Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra has just leakIn a new real-world image, raising an eye-catching, and controversial, design choice. As we can spot from the most recent picture, the Tab S11 Ultra will opt for a water drop notch — more than a little strange to see in 2025 for a flagship grade tablet, as many techies will tell you.
What appears to be this new Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra seems to have marked a clear ditching of the pill-shaped notch found on the current model, which came with a dual front camera system. Samsung has instead opted for a single front facing camera housed in the water drop notch. That difference is more than skin deep, however, and affects the way you interact with the notebook.
Tab S11 Ultra specifications and performance
Here are the leaked specs of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra Lis Excel leaks The Tablet will probably be driven by one of the most powerful Android chipsets in the market right now – the Dimensity 9400+. The tablet will also feature 12GB of RAM and arrive preloaded with Android 16 to be a future-ready device you can use for work and play.
But for a lot of customers, specs alone may not be enough to compensate for the new notch design. The water drop notch is smaller, but still dated looking, and doesn’t feel that premium on such a high-end tablet.
Notch design backlash
Apple popularized notches historically. Since then, we’ve seen many forms of it — ranging from the big rectangular cutout to the latest round punch hole style. The water drop notch, though, kind of feels like a step back. Although it can be used to make the front face more usable, the visual trade off does not go unnoticed.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra is designed to go head-to-head with other premium tablets such as Apple’s iPad Pro and the Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra. But some die-hard Samsung fans might end up leaning toward older models, or even other brands, because of this design decision.
The previous Tab S10 Ultra sported a far cleaner and symmetrical pill-shaped cutout for its dual front cameras. Now that Samsung’s latest tablet has only a single camera, it’s a question whether the single camera experience would match up to dual sensors in terms of picture quality and ultra-wide capabilities.
A plea for cleaner displays
Personally, I’ve always dreamed of the future, where there are perfect displays — no cutouts, no notches, just a screen that goes on forever. Well, the water drop notch on the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra puts paid to that for a lot of folk. It’s small, but it makes its presence known, which may make itself apparent to you in the middle of watching a movie or gaming.
This disappointment isn’t isolated. Even the great-looking RedMagic 10 Pro isn’t immune to the compromise of cutting it out. The fact is unless Apple decides to go all in on a cutout-free display — maybe on its 20th anniversary iPhone Pro — everyone else is probably going to play it safe anyway.
Until then, devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra could continue to show a somewhat conservative attitude, even if it might lose them some fans.
