Rich Fiscus
29 Dec 2011 6:52
The Galaxy Note may be the most unusual smartphone Samsung has produced, but according to the company that hasn't stopped carriers from ordering 1 million of them already.
The Galaxy Note is hard to classify. With a 5.3 inch display, it seems almost too big to be a phone, but certainly too small to be a real tablet. It is clearly intended to be tablet-like, however, as you can tell from the inclusion of a Wacom stylus.
Although a company statement reprinted in various Korean publications claims 1 million of the Android phones have been sold, a closer reading shows that to be the count of units shipped, rather than sold.
Regardless of how many are actually in consumers' hands, the Galaxy Note has the potential to be something truly unusual - a device that defines a new category. It has a lot of power, with a 1.4GHz dual core Cortex-A9 processor and 1GB RAM. It also offers a minimum of 16GB of internal storage, plus of course up to 32GB more using the microSD slot. Even the display resolution is impressive at 1280x800.
Of course the most interesting feature for some people will be the Wacom-made S Pen. The Galaxy Note ships with Android 2.3.5, which means it lacks a native pen API. Like HTC with the Flyer, Samsung has filled the gap with an API of their own. Whether this multitude of API's will ultimately be a problem for Android remains to be seen.
A video from GSMArena shows the Galaxy Note's stylus in action: