September 3, 2011

What’s flying up there? Is it a plane? Is it a bird? No! It’s the Superman!

Yes, Samsung has a new super device on their hands. After the Samsung Galaxy S2 – the incredibly succesful 4.3 inch dual-core Android smartphone, comes the 5.29 inch dual-core, Android-powered super device that combines many devices in one.

If you carry both a smartphone and tablet with you, Samsung has a solution for you: Samsung Galaxy Note = a cellphone + multitouch tablet + pen input device all in one. It’s a stunner and yes, it’s pocktable for non-midget persons.

Since I couldn’t find even one Windows Phone at stands of Samsung in various halls, I started playing with the Samsung Galaxy Note and comparing it in size to iPhone:

From the above photos you may get the impression that the Samsung Galaxy Note is enormous, but it’s not. When you actually touch it, when you play with it, when you hold it – it in fact feels like a device that you could use as your day-to-day phone, yes, phone, not just tablet.

If you can’t see it in the photo above, here is a zoom-in on the back side of the Samsung Galaxy Note, where you can see, it has a nice touch, as there is a pattern in the plastic and this pattern feels great when you hold the device.

Apart from the external appearance this device is “just” a regular Android device – phone and tablet in one and it has the standard (i.e. Google’s own) Android Market

… with all the apps like Angry Birds, Funky Baboons, Kindle, etc.

What is distinctive about this device is the stylus.

This is not a digitizer pen, but actually a stylus. The display is a regular multi-touch display, so it allows for quite precise drawing too.

Since Samsung is releasing the SDK for pen computing on their Android devices like Samsung Galaxy Note, developers will be able to provide more pen apps than the ones provided by Samsung. Who knows, maybe one day pen computing will become part of the Android OS itself.

Is the introduction of a stylus a step back? No way! Because the Samsung Galaxy Note also supports multi-touch input, and having the pen ability adds much more comfort to taking notes, doodling and is much more precise than a Pogo and other such pens for multitouch tablets and cellphones.

Of course, I would prefer to see a digitizer pen in this device as it offers hundreds time higher precision yet, but after thinking a while I must say that it is not totally necessary to have lines of various widths depending on the pressure that I apply to the pen.

If you are interested in the specifications of the Samsung Galaxy Note, you can see them here, and these are the freshest specifications possible as they come from the big-touch display that was next to the Galaxy Note itself:

Some remarks about specifications:

• display is AMOLED so well visible in sunlight and very bright and good indeed
• display resolution is 1280×800 – the same resolution of some notebooks and netbooks and more than the resolution of the iPad
• apart from GPS this device supports Russian geolocation service GLONASS – just in case in World War 3 American GPS would go down (or any other events where GPS is not usable e.g. due to military actions of US Army, etc)
• I don’t know what “WiFi Direct.” is but propably directional WiFi antennas (my WiFi access point has it – it’s like 6-8 antennas that beam signal to the device what is better because signal is more focused and not widely spread)
• 21 Mbps means that wireless carriers that support high HSDPA on cellular networks will make browsing faster than DSL or cable modem and LTE is not necessary
• front facing camera is 2 megapixel and not VGA like in iPad so you can use Samsung Galaxy Note to shave your gob
• processor is dual core what means you get a lot of power also in this small format

Conclusion: Samsung Galaxy Note is an impressive mega-phone and super-tablet and whatever you want it to be. I can imagine using it as my primary cellphone and as replacement for my tablet… and maybe even for my notebook (as Samsung is also preparing accessories that I have seen but forgot to take photos of,  due to distraction by booth babes).

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