Gadgetory

for a while now tablets have been trying to become more potential replacements for general computing and unfortunately they haven't quite gotten there just yet but Samsung is looking to put its best foot forward now by taking it's already well received top-tier tablet and quite literally blowing it up out of proportion well does it succeed well that's what we're about to find out cuz it's Joshua the guard from Android authority what's going on everybody and this is the Samsung Galaxy Note pro 12.2 and starting off with the design we are going to get the obvious out of the way first yes this is a huge tablet I had 12.2 inches in the screen you do have a wonderfully big and very vast black slate at the front but it's because of this size it also comes with all of the issues you would expect from it mainly that you have to hold it in two hands in order to have a safe grip on it you're probably going to use this on a tabletop more often than not and on top of all of that it is also quite heavy at 7 and 753 grams making this almost like you took a small laptop and you just snapped the back off of it and all you got left was this in my hand but design wise Samsung went with the tried-and-true aspects that they usually do with their tablets the button layout is on the top with the power and the volume rocker the s-pen and the micro USB 3.0 port are on the right one real notable change is that on the front button layout you have the home button flanked by a back button and this time instead of a menu button you have a recent apps button so the kind of coming in with the new here instead of looking for a menu button they're going to add a little bit more multitasking functionality by allowing you to use a recent apps button as far as the handling goes when it comes to using a twelve point two inch tablet like this there's really only one way to put it if you use a 10 inch tablet before and you thought that that was too big there is no way you're going to think that this is any better the bezel around the screen does make it possible to hold the tablet with one hand but you're going to need to really pinch pretty much almost have a death grip on the tablet lest you let it fall to the ground and you destroy all of the loveliness of that screen more often than not you're probably going to be using the note Pro on tabletop especially when it comes to typing because typing on this large screen is one of the hardest things you can do when you have it handheld and quite obviously it is that 12 point two inch screen which is the reason why this tablet is so big but one of the greatest parts about this tablet is that screen because it is one hell of a performer it comes in with a massive resolution of 2560 by 1600 which makes it one of the best media consumption tools that is still at least for most intents and purposes pretty portable just about anything you watch read or enjoy on this LCD will shine through and even if you have it on a tabletop and you are a little bit over on the side the viewing angles actually look quite great still when it comes to performance it should be no surprise that the current most powerful processing package comes on the Note pro 12.2 the Snapdragon 800 clocked in at 2.3 gigahertz and then the audrina 330 with three gigabytes of RAM now I did kind of want to address this issue that seems to come up fairly often where people are really I'll say kind of sniping at the TouchWiz UI in that any little stutter makes them think that there's a lot of lag well the one thing I want to address there is while TouchWiz obviously is in need of an update for more reasons than one which I'll get into later but as far as those little stutters you might find I really didn't see that many of them and even if it did happen it didn't keep me from doing whatever it is I needed to do the stutter is less about performance and more of an aesthetic issue which is what I'll give you but what I my point here is that the stutter is not necessarily because of the processing package because it performs really well even under all that TouchWiz demands of it a micro SD card slot allows another notch in the media consumption category for the Note pro 12.2 as you can bolster the already included 32 or 64 gigabytes of on-board storage for further media consumption as far as the battery goes in the note pro you have a 95 hundred million power unit in here that goes for quite a long time and that is really no joke because I let this sit for hours and hours and the standby time proved itself by not letting the battery life go down even more than a couple percent so you should be able to get two days maybe even more from the no Pro depending on how frugal your usage is now one aspect about the hardware here that was a bit of a bummer was the sound quality there are dual speakers here one on either the device however despite it getting pretty adequately loud I did wish that there was a little bit more richness to the sound for a tablet like this that potentially could be a great movie watching experience or even YouTube I was really hoping for this thing to really boom unfortunately it fell just below those expectations and of course there is the s-pen which includes every new enhancement originally abroad since the Galaxy Note 3 and thus its functionality is very similar to those so if you aren't familiar with it you can refer to previous reviews of note devices and you'll get the gist of it it still remains as one of the best stylus experiences available on pretty much any peripheral to date usually there isn't too much to say about a camera on a tablet and that is also true for the Note pro 12.2 and this is also primarily because with such a large body especially in this tablet we do run into a very familiar problem nonetheless the 8 megapixel shooter comes with a rather surprising number of enhancements in the app that originated from the galaxy s4 and the quality of the photos actually isn't all that bad but as is the case with many different tablets when it comes to their cameras you probably have a better and much more portable shooter in your pocket already and the tablet is really just a backup more than anything else and finally we make it over to the software in which TouchWiz finally got an update but it can be best described as the my magazine second screen coming to the forefront but before we get into that will say that the elements you may already be very used to have been somewhat altered with more flat elements and colors and a motif leaning more toward circles as you can see in the notification drop-down and speaking of multitasking the screen real estate is taken full advantage of with multi windows new capability of simultaneously running four windows at once now this is a very welcome addition and while I would argue that you may not often run into situations where you need for windows running all at once it is still pretty damn cool and now the magazine UX swipe over from the right and you will hit the magazine UX that has its own indications on the bottom for its own home screens once again the full screen real estate is being taken advantage of as sizable tiles quite literally take up every inch of the display now you can't add regular widgets to the magazine as a set list of additions are available for news applications and social categories all of which focus on content delivery for example the news widgets take on a Flipboard back-end to provide sources and avenues of contents when you are looking at that tile you can change which sources it pulls from via Flipboard as the backend and you can pick the different sources of the news that you will find now when you consider the magazine UX as sort of a at a glance type of home screen you will get a lot of content from the tiles and they are customisable in a number of different ways but there's really only one main gripe that I had with it for example if you look at the YouTube tile down here if I was going to click on that I would hope that it would take me straight to that trailer that it is showing me already but if I click on it right now it will bring me right into Flipboard which will essentially show me this same exact picture again that I have to press once more in order to open up the actual video itself so instead of being shortcut straight to the content that it is displaying it actually brings you to a couple more layers which is something that it's a little bit of a bummer in the end the magazine UX is a very nice step forward but ultimately TouchWiz still looks very familiar in its uber colorful and somewhat bloated elements now while the whole screen is being taken advantage of and that is great those other aspects are what we still notice and those are the things that we want to be updated at very soon so when it comes to the price there's really only one way to put it big tablet big price the Note pro 12.2 comes in at 750 dollars and is as expensive as actually a number of halfway decent laptops that are available in the market but then that brings us to our question that we started this review with does this tablet provide an experience that can replace general computing well if anything the Note pro 12.2 gets as close as probably any other tablet has with a screen that plenty of gaming laptops just wish that they could have heavy multitasking capabilities of very good stylus experience if you need it the Note pro 12.2 tries to be quite literally everything for you and for those of you that it succeeds in doing that for the Note pro 12.2 will likely be a for you but for the rest of us this is still a pretty damn good tablet despite its huge size but in the end what is important is it is also pretty damn fun so as always thank you guys very much for watching and I hope you enjoyed this review of the Samsung Galaxy Note pro 12.2 it is definitely quite the tablet to try and wrap your head and even your hands around but in the end I find that it is a nice experience and TouchWiz being slightly updated with the magazine UX was a nice touch but there's still more that has to be done so keep it tuned to Android 34 all of the best coverage especially our upcoming Mobile World Congress coverage as the show is starting in just a few days I am actually standing in Barcelona Spain right now bringing you this review so drop us some likes on our videos because we love to see those thumbs up subscribe to our channel if you haven't already and also keep it tuned here to Android authority because we're your source for all things Android