The Samsung Galaxy Note can be considered a smartphone, but also a tablet. Whichever way you look at the Galaxy Note 4G device, one thing is for sure. It has a huge display. The 5.3 inch multitouch, capacitive screen works in tandem with the S Pen smart stylus to provide handwriting recognition technology, as well as a host of other note taking, texting, e-mailing and native handwriting features. If you think of the Samsung Galaxy Note device as a tablet, it offers a smaller display than the 7 and 10 inch offerings in the tablet marketplace. But it is also held comfortably in one hand, and adds 4G LTE connectivity to AT&T’s wireless network. Consumer-electronics fans have taken to calling the device a Phablet (part phone, part tablet).
When Samsung released the Galaxy Note 4G smartphone in January of this year with the largest 4G screen to date, they answered critics of the largest smartphone display size by saying that the Galaxy Note would create an entirely new device category, and that it was the face of things to come in the smartphone marketplace. Depending on the online sales estimates you accept, sales for the Galaxy Note have been in the 7 to 10 million unit range, so it is hard to argue against the sales success and consumer popularity of the device. And at least one online industry analyst, ABI Research, agrees with Samsung in their prophetic pronouncement.
ABI Research recently released data confirming their belief that large screen Phablet devices such as the Galaxy Note are definitely what the consumer wants, as long as the screen is small enough to hold in one hand, but larger than the standard 4+ inch displays being offered now. They define a phablet as a smartphone with a fast processor and touch screen display size between 4.6 and 5.5 inches, and predict sales of as many as 208 million units annually for phablet devices as early as 2015. Samsung competitors are already copycatting the device in the hopes of similar sales success, and HTC recently released a handful of phablet smartphones.
The Samsung Galaxy Note delivers other respectable features aside from the large high-resolution screen. The device is slim, at only 0.38 inches (10 mm), and is reported to receive an over the air update to the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) operating system by the end of June. That 5.30 inch display offers 800 x 1,280 pixel resolution, and renders visuals in more than 16 million colors. At 10.0 hours of talk time from a single charge, the 2,500 mA battery delivers 25% better performance than the average 4G handset. A dual core 1.5 GHz central processor, graphics dedicated chip, 1.0 GB of RAM memory and 16 GB of storage are built into the Galaxy Note. An 8.0 megapixel camcorder on the back of the handset provides video capture at 1,080P HD resolution, and a 2.0 megapixel chat cam rides up front. You can purchase the Samsung Galaxy Note starting at $199 at select retailers.
