Samsung Galaxy Note II review

Samsung’s Galaxy Note II is a massive improvement on its predecessor – Matt Warman says he wants one.

When Samsung launched the original Galaxy Note last year, it was the most powerful phone on the market but it was also criticised for being either too big to be a phone or too small to be a tablet, and its ‘S Pen’ stylus struggled wasn’t as easy to use as the standard pen or pencil that it was touted as a replacement for.

It went on, nonetheless, to sell more than 10million units. My own initially negative feelings were soon banished after I spent more time with it and saw others excited about its possibilities. The screen was good, it was fast for web browsing, gaming and watching movies or TV. The Note became a useful travelling companion because it fits easily on even the smallest train or plane table, but is more than big enough for what most people need.

Now, however, the new Note II has been launched. Its screen is extraordinary – the new HD Super Amoled 5.5” display is more compelling than ever, its 1.6MHz quad-core processor is faster than ever, the battery lasts longer and the S Pen has been updated to provide huge improvements over its predecessor. Although it’s just 0.7” larger than the Galaxy S3 mobile phone, the device feels very different. It's totally unlike anything else on the market.

So while the Note II is merely an iterative improvement over its predecessor it feels far more fully formed. This is a device that now recognises my handwriting fast enough to be usable, and allows me to annotate pictures or web pages with the ease that the original Note lacked. While a return to the stylus felt like a retrograde step, now Samsung have added ‘Air View’ a feature that allows you to see previews of, say, emails or calendar appointments if you hover the S Pen over an item, or pop out a video and keep it on screen while you’re doing something else. It makes a real difference and largely works very well. While I struggled to make the S Pen gestures work consistently – often the device interpreted the line that’s supposed to introduce a space as a hyphen – even these too are broadly helpful.

Samsung, too, have made the S Pen more fully integrated – simply pull it out and up pops a new, blank note, for instance. All of these factors combine to make the Note look lovely, and feel even better to use. The Note deserves to sell many more than its popular processor, in part down to Samsung's own decent software.

If there are faults, they feel like very subjective quibbles – it is still too big for most people to want to use it as a phone, but that’s unlikely to surprise prospective purchasers. It’s not a total replacement for pen and paper but it’s good enough for using on the go if you need to, and the new feature that lets you add a note on the ‘back’ of a digital photograph is genius.

It’s also really too big to be used one handed, even in ‘One handed mode’ where the keyboard sits to one side. But how often do you have to use a device such as this one handed? The camera isn’t perfect, but the searing power of the device more than makes up for that with its high speed web browsing. I couldn’t find an app that made it remotely struggle, and it has a battery life that is plenty for most transatlantic flights

On 4G, it will offer an overall experience as yet unprecedented in the UK. With the added bonus of Android Jelly Bean and Google Now, it’s hard to find any reason not to recommend the Galaxy Note. At around £30 per month, or roughly £500 unlocked, it’s not bad value either – for that money you're getting an extraordinary phone and a stunning tablet.

Specifications:
Screen size: 5.5"
CPU: 1.6GHz, quad core, ARM Cortex A9
Screen resolution: 720 x 1280
Height: 151.1mm
Width: 80.5mm
Depth: 9.4 mm
Weight: 180g
Memory slot: MicroSD up to 32GB
Camera: 8mp
Front facing camera: 1.9mp
Video camera: 1080p
Camera flash: 1 x LED
Bluetooth v4.0; FM Radio; WiFi; GPS; 4G

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Posted in: NOTE-BOOK--Samsung Galaxy Note II review,TABLET-TECHNOLOGY

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 review

The tablet-computer market is like guerrilla warfare. One huge army - Apple - dominates the land, while a ragtag group of insurgents keeps raiding and probing, hoping to find some opening it can exploit.

With Samsung's new Galaxy Note 10.1, the rebels have scored a small victory. It's a tablet that does something that the iPad doesn't do, and it does it well. This victory won't win the war, though.
Available in the U.S. starting Thursday, the $499 tablet comes with a pen, or more precisely, a stylus. It doesn't leave marks on paper, but the tablet's screen responds to it. I found it a pleasure to use: It's precise and responsive, and it glides easily across the screen.
There are styluses available for the iPad, but they're not very good. The iPad's screen can't sense sharp objects, so any stylus has to be fairly blunt. Many of them have rubber tips, which resist being dragged across the screen.
The Galaxy Note has an additional layer in its screen, tuned to sense special, sharp-pointed pens through magnetism.
The Note is not the first iPad competitor to work with a stylus.
The HTC Flyer came out last year with the same ability, but several missteps limited its appeal. First, it was half the size of the iPad yet cost just as much, and that was without the pen. Second, there was no slot for the pen in the body of the tablet, making it easy to lose. The pen also was expensive, costing $80 to replace.

Samsung then built pen-sensitivity into the first Galaxy Note, a smartphone launched early this year. Though well-received, the tablet had an odd size, with a 5-inch screen. That makes it very big for smartphone but small for a tablet. With the Galaxy Note 10.1, Samsung is taking the pen squarely into iPad territory.
So what can you do with the pen? Well, this is where the Samsung offensive starts faltering. There just isn't that much the pen is useful for, because stylus-equipped tablets are so new.
You can jot down notes, or edit photos in an included version of Photoshop. You can scrawl personal notes to people and email them. Instead of using the on-screen keyboard, you can use handwriting and let the tablet interpret it. You can even enter Web addresses this way. Handwriting is slower than typing, and the tablet's interpretation introduces errors, so it's not clear why you'd use it much, though.
The stylus senses how hard you press into the screen. Samsung's S Note app responds by making the line you make thinner or thicker, an essential feature for anyone who wants to use a tablet for serious drawing. The pen also comes with a side button that works much like the left mouse button, giving access to extra features with little effort.
Very few third-party apps are designed with styluses in mind, but some of them work better with a stylus anyway. "Draw Something," a drawing game, is a good example. It's designed for use with fingers, but the stylus makes it much easier to draw intelligible pictures, because it's easier to see what you're drawing. By contrast, a finger is so big and blunt that it obscures the picture. The app would work even better if it sensed the pen pressure.
At the current level of software support, the stylus is just slightly better than a gimmick.
But even when there are more apps for it, the stylus is going to have limited appeal. It's a must-have for only a small group of people, who like to doodle or need to do so for their jobs. For the rest of us, it will be a fun thing we use once in a while. It can and should tip a purchase decision now and then, but not for everyone.
You can contrast that with the signature feature of the latest iPad: the ultra-high resolution screen. That's not a must-have feature for everyone either, but it's immediately useful to everyone.
The Galaxy Note does chip at the iPad's defenses with other features the Apple tablet lacks. One is a slot for microSD memory cards, which means you can expand the memory of the Galaxy Note inexpensively. That's very welcome.
The other feature is an infra-red light, which can be used in place of a remote at the home entertainment center. This is a feature Sony pioneered in its Android tablets. It's welcome, too - some people spend hundreds of dollars on universal remotes, which the Galaxy Note effectively replaces with this feature. However, the included software didn't work well with my TV and stereo, so this will take some tinkering to get right.

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Posted in: Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 review

Nokia Lumia 510 specs, picture leaked; may be priced at $150

Nokia may have moved on to Windows Phone 8 with its new flagship Lumia 920 and its poorer cousin, the Lumia 820, but it seems the company is not giving up on Windows Phone 7.8 just yet.

Nokia Lumia 510 running Windows Phone 7.8 has been spotted in the wild by the folks over at GSM Arena. The report also confirms earlier leaked specs of the phone. The Lumia 510 is said to be powered by a 800 MHz Scorpion processor and 256MB of RAM. It will reportedly sport a 4-inch display of WVGA resolution and will likely start selling in China for $150 later this year.

The device is expected to go on sale in other markets early next year. Nokia Lumia 510 could replace the Lumia 610 as the "cheapest Windows Phone device", and is likely the same device that had earlier leaked under the codename 'Glory'.

It is worth pointing out that there is no upgrade path for Windows Phone 7.5/ 7.8 customers toWindows Phone 8 that adds many new features like 'proper' multi-tasking, over-the-air updates and Internet Explorer 10.

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