The Samsung Note is essentially part smartphone and part tablet. The hybrid smartphone has been for sale in Europe and Asia for about two months now and has sold over 1 million units. The smartphone is available in Germany, France, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Samsung says the sales are “notable” since the device is a hybrid unit that opens a new market for phone/tablet combinations. The Samsung Note has made its way into the United Kingdome in mid-November and the company said the United States should see the Note launched some time in 2012, but there is no specific date announced.
The Samsung Note showed up at the IFA Electronics Show back in September. The Android powered smartphone has a huge 5.3-inch AMOLED HD tablet like screen, but functions very much like a smartphone. The Note is powered by a 1.4GHz dual-core Exynos processor and comes with 16GB of internal storage that can be upgraded, like many other devices, to 32GB with the use of a microSD card. The display supports 16 million colors and has a resolution of 800×1280 pixels. The battery that comes with the Note is above average and can hit 13 hours of talk time, as well as, 570 hours of stand-by time. On the 3G network the talk time is reduced to about 4.5 hours.
The graphics processor is a Mali-400MP; the hybrid phone comes with over 1GB of RAM and support for Bluetooth 3.0, Wi-Fi connections, HDMI via microUSB and USB 2.0 technology. The Samsung Note includes GPS navigation, Glonass, phonebook, organizer apps, supports SMS, MMS and threaded view messages with predictive text input features. Email can be accessed via IMAP, POP3 and SMTP. The Samsung Note has a nice 8MP camera with LED flash, auto-focus, smile detection and panorama on the back side with a smaller 2MP camera on the front that is perfect for video chatting. The back side camera can capture HD video in 1920×1080 pixels at about 30 frames per second.
The phone does have support for browsing the Web including HTML and Flash. Built-in apps include those for Facebook, YouTube (with upload), Picasa and Twitter. The Note also comes equipped with its own built in stylus and Samsung’s popular TouchWiz UI. The Samsung Note was officially announced on September 1st of this year and should be well received in the United States when it launches some time in 2012.
