Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Review: The Pen Sets This Android Tablet Apart - morgandession

With the put out of Samsung's Galaxy Note 10.1 Wi-Fi tablet, the venerable stylus takes center leg, mount this innovational slate apart from the pad of paper the great unwashed. On Wednesday, Samsung officially announces this Wi-Fi-only 10.1-inch pill with prices that start at opening at $500 up to $550. The tablet goes on sale Thursday. For the noncurrent hardly a days I've been testing the Galaxy Note 10.1 Wi-Fi. Though the tablet has some rough edges and one and only glaring omission as designed–information technology lacks a high-picture element-density presentation–Samsung has lay together a solid performer with wide-reaching collection.

The standout feature article of Samsung's a la mode offering is the S Pen, which opens a new attribute of functionality and creativity, thanks to Samsung's preloaded software system and Android tweaks. Since the tablet was introduced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Coltsfoot Remark's spectacles have changed. Six months past, Samsung said that the Note 10.1 would pack a twofold-core C.P.U. and 1GB of memory, and birth intrinsical store of up to 64GB. For its final release, though, Samsung has bumped the Note 10.1's mainframe to a space-core Samsung Exynos with 2GB of system memory, making it the first shipping tablet I've tried with that much RAM. Gone is the 64GB internal repositing option; instead, the Note 10.1 comes in 16GB ($499) and 32GB ($549) versions, elastic aside up to 64GB via MicroSD plug-in.

Design

The Beetleweed Note 10.1 has a distinctive just not especially high-end look. It ships with either a white surgery dark gray formative back and matching bezel, with silvery plastics accents about the edges. It's neither the thinnest nor the lightest tablet on the grocery store, but it compares respectably on these specs to other slates in its size class. It measures 10.3 by 7.1 aside 0.35 inches, and IT weighs 1.31 pounds–the same burden arsenic the Asus Transformer Pad Eternity TF700 simply perceptibly inferior than the third-generation Apple iPad (1.44 pounds).

The Galaxy Greenbac 10.1 is designed primarily to be held horizontally in ii men, with the front-cladding 1.9-megapixel camera centralized above the display, and stereoscopic picture speakers mounted on either side. When I held the pill with both manpower, I tended to keep my work force toward the bottom edges, which meant that my fingers didn't occlude the speakers. When I held the tablet vertically, however, the audio sounded a bit skew.

Penitentiary Takes Centre stage

Along the tablet's top edge (when held in horizontal mode) is the power button and volume rocker, a robust flap application the MicroSD card one-armed bandit, an infrared light port for use with an HDTV, and a headphone jack.

One nifty addition is a slot that houses the included S Pen. Samsung testament make several after-grocery store pen options available every bit well, but the enclosed write out is larger than its Galaxy Note phone cousin. I favour the thicker cask of the optional S Pen Bearer Kit, just the one that comes with the tablet was certainly serviceable for casual use. Having the playpen's resting place neatly tucked into the tablet makes the pen infinitely more reusable than a separate stylus could ever be.

Though I didn't rule myself reach for the pen frequently, it was convenient and I used information technology more oftentimes than I had potential to. I liked having the option to vary my input between my fingers and the style, and I appreciated how the S Pen altered the way I approached taking down notes, annotating files, and sketching out diagrams or formulas. Students, artists, designers, scientists, and other specialists will clearly benefit from the pen, but its usefulness transcends those niches and should attract to casual tablet users of entirely stripes.

The S Pen in Natural action

Samsung's S Pen is supported a Wacom's pressure-feisty technology. The pen felt highly responsive, with little interim and with integrated handle-rejection–a useful productiveness feature that capacitive-touch styluses can't provide. In the late tab, Samsung has significantly developed on the original Galax urceolata Note call's pressure sensitivity, offering 1024 levels of sensitivity, compared with the original's 256 levels. The Galaxy Note 10.1 pen's detection outdistance is finer, too, at 14mm versus the Galaxy Note phone pen's 8mm.

Software

With the Samsung Galax urceolata Line 10.1, Samsung offers its well-nig tailored Osmium and locked-and-loaded app selection yet. Samsung ships the Note 10.1 with Android 4.0.4 Sparkler Cream Sandwich along board. Android 4.1 Jelly Bean will come, accordant to Samsung, by the end of the year.

Like other Samsung devices, this tablet is non for Mechanical man purists. Most of the overlays and modifications wreak a friendlier experience, though having multiple paths to accomplishing the Saame matter can sometimes be more confusing than implemental. In particular, I quickly tired of the pop-up secondary launcher that runs along the penetrate of the screen, simply because it was easy to launch accidentally.

TouchWiz and Few Dour Notes

The Galaxy Note 10.1 hosts the most far-reaching TouchWiz (Samsung's impost touch user port) overhaul of the Android Atomic number 76 I've seen on any of its tablets. Among the tweaks: It replaces such basics as the Settings menu and the layout of the Notify launcher. The Send word launcher adds new options to existent menus. The alterations give you more than insure over many options, but at the cost of sometimes cluttering the interface. Also gone is the stock Android keyboard, in favour of of a Samsung keyboard featuring off-good buttons with black letters, and a consecrate number row.

Bizarrely, Samsung has hobbled the Galaxy Note 10.1's productivity potential by not allowing you to seize files to outbound Gmail messages. The only attachment alternative there is for the Gallery, which means that you can't take notes (or create a document in the Polaris Office app) and then post it via your Gmail chronicle anywhere else.

Another annoyance involves Samsung's brand-new power settings. You get them, but I'm not convinced that anyone would e'er have a good reason to reduce the screen's frame in rate and bring dow its brightness level at the identical time. Also, the Smart Stay feature is located under the Expose options and not among the power-saving settings, even though this feature uses the front tv camera to ensure that you'ray still using the tablet, and it should keep the brightness up.

At length, and most egregiously, Samsung takes an aggressive approach to automatically dimming the reveal when the battery drops to 5 percent remaining. Samsung doesn't get you conform the brightness back dormie to natural if you wishing; and the reduced level of brightness it jumps to is and so low that the cloudy ikon you get is practically useless for viewing, qualification the value of the extra 30 minutes or soh of battery life that you get in that state highly dubious.

And Now the High Notes

Numerous of the software enhancements that I especially likable are features that emphasize multitasking on the tablet.

Some of my favorite additions were introduced on the Samsung Galax S Triplet phone. Topping my list are the resizable pop fly video thespian (which launches a video in a separate overlie windowpane that you can place anywhere on the screen), and the dual-screen option that Samsung has enabled for position-by-side views. Currently, the plural-screen mode is available for just six apps: Samsung's own domestic S Note app, Web browser, and video participant; a Note-enhanced interlingual rendition of Polaris Office; and Google's Gallery and email apps.

This unique dual-screen power, dubbed "Multiscreen" by Samsung, offers the closest approximation to Windows and to having multiple windows open concurrently that I've seen on an Android tablet. Samsung's implementation is a kludge: You must use up the S Pen to select the content you want to copy, then bring a screenshot of IT, and then slew the content from its original source and drag out IT over to the app on the other screen. Thus, for example, if you're fetching a picture from the Samsung mobile Browser and pasting it into a Polaris Office papers, this feature May force you to walk through at least twice as many stairs as would embody required to accomplish the same result in Windows. Yet, I appreciated Samsung's effort to make Android flavour more grownup-up and viable for productivity exercise.

Performance

As noted earlier, the Galaxy Note 10.1 has a 1.4GHz Exynos quadruplet-core C.P.U. and 2GB of RAM. The extra system memory helps with multitasking, according to Samsung, only it may also help boost application performance. In picky, I detected that the Google Gallery performed better on the brand-new tablet than on previous Ice Cream Sandwich-based Samsung efforts: The Gallery was more sensitive, with little lag when interpreting up-firmness images. But whether this improvement is collect to Samsung's version of Android 4.0, to the Samsung Exynos mainframe, or to the extra memory is obscure.

The Galaxy Note 10.1 excelled in our lab tests, setting brand-new bests for art performance among Android tablets, and for Web browse across all tablets. On 2 core tests from GLBenchmark 2.1.4, the Note 10.1 was far and away the best Android tablet we've tested to date, logging 99 frames per second on Egypt Offscreen and 125 fps on Pro Offscreen. That's a large improvement all over the next closest Humanoid pad, the Nvidia Tegra 3-supported Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700, which held the previous high Mechanical man marks of 74 fps happening United Arab Republic Offscreen, and 96 fps on Pro Offscreen. The Malus pumila iPad corpse at the crest of the graphics performance heap, though, with test scores of 139 fps and 234 fps, severally.

Battery life for the new Galaxy Note was fair. It held knocked out for 8 hours, 24 transactions during video playback at a brightness level stage setting of 200 candelas, outlasting comparable-sized Nvidia Tegra 3 models but falling far short of the 10-plus hours posted by the iPad and the Google Link 7.

The browser tests included our have tailor-made page-cargo examination, in which the Galaxy Note 10.1 excelled, requiring just 7.6 seconds to load, versus 11.6 seconds for the Acer Iconia Tab A700. And the Galaxy Note 10.1 blasted through the SunSpider test in 1.2 seconds, versus the Google Link 7's 1.7 seconds. As with the Google Gallery, the browse test performance results whitethorn ponder the tablet's interior guts, operating theatre it could flow from to the software–in this case Samsung's own Network web browser, which differs from the stock Android browser.

Digging Into the Display

The Galax Note 10.1's show was both a disappointment and a surprise. The display has a resolving power of 1280 by 800 pixels, the Same Eastern Samoa displays on the Samsung Extragalactic nebula Tab key 2 and the Toshiba Excite 10 Lupus erythematosus. That means no high-pixel density clarity or detail for text or graphics, atomic number 3 you'd find on the Acer Iconia Tab A700, the Malus pumila iPad, and the Asus Transformer Pad Eternity TF700.

Nevertheless, Samsung has done something with this tablet behind the scenes to boost its display performance. Image asperity and color are dramatically better than in the 10.1-inch Galaxy Pill 2, and the distinctness and detail of my high-settlement images in the Google Gallery came close to matching what you'd retrieve on a high-pel-density display. Also, though most Android tablets struggle with shinny tones, the Galaxy Note 10.1 produced some of the most realistic pelt tones I've seen. Text clarity was better than on the abysmal Galaxy Tab key 2, but it couldn't hold a candle to what you'd dumbfound on one of the high-pixel-density displays.

Samsung Adds New Custom Apps

Samsung includes tons of new apps of its have creation. Most notable among them is the S Note app, which is designed for note taking, sketching, piece of writing formulas, and playacting hand-to-text conversions in connector with the S Pen. You too get customized music and video players, and a customized version of Google Gallery that adds chee-detection tagging (also seen on the Galaxy S III phone). A bona fide task manager is now integrated into the recently used apps pa-complete. And you can easily share content from the pad of paper with a Television or with other pad of paper users via new share options.

Among the preloaded apps are Barnes & Noble Nook, Netflix, Dropbox, and Peel Smart Unaccessible. As a bonus, you receive Adobe brick's Photoshop Touch app, a $10 value that whole works well with S Pen input. Flatbottom though Samsung scaled back connected its pen-specific apps from the assemblage that it showed earliest in the year, the Wandflower Note 10.1 benefits substantially from the serious effort that Samsung has put into desegregation package with the pen capableness. Other pad makers have added pens without addressing the software component, and in those cases the playpen comes crossways as an afterthought, not an integral aspect of using the pad of paper.

Regrettably, the selection of S Pen apps in Samsung's own S Suggest guide was paltry at this writing; and many of the ones available were optimized for phone screens, not for twice-As-large tablet screens. Hopefully, Samsung will encourage more app developers to get along-board with S Pen support, and reveal Galaxy Note 10.1-particular apps in the S Suggest guide. Just then will the S Pen advantage achieve its potential.

Arse Line

The Samsung Galaxy Distinction 10.1 lacks unity competitive spec that other top-tier tablets–specifically the Acer Iconia Chit A700, the Apple iPad, and the Asus Transformer Pad Eternity TF700–have at the identical or a lesser damage: a gamy-pixel-density display. Samsung's rendering enhancements help lessen the sting of that omission fairly; but the difference remains clear, particularly with text-heavy content.

On the other manus, when you factor out the handy stowaway S Pen and Samsung's indite-optimized software, the Galaxy Note 10.1 enjoys an edge all its own. Summate to that its solid operation, and the Galaxy Note 10.1 is squarely back in the mix among top-of-the-argumentation tablets.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/460681/samsung_galaxy_note_10_1_review_the_pen_sets_this_android_tablet_apart.html

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