The Galaxy series of Smartphones and tablets from Samsung seems to be ever expanding. It’s just been days from the Galaxy Note 800 tablet, and here we are with the Galaxy Note 2. The very first look gave us the feel of the Galaxy S3. It is quite similar to the S3. The Same curves, the same home key and the large display. You can say Note 2 is the elder brother of the Galaxy S3. It’s a new note, so we expected a whole lot of interesting upgrades and features from Samsung.
Design wise, we already mentioned it’s a ditto of Galaxy S3. Glossy finishing, plastic back cover. Its display is a bit larger than the original note. It was something we noticed only on reading the specifications, otherwise we thought it was the same screen size of the Galaxy Note. But it’s got a wider Aspect ratio of 16:9 this time compared to the 16:10 of the original note. This made it support more of the HD content. The display needs no introduction. The note’s screen has been gorgeous. It’s the same with the note 2. It’s bright, has deep blacks and the viewing angle is fantastic. How could we forget the new stylus, oops! The S-pen? Yes, it has undergone some changes too! It’s a bit thicker; So Samsung did take our suggestions on this one as the original note’s stylus was uncomfy to hold. It’s not much longer, not longer than the note 800’s s pen. It’s also got a tiny button on it that adds in a particular functionality in certain applications. The phone’s still a bit awkward to hold in your hands.
You might consider buying a Bluetooth headset once you have the note because all of us know it looks ridiculous with a whole part of your face being covered during a phone call. The one more feature that Samsung added along with the S pen was the Air view. It needs you to make the stylus tip hover over the screen, without touching it. Doing this action results in a preview of the content you are hovering upon. That’s cool, right? Well it may take time to get used to this particular feature. Note 2 also has the feature of pop up video which allows you to play video simultaneously while doing something else, say, browsing the internet. What’s cool is now you can also resize the pop up video player’s window.
The other thing we would love to say here, the Note 2’s got a super fast 1.6GHz Quad-core processing chip. That makes multitasking a breeze as ever and also render pro quality graphics on its enormous screen. We didn’t experience any glitches or hanging while conducting our hands-on testing. It also runs on the latest Android version, the 4.1 Jelly Bean. It flaunts an 8-megapixel camera at the back and also a 2 megapixel on the front for video calling. The moment you pull out the S-pen, Note 2 knows that you are up to something (smiles). It opens up a screen with customizable widgets that come more handy while using the S-pen. The note 2 now has a feature to flip over the photo you are viewing and then leave a note behind it. Was kinda cool and we give it a thumbs up.
The software features don’t end here. The S-beam, Samsung’s technology to share files and stuff with another note 2, we tested it and found everything alright and it performed as said by the company. The camera software also gets better. It can recognize up to 20 faces in a single picture, takes 20 pictures in a second in burst mode. It also selects the best picture for you, finds a flaw, replaces it with a better part from the other 19 pictures. We tested this feature, too. And we must say, the Note 2 impressed us. We took a burst shot with 17 of our team members, with 5 of them trying to make it look as bad as possible. It was fabulous and for a moment it surprised us! But the battery life sucked quite a bit. Was not a big thing as it’s Samsung first LTE phone. For those who have big pockets with a bigger budget, the Note 2 is a perfect mobile companion.
