The iPad Air 2 is undoubtedly one of the slimmest and best designed tablets in the world but with Samsung's range of cheaper tablets including the Galaxy Tab S 8.4, it has started to challenge Apple's dominance over the market. Here is how these two light weight tablets compare.

Design

The Galaxy Tab S 8.4, like most other products from Samsung, has a plastic body and a faux leather back panel. Samsung's device comes in two colors, white and bronze. The iPad Air 2, on the other hand, has a premium aluminum body, which gives it an edge over other tabs in the market. Apple offers it in three colors, grey, silver and gold.

Both devices have fingerprint scanners. The scanner on the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 is swipe-based while its competitor has a touch-based version. In terms of their weight, the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 weighs much lighter at 294 grams compared to the iPad Air 2, which weights 437 grams.

Display

The display on the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 is a super AMOLED screen, which, as its name denotes, measures 8.4 inches with a resolution of 1600 x 2560 pixels and a density of 359 pixels per inch. On the iPad Air 2 is a bigger IPS LCD screen measuring 9.7 inches with a resolution of 1536 x 2048 pixels and a density of 264 pixels per inch.

Specs

The hardware on each device is pretty remarkable. The iPad Air 2 is powered by the Apple A8X chipset and a CPU with three cores clocked at 1.5 GHz while the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset, a Krait 400 CPU with four cores clocked at 2.3 GHz and an Adreno 330 GPU.

Memory

The Galaxy Tab S 8.4 gains an edge over the iPad Air 2 as it comes with a memory slot, which allows for the addition of up to 128 GB of external storage. The iPad Air 2 does not have a memory slot, although Apple offers the model in different memory capacities. In terms of RAM, the iPad Air 2 has 2 GB while the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 has 3 GB.

Price

The 16 GB iPad Air 2 costs $500 while the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 with 16 GB onboard storage costs $400.