Samsung has been very busy at the IFA show in Berlin. At its keynote yesterday, the company announced a 7.7-inch Galaxy Tab, new Bada phones in the form of the Samsung Wave 3, Wave Y and Wave M, which will be running the new Bada 2.0 operating system (OS).
The highlight however, has to be the new Samsung Galaxy Note that's running Gingerbread (Android 2.3) OS. The handset comes with a stylus dubbed the S Pen which lets you write and draw on the 5.3-inch Super AMOLED capacitive screen. The phone also packs a dual-core 1.4GHz processor, which should provide a zippy experience for users.
Upside
The huge 5.3-inch display is what will catch your eye, and Samsung has squeezed in a 1280 x 800 pixel (WXGA) resolution into the screen. It's the first Android phone that we know off that has a resolution larger than the iPhone 4, though the specs seem to indicate that the Note's 285 pixels per inch (ppi) still lags slightly behind the 326 ppi of Apple's handset.The large screen will be beneficial for browsing content, and Samsung seems to also have done some customizations to Gingerbread to take advantage of the larger display (based on the video demo). We saw an email client with a split screen when used in landscape mode that looks similar to what you might find on tablets.
While it's big in size, the phone is quite thin at 9.65mm and weighs just slightly heavier than the HTC Evo 3D at 178g. That's not too shabby we think and should make the Galaxy Note a smartphone that's easy to carry around.
Downside
While the larger display certainly seems appealing, battery life of the Galaxy Note may be affected. The screen is usually the largest power hog (based on our experience), but perhaps the 2,500mAh battery may be able to provide sufficient charge to make the Note last for more than a day.The Galaxy Note comes with the S Pen stylus which seems handy for scribbling down notes and is stored inside the handset but given our experience with Nintendo's DS Lite and our penchant for losing styli, this may not be a good thing.
Posts
