Gadgetory

despite Apple's iPad having been on the market for quite some time tablets in general are still trying to figure out exactly what they need to be and are on the cusp of an evolution they're trying to determine just how big their screen should be or how small how thick they should be or how thin if it should be finger only or if it's going to be more productive to have keyboards and stylus trying to answer all of those questions and compete in an already saturated market is the samsung galaxy note 10.1 will it live up to the hype let's dive into the review and find out the samsung galaxy note 10.1 isn't much of a note at all in fact leaving its predecessor notes behind the note 10.1 is more like the galaxy tab then again the Galaxy Tab 77 is more of a note I think they're doing it just to confuse us but that aside let's dive right into some specs the screen on the note is a huge 10.1 inches but the resolution falters a bit coming in below HD at only 12 90 x 800 pixels the screen however is bright and fairly high resolution it's no Retina Display but it looks very good and has good contrast and color representation powering that display is a 1.4 gigahertz quad-core exynos 4412 and it's available in both 16 and 32 gig varieties and both come with an external microSD slot which will let you expand up to another 32 gig quickly and easily the differentiating features of this tablet are its front firing speakers and sweet of stylus friendly apps which take advantage of its s-pen stylus the front of the device is optimized for a landscape experience at the top is the 1.9 megapixel front facing camera and ambient light sensor to the right and left of the screen just outside the bezel are two off-center speakers the right and left sides of the note are completely bare the bottom has the samsung proprietary port and the microphone pinhole turning the note over you'll find a slick back cover along with a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash more on that later the top is where all the fun bits are you'll find the power button the volume rocker which is a bit unusual we'll get to that in a minute too and the micro SD card slot headphone jack and I Airport are right over here the hardware itself looks beautiful that beauty doesn't extend to the in hand experience the screen is a fingerprint magnet and quickly gets covered by an oily film that is underscored by stylus trails all across it the back panel seems to be the same material and texture of the galaxy s3 and it's every bit of slippery Samsung has gone to great lengths to make their user interface look nice they've developed their own TouchWiz UI with their nature UX complete with sounds and textures that you'd expect to find in nature the lock screen on the note 10.1 emphasizes the fact that it's a tablet enabled device with a beautiful picture of a fountain pen the home screen comes pre-loaded with widgets and shortcuts that help introduce you to what the tablet can do and heavily features samsung stylus friendly apps one of the more subtle yet elegant interface elements is the shortcut bar that automatically activates on the right side of the screen when you remove the s pen from it's stylist well what's included in the shortcut bar my stylist friendly apps of course Samsung has an uphill battle to try and make an environment to take advantage of their s-pen to do so they've included S note for note taking PS touch which is Photoshop and even a game called crayon physics Smart Remote isn't what you might think it's not just a big grid of buttons and numbers that you push to change the channel on your TV instead of a big grid of buttons it's more of an on-screen menu that shows you what's on now based on your location and your chosen content provider it shows you what's coming up next then very easily lets you turn your home entertainment system on including your stereo and it changes to the right channel so with a quad-core 1.4 Exynos processor you'd expect this thing to fly how did it do speed on the note 10.1 is snappy but everyday activities are not always buttery smooth that's not surprising since it's only running android 4.0 point for ice cream sandwich we expect a jelly bean upgrade will all but eliminate any hesitation you might come across even still unless you're very picky you're not going to complain about the speed of a note inside the note 10.1 is a 7000 milliamp hour battery no I didn't read that wrong 7000 milliamp hours how does it hold up in our review we charged it once as it sits now we're at six days 14 hours 48 minutes and 44 seconds you want to get nitty-gritty now that's mixed use but push notifications for facebook twitter email via gmail and via exchange we're all running all the time we ran games we browsed the web we use the calendar we took notes we listened to a lot of music we even did some light video watching both on Netflix and on Google Play Movies oh and that's what Samsung's special power saving mode turned off so what did we like and what didn't we like about the tablet for starters one of the things that we really liked was the nice big screen it looked good not great but it's going to do what you want with a 10.1 inch tablet the next thing we like was front firing speakers this lets you hear your content without blasting it to everyone around you or being too quiet one of samsung's advancements is multi screen which lets you run multiple apps on the same screen at the same time though only a few apps currently support this feature and as we just mentioned battery life is nothing short of amazing how about some cons well the volume button is upside down the screen gets oily and it shows stylus trails which doesn't look good at all that leads us to construction it's not really well built I mean it feels good in hand but it creaks and it squeaks that's just not something that we'd expect from a high-end tablet let alone the highest end tablet from a particular manufacturer and last the S note app it's got great potential but it doesn't live up to our stylist friendly expectations to do things that you could do on Apple's Newton requires extra steps so if you'd like to pick up your very own samsung galaxy note 10.1 they are available now they come in two major configurations a 16 and a 32 gig the 32 gig is going to cost you just shy of five hundred fifty dollars us and the 16 gig is going to cost you about fifty bucks less we've seen that difference before on other tablets like the Nexus 7 though this one has double the space and an SD card slot just in case it's not enough so in conclusion can we recommend that you get the samsung galaxy note 10.1 absolutely with a couple considerations first of all this is a big tablet if you're used to the Nexus 7 or even the kindle fire this is a lot larger it comes with a larger price tag to why the screens bigger it's got longer battery life and it's also not twice the storage space and external expandability now is that worth paying double for some people might think so for us that's probably a little bit too high of a premium but you've got to consider Google pulled the rug out of everybody with the Nexus 7 and everyone's still kind of recovering from that are you going to regret paying the money for it probably not this is a good tablet there are some things that we'd like to have fixed like some kind of a better screen that doesn't attract oil and leave track marks when you write your stylus over it that's something that you just have to keep on top of by cleaning your screen off how about the s-pen sweet that's the biggest thing it's got going for it unfortunately it's not quite as user friendly but still very powerful I hate to say it but Samsung needs to take a page from the Apple playbook and I know they've gotten in trouble for doing this before but look back at Newton see how easy that was to do a lot of the same things that the S note app is doing I'm not saying copy them I'm just saying learn from what they did and take it to the next level once those things are taking care of the stylus is really going to revolutionize the way that we're using our tablets and Samsung is pushing that for everyone so for that alone we have to be appreciative of Samsung and everything they do back to this tablet can I recommend it absolutely I'm going to be sad to send it back but all good things must come to an end as far as pocket now goes we give this a solid eight out of 10