the middle of nowhere knows why that’s a real selling point.
Depends where you’re travelling. If you regularly head into areas where you want to load fresh maps or pull up weather info and using your phone as a hotspot is a pain, get the 5G variant. If you’re mostly on WiFi anyway or always have a phone with tethering to hand, save your money and get the WiFi version.