Samsung after it’s huge success with Android mobile phones has now launched yet another addition to it’s queue. Samsung Galaxy Note, a smart mobile handset with a combination of smartphone functionality along with a tablet viewing experience. You no longer required to carry any other devices like mobile, tablet PC, digital camera, pen, notepad & other stationary stuff if you have Samsung Galaxy Note in hand.
The Samsung Galaxy Note mobile is equipped with a 5.3″ HD Super AMOLED WXGA screen with different sensors like Light sensor, proximity sensor, accelerometer & Barometer. The mobile runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system with a 1.4GHz dual core processor & 1GB RAM powering it from the back end.
Galaxy Note also ports a S pen (stylus) which is used to capture, crop & annotate. For example, you can draw pictures, create presentations and many more using the S pen.
The mobile supports playback of different audio formats such as mp3, mp4, aac, amr, wma, wav, flac, ogg & video formats such as MPEG 4, H.264, H.263, WMV, DivX, Xvic and VC-1. Apart from these it allows the playback of 1080p HD videos. The music player is powered by SoundAlive & the mobile has a 3.5mm audio jack for better quality. Stereo FM with RDS will allow you to tune into different FM radio stations. The other connectivity features include LTE, HSPA+, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi hotspot.
Samsung Galaxy Note has got a 8MP camera on the back side with LED flash support. The front camera is of 2MP quality which allows you to make good quality video calls. As the rear camera is providing HD video recording of 1080p @ 30fps (frames per second), you don’t need to carry a separate digital camera with you.
It has an internal memory of 16GB/32GB (two different variants) and in addition it supports an external memory card of upto 32GB.
Price of Samsung Galaxy Note in India: Rs.34,990/-
Review Of Samsung Galaxy Note
Without a doubt, the Samsung Galaxy Note is the biggest smartphone you’ve ever seen. It’s still nice and thin (just 0.38 inches), so don’t worry about flashbacks to the Zack Morris phones of yesteryear. Still, why would you want such a big screen in a phone? Samusng has a few ideas, some of them brand new.
With a 5-inch screen, the Galaxy Note blurs the line between phone and tablet. Any function that benefits from extra screen space effectively gets an upgrade on the Note, and there are a lot of them. Still, let’s be clear: you buy this device from AT&T with a contract. It has a built-in data connection (4G
LTE, thank you very much) and — oh yeah — it can make voice calls over wireless networks. This is a phone.
The Note’s sheer size has both advantages and disadvantages. With more real estate, the menu screen has room for 30 app icons. That’s amazing, though it’s kind of too many — looking for an app in a 5×6 array definitely makes it a bit harder to lock on to a target. Reading, however, is a better experience than almost any phone, letting you get through lots of text in emails and articles before you need to scroll. If you’re a slow reader, though, you’ll need to increase the time before the screen goes dark from inactivity.
So what sort of tricks can you do with the delightfully retro S Pen? First, there are several drawing apps (surprise, a few are preloaded) that let you get your stylus on, like Touch Physics clone called Crayon Physics, where you draw objects to coax a ball across the screen to hit a star. Cute — and addictive.
But the app Samsung wants you to use the most is S Memo, which you can call up while running any app (even the phone) by holding down he stylus button and double tapping. That way, you can stop and take notes — handwritten notes — anytime, anywhere, no matter what you’re doing. Samsung even throws in handwriting-to-text software to translate your scribble into something intelligible.
In practice, the concept isn’t as good as, um, on paper. As a reporter, I often have to take notes, but writing on the Note feels alien after using an actual notebook. You can simulate an actual pen better with a $50 accessory, but the whole idea just feels better suited for quick Post-It-type messages. Even for those, I’d wager most smartphone users are so good at dashing them off with their thumbs that S Memo would just be redundant. The handwriting recognition is far from flawless as well (shown in the photo below — click to see it larger).
Samsung Bring Galaxy Note`s update and no, it's not Android Ice Cream Sandwich
Samsung issued an update for the Galaxy Note 5.3" monster of a phone, and some usability tweaks are in store, taking advantage of that massive screen real estate.
The most clever change is a new five-row virtual keyboard, which has the numbers constantly on top, instead of having to enter punctuation mode every time you need to key in the bid in your eBay shopping spree.
There are shrunk keyboard and dialpad modes now as well, which helps immensely when you are struggling to use the phone with one hand, and, lo and behold, it's a struggle with a phone like the Note.
Other enhancements include a larger lock in the lock screen, which you now have to move only slightly to get to the homescreen, instead of having to drag the thing across half the entire giant display before.
There are also arrows that point which way to move it to unlock, in case you are a first-timer.
The laundry list continues with separate settings for brightness and background color for the browser, which should help with battery life, additional date display modes in Calendar, and a dedicated torch widget for your homescreens. This way you can easily use the phone's screen as a torch, with three levels of brightness available by pressing the torch button.
Well, it's not the Android Ice Cream Sandwich update, but it shouldn't be far behind, as Samsung mentioned it will be out this quarter.
