September 11, 2012
Feedback submitted!Unable to submit feedback! The Note is my dream phone come true. My most cherished differentiator from anything else: hand-writing recognition with the S Pen, which is in essence a WACOM digitizer. This makes the Note the only dual-digitizer phone: it has both passive digitizer (touch screen for fingers) AND active digitizer (WACOM pen computing technology). With this on board, it is absolutely unique, no iPhone, nor i-anything touches it, no tablet and no other phone. In addition, I just recently upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) - the original came with Gingerbread. I also have the international version in white (GT-N7000). It is better (faster) than the American (AT&T, Verizon) versions. With ICS it is a dream. A whole suite of apps came with ICS, including the all-new S Note app that is without equal. You can draw, you can write, you can type you can include any media (voice, music, image, video) in any document you create, and it has templates for a variety of styles and documents. And then it does absolutely cutting edge things with them: for example it has corrective geometry: you draw an ugly blob and it makes a perfect circle out of it. You draw an ugly block and it makes a perfect rectangle (or square of triangle, depending on the shape you intended). It recognizes and converts your handwriting into typed, printable and editable text. It is productivity on a whole new level that no full size tablet or laptop has achieved (except for the yet to appear Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1). As for being "too big" for some: then get a frigging (inferior) iPhone. Then you get your microscopic, good-for-nothing 3.5 inch mini-screen. And you have to write with your finger like a Neanderthal on a cave wall. Enjoy. For me, bigger is better: for a phone, the Note gives fantastic browsing and video experience, there is no more a need to carry a phone AND a tablet. It comes with great GPS navigation from Google as well as I have CoPilot Live, and it has everything else: FM radio (with the incredibly good headphones serving as antenna), compass, motion sensor, light sensor, gravity sensor, you name it sensor, GREAT front and back camera (flash with the high-res back camera), Bluetooth, WiFi as well as 3G HSPA+ quad GSM (i.e. worldwide international) phone (4G LTE with the American versions, but I don't need that), and all. The S Pen works with any other WACOM (tablet PC) devices, and vice-versa (all WACOM pens work on the Note). Beautiful home screen and widgets (can have seven home screens), no need for third party launchers. Lightning quick performance (dual-core Exynos processors), especially with ICS. And ... it STILL fits in any of my pockets, as a phone should. And you get the biggest available phone screen real estate: 5.3 inches of gorgeous display. Note also that with ICS there is another innovation: one handed operation. With this on, the on-screen keyboard comes in a smaller size than the full screen width, either on the left or right hand side, in a size that can be operated with just one finger (and you can be right- or left-handed). You can set this individually for keypad-intensive applications: not only for the keyboard in general, but also for the phone keypad or the calculator keypad. So no, it is NOT too big for one-handed operation, because it has this functionality.Summary: if you share my "one gizmo" philosophy that ONE DEVICE should fulfill ALL your needs (phone, computing, note taking, voice recording, Skyping, Web browsing, texting, GPS navigation, photography and video recording, e-book reading, music and movie playing, entertainment and gaming). i.e. provide ALL FUNCTIONALITY IN A SINGLE DEVICE, so that you have to carry (and remember to re-charge) only one device that is with you all the time, everywhere - then this is it. There is nothing like it that is this complete in every respect. The only thing better will be its successors: the already announced (but far in the future as far as availability goes) Samsung Galaxy Note 2 (with a 5.5 inch screen) with even higher resolution and the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet - this being the same as the Note, except in a 10.1 inch (tablet) form factor. The Note 10.1, by the way will be also unique among tablets: it will have a SIM card slot, so it will work as a phone as well. Of course 10.1 inches are really too big for a phone. But Samsung figured out an absolutely ingenious solution: the S Pen has a built in Bluetooth mic and speaker, so THE PEN SERVES ALSO AS A THE PHONE HEADSET. In short: move over Apple and everybody else, Samsung rules. I love my Note and would trade it for nothing else. Except the new one :-)