Our mobile devices have become more powerful, more expensive, and more difficult to repair. Long gone are the days when you could easily pry open a phone’s back to slap in a fresh new battery and keep on going without scrambling for a power outlet. These days we do have power banks to fill that need, but these are more like band-aid solutions to problems of our own making.
Curiously enough, there are still phones and tablets that do offer removable batteries, but those have been limited to the kind that very few consumers use outside of industrial or field applications. Yes, it’s quite mind-boggling that those tank-like rugged devices sometimes have features we wish still existed in today’s phones. But Samsung’s latest Active tablet takes it even further by allowing you to swap out batteries without even turning the device off.
Designer:
The Galaxy Tab Active5 Pro is definitely not a looker, though that depends on who you ask. There has been a wave of tough tablets that look more like miniature projectors because they’re exactly that. In comparison, Samsung’s newest tough-as-nails tablet has a more traditional aesthetic that’s also sleeker and thinner. Slap on a more decorative case and you might not even be able to tell that it’s one of those rugged tablets built like tanks.
You might not want to cover up the tablet, though, because its defining feature is its removable 10,100mAh battery. What makes this more interesting, however, is that the Galaxy Tab Active5 Pro supports “Hual Hot-Swap” battery functionality, meaning you don’t have to power down the tablet just to change large battery slabs. It probably won’t stay powered up too long with a battery, but it definitely helps remove the stress from quickly replacing batteries in the field.
The rest of the Galaxy Tab Active5 Pro’s specs don’t look that bad either, at least for a mid-range rugged tablet. It’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 processor, though the selection of 6GB or 8GB of RAM and 128GB or 256GB of storage is way too low for today even for this tier. But yes, it also has “old-school” features like a microSD card slot and a 3.5mm headphone jack that some also probably wished still existed on modern smartphones.
It probably sounds a bit ironic that rugged smartphones and tablets still have removable batteries when one of the reasons manufacturers moved away from that is to tightly seal and protect sensitive devices from the elements. The Galaxy Tab Active5 Pro, along with the new Galaxy XCover7 Pro smartphone, has IP68 and MIL-STD-810H ratings, so they have you covered in that regard. Maybe someday in the future, we will be able to go back to hot-swappable batteries or, better yet, longer-lasting batteries that don’t need to be charged as often in the first place.
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