Samsung Galaxy Tab A9 (SM-X110), 64GB 4GB Ram, WiFi Only, Factory Unlocked GSM, International Version (Silver)

I purchased this as a little surprise gift for my spouse and tucked away until it was time to gift it. My bad, now I can’t select a Canada to set it up and I have missed the return window.

Works as well as you would expect for the price. Nothing spectacular but totally functional and a great value. Yes it does work in the USA. I have an asian (Possibly a Singapore) model but everything was easy to set up for use in the USA as long as you have another galaxy device.👍

I wanted a small tablet to serve effectively as a larger version of my phone for evening couch/lounging browsing, reading, social media, and regular app use. I’m not a gamer and am not intending to do compute-intensive work on this device so I have no need for a high-powered tablet but I did want a device that performs well (little to no lag when opening, using, or moving between apps).

I had considered picking up an iPad Mini because of its easy-to-hold-in-one-hand screen size (8.3″) and Apple’s tablets are generally considered best in class. However, the entry price of $500 (64G version) for a secondary service device is a pretty steep price tag and the impressive power of that device is considerable overkill for my needs. The Samsung Galaxy Tab A9 was much closer to what I was really looking for. The screen is a bit larger than the Mini at 8.7″ but the resolution is much lower (1340 x 800 px versus the Mini’s whopping 2266 x1488 px Liquid Retina Display which, taking into account screen size puts the Tab 9 at 179 pixels per inch versus the Mini’s super dense 326 ppi). Notwithstanding this rather large difference, the Tab 9’s screen is perfectly acceptable for what I need (reading articles in the NY Times app or watching YouTube videos for example is just fine). If you’re a gamer or intend to do digital art, this is not the tablet for you.

Screen color saturation and contrast are quite good and I only needed to dial the screen brightness up to about 40-50% for it to be comfortably bright (indoors; expect to crank it to ~100% outdoors). As you might expect, audio is just okay (loud enough at 70%-80% max) but isn’t exactly going to rattle your rib cage with deep bass or shatter your eardrums with piercing high notes. The Tab 9 includes a headphone jack so I tested a music video with a pair of Apple EarPods and the sound was very good.

I haven’t tested the cameras but I understand from my research that they aren’t great. That’s not an issue for me since I rarely ever use cameras on my mobile devices and will likely not do so much with the Tab 9.

The Tab 9 is very well constructed with a primarily metal body that looks and feels premium. In the Tab 9’s box is the tablet, a USB-C to USB-C cable, a SIM/SD card slot opener tool, and a user guide (which actually has no useful instructions in any of the provided languages). I was pleasantly surprised to see that a USB-C adapter was separately included in the plastic bag containing the Tab 9 box (the black plug in the pictures). The product description does indicate that this is a “15W Wall Charger Bundle” but sometimes on Amazon products what is described isn’t exactly what is delivered. This (non-Samsung) adapter isn’t going to give you the super-speedy charging of a 30W wall charger but it’s really great that this is included in the package since most of us typically have a pile of USB-A port chargers and they only work with a USB-A to USB-C cable. My Tab 9 shipped with about 50% battery charge. After set up, app installation, and software updates, my tablet dropped to 27% remaining charge. I plugged it in for 1 hour which increased the charge to 79% and another 30 minutes pushed it past 90%. Pretty acceptable.

I want to reiterate what several other reviewers indicated about this International Version device. My Tab 9 was for the Middle Eastern market (some of the descriptive text on the sticker on the back of the box appeared to be Arabic). This is NOT a problem. The usual set up welcome screens are in English. When asked for your language, English (US) is one of the many available language options as per the usual set up behavior. The next step (indicate location) showed a list of only Middle Eastern countries. Here, you simply select any one of the countries listed (I chose the UAE even though I’m in the US). Beyond that, the remainder of the set up process is exactly what you experience when setting up a US Google device (even the time will be your local time, however, you may want to change the weather widget default setting from Celsius to Fahrenheit given that most Americans still don’t understand metric 🙂

In the short time that I’ve used this device, it has proven to be exactly what I wanted. Acceptable screen quality, excellent construction, and snappy performance (cold boot ups are a bit slow but once it’s on, it runs with no discernible lag). At one quarter the price of an iPad Mini, there really isn’t much to complain about here.

Originally bought a Tab A9+ and quickly returned it because it was fine but as soon as I did the software update it became so frustratingly slow that the tablet could barely even swipe between home screen pages. Not making the same mistake with this one so I turned off the automatic update in the settings as soon as I turned it on. Also I actually prefer the smaller size of this tab since it’s easier to handle and I’m also fond of the metal build quality. This tablet is great for the bare bone basics such as web browsing, YouTube, Email and things of that nature. If you’re looking for photo/video editing, RAM intensive apps or gaming then look somewhere else. Yes the region thing through me off too but I set it to South Africa and everything seems to be working just fine. Since I’m using it only at home on WiFi for simple entertainment the region issue doesn’t affect me at all. Nonetheless that should have been mentioned in the description but I still give this review 5 stars because the tablet does the job.