Samsung Galaxy note 2 first Look!

The Samsung Galaxy Note was launched with huge fanfare at IFA in Berlin this time last year, and it was met with huge confusion. Was it a phone, a tablet or whole new category of device? Samsung claimed the latter, but rejected the ‘phablet’ label. 

With a 5” screen and a stylus for writing directly on the screen, the Galaxy Note was a real attempt to turn creativity digital and even to digitise the humble paper notebook and pen or pencil. The idea of the ‘S-Pen’ was that it would allow users to snip parts of photos or the web and send them to friends easily and simply, annotate websites or pictures, or simply to write notes. To the surprise of the technology press, the Note sold very well and gained a loyal following among the 10million consumers who bought it. 

With the launch of the SIII mobile phone, an update to the Note was inevitable, and last night in Berlin again Samsung revealed that the Note, previously like a large SII phone, would now look like a large SIII phone. 

That’s unfair, however – in the few minutes I’ve had to use the Note, the improvements are substantial. I said in my review of the original that it was a brilliant idea whose execution was not yet perfect; in the Note II, however, the main improvement is the update to the pen so that it feels almost like using a conventional rollerball. 

That simply makes writing on the screen feel easy, rather than like skating over glass: if anything the regret now is almost that the 5.5” screen is in fact too small. Who, after all, would use a 5.5” notebook as their main pad? The Galaxy Note 10.1, in fact, looks more attractive than ever. 

Although there are a range of new features in the new Note, it’s the improvements to the stylus that make the most difference: it’s easier to write with, but it also now has a button allowing users to change what ‘nib’ it virtually has, and it also reveals more of, say, emails, calendar entries or picture galleries if you hover over the screen rather than touch it. There’s an easy way to add notes to photos, too, which could make a huge difference to those huge digital libraries of neglected, unlabelled photos that many users are now gathering. 

In the versions on display at IFA, software is not yet perfect: the version I was using crashed once, and others struggled with the ‘Air View’ hovering. The new feature to automatically bring up a new note when you pulled out the pen was also not possible to test because of the cap on top of the stylus to prevent journalists borrowing them. 

Overall, however, as Samsung claim, the Note is innovative and unique, and the new pen really is able to be used “more naturally and precisely”. There’s something of the future about the Note: it’s a phone, with a blazingly fast 4G chip, as well as a 3G option; it’s now a usable notepad; and it lets you interact with information in a way that was simply not possible just a year ago. Samsung deserves huge credit for that ambition, and consumers may yet find that the Korean company has changed note-taking forever. Thankfully, for the nostalgic, there’s even a Moleskine app.