Wednesday, November 30, 2011

If BIG size is not an issue, Galaxy Note is for you


Yes. It is a phone+tablet (Phablet?). This is the fastest Android phone available till now with 1.4 GHz Dual Core processor and 1GB RAM. Amazingly beautiful Super AMOLED 5.3"(800 x 1280) screen with 2500 mah battery, 16GB built in storage expandable with additional 32 GB memory card. 

The 5.3" screen is not as big as I assumed it to be in the hand. Looks very slim and decent. This is the phone for the people

1. Who do not want to carry a laptop
2. Who do not want to carry around a tablet in addition to the phone
3. Who does most of their work with emails, spreadsheets, social media and android apps
4. Who do not mind the carrying around approximately 1.5x size of Galaxy S2.
5. Who enjoys convergence to the extent that the phone and tablet are in a single device. 
6. Who would love to use the special features by SPen.

This is definitely more than a smartphone and size wise less than a tablet. However the hardware and software are on par (may be more). 

I really like the special functionalities of SPen. There are plenty of things one can imagine to do with this SPen. Samsung seems to be very serious about their SPen and released a SDK for developers.

Display, Speed, Size and SPen are the specialties of this phone. Samsung also promised that they will be updating the OS to latest Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) by 2012. Looking at aggressiveness of Samsung it may release it in 1st quarter of 2012. This is available in Bangalore at Rs. 32,500. Samsung showroom (Mantri Mall) was selling at Rs. 31,900 as promotion offer. Samsung is also providing a designer cover along with the package.

The only feature that is futuristic and catching up rapidly is absent in Note is NFC (Near Field Communication). I think with the commercial focus on this technology this may come to India in a year, where you do not need to carry your Credit Cards with you but just tap your phone on NFC scanner to make a payment at shops. This can also be used to transfer files, photos, music, contacts from one phone to other as promoted by Nokia Lumia 800. The technology is catching up very fast. Google Nexus has the NFC antenna in its battery. In future it may be possible that a non-NFC phone can be converted by just inserting a NFC enable battery or Memory Card.

There are going to be rain of smartphones in the 1st half of 2012. If you can wait, you may consider Galaxy Nexus, Lumia 900, iPhone 5 etc.

4 comments:

Madhusudhana said...

hi sreedhar its very informative review , thanks madhusudhana

Rajeev Raj said...

Will galaxy note with android ver 2.3 upgraded with the new OS android 4.0 ?? or will samsung launch a new Phone for that ?

Sreedhar Saraswathi said...

@Madhu, Thanks.
@ Rajeev, as I mentioned "Samsung also promised that they will be updating the OS to latest Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) by 2012." This is for S2 as well as Note.

Sreedhar Saraswathi said...

Here is the list of phones to get ICS update

http://www.engadget.com/updates/which-devices-will-get-ice-cream-sandwich/