Gadgetory

hey guys it's Michael Fisher with pocketnow.com we wrapped up the AT&T hands-on event last night in New York City I decided to come out into the country for the weekend but before we get to relaxing which will not be on camera want to do a little bit more play with the the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 specifically want to talk a little bit about the stylus and all the cool things we can do with it I'm going to put together a real quick video to show you all the functionality of the s-pen as Samsung is calling it so tune in it's Michael pocket now it's the Galaxy Note 2 stylus lesson S Pen lesson so obviously one of the differentiating features of the Galaxy Note 2 is that S Pen which actually lives in a dock right down here to the right of the home button if you're looking at the device from the front what's nice is as we saw in the Galaxy Note 10.1 you pull out the S Pen and when you flip the device back over it has executed an action that you've programmed it to take out of the box this is actually not the default behavior this is something I've said I've set it to automatically open s note but you can hop into the S Pen section of the settings and actually have the Galaxy Note 2 do any number of things when the S Pen is removed so that's handy right there one of the nice things about using the S Pen on this display is that the display will register the S Pen even when it is not touching the glass as you can see I'm still hovering over the glass of the display screen here but there's I'm not actually touching it and there's a little indicator on the screen to show me where the screen thinks the S Pen is currently living that's very handy for websites like pocketnow.com that feature drop-down lists where you can hover over them without actually selecting them and you can scroll down the list that way when you find the item you want you just tap it to select that's also handy and applications like s planner where you can hover over certain events and get a popover without actually jumping into the app any further and also in applications like messaging where you can hover over a message to read its contents once again without actually jumping into the message itself you might also remember this functionality from our time with the Galaxy Note 2 at Aoife in the gallery here where you can hover over different albums and have them display all their photos before you actually jump into the one that you want and then of course there's on device video samsung has thoughtfully provided a very beautiful video for us to test this feature on you can hover in the timeline without actually jumping ahead in the video find the area you want then finally select it but you'll notice here that the s-pen if we can get focus actually does feature a button on the side of it there's no battery inside the s-pen this is a button that works on magic apparently whatever the science is if you hold down the button while tapping on the screen and holding the device takes a screenshot instantly pops up that screenshot then allows you to do things like crop it edit it and so on of course capturing screenshots aren't all that it's good for press and hold the button once again and just do a vertical swipe up on the display samsung has provided a nice quick command feature you can then draw a symbol much like a shortcut key on a device with a physical keyboard and then in this case I did the crosshatch should open up the dialer and you can actually well if you're faster than I was just then you can write out the number and the dialer will complete the call for you that is pretty cool it's not faster in any sense than actually open up the dialer with your fingers but it is somewhat cooler and just to be complete here we'll do a little @ symbol a very sloppy one and write a recipients name to send them an email well isn't that fun what if I wanted to email Brandon minimun sloppiest handwriting ever probably not going to work for us jumping to the email composer Brandon minimun okay well it didn't complete the address field but it definitely did understand what I wrote baby steps baby steps one of my favorite shortcuts though with the Galaxy Note 2 and it's S Pen functionality is achieved by holding down the button and double tapping anywhere it'll pop open an S note as you can see here and you can instantly take a note if you want to jot something down don't forget X whatever you can see my handwriting has not improved over time but this is very handy because you can be anywhere in the device you can be in the browser once again if we want to hop in there go on into the right pocket now reading how the razorium review oh this is awesome I have to remember to do this press the button tap tap boom there it is right there very handy here's my note saved that is something I learned last night at the ATT unwrapped event very helpful Samsung Repp helped me discover that one and it was really really really handy has already come in handy a couple times today obviously you can move it around and if you want to cancel you just go ahead and cancel I've used Samsung S Memo application and results have been mixed you can hop on into a note here and I was having some trouble deciding exactly how hard I needed to press with the stylus to get it to register one of the things that you have to become aware of is that the S Pen doesn't really engage unless you feel there's a little click and you can see that rubber tip kind of going into the S Pen a little bit if that doesn't really happen there is no response from the display so that's something to keep in mind if you're thinking you want to do a lot of featherweight coloring in here you really it is a very light press I'm not suggesting up to really press very hard on it but initially I thought that I would have a little bit more sensitivity than we're actually getting from the device that said once I was done with all the handwriting experiments I was able to whip out a fun little drawing of this planet here which despite the glare I think you will agree is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen nice software touches here make this look like it's a water color marker that has soaked into the paper at points and that has not at others nice little detail there helps make the experience just a little bit more fun as I touched on before there are and in there is a whole array of spen settings that you can use to calibrate and change the behavior of the s-pen as you see fit you can set your dominant hand between right and left hand you can set the sound that the device plays when the S Pen is removed on or off you can set it to automatically open the pop up note as we saw at the beginning of the video that's how mine is set the pen detection can be disabled this kind of the the hovering effect that we demoed before can be disabled if you want to save battery life it'll crank down the sensitivity of the displays I believe how it's doing that the S Pen keeper is actually pretty cool that will alert you if you've removed the S Pen from the device and then you try and walk away with the device without the S Pen in its dock it will use the accelerometer detect it's moving without the s-pen and you'll say hey go back and get your s-pen because they're tough to replace air view of course you can modify the the hovering behavior sound and haptic feedback you can turn on and off quick command settings we sell those before and s-pen help which is a series of fun tutorials Samsung obviously really really good still including a lot of tutorials as they did on the Galaxy s3 to help you learn stuff that you do not already know and just to briefly jump back into S note here not S Memo as I called it before sorry there are just a whole bunch of predefined formats here this one is called financial information and if they're essentially just templates like you might find in a word processing program that allow you to or that aim to allow you to make the most out of these applique out of your S Pen and the applications that come with them interestingly as you might see I just tried to use the S Pen to activate the capacitive button flanking the home screen here it does not this is not a new development it's not news just keep it in mind you will have to somewhat clumsily alternate between on-screen inputs and coming up here with your finger if you want to activate the back or menu buttons finally we'll just give you a real world example of usability on on the s-pen here you have a look at Jaime Rivera email here asking if the Lumia 920 is in fact 30 grams heavier than the Dell Venue Pro well we can find that out and we don't have to do a whole lot of typing to do it through the magic of editing I've just hopped on over to Google here and typed in Lumia 920 wait we'll wait for the browser to load that up and we got our answer how much is Lumia smartphone way Lumia 920 can we get any of them in these yes wait 185 assume there's a primary source we're not going to do too much fact-checking on hi mates behalf circle it while pressing the button boom there we go there's our screenshot we hit email copied to clipboard boom it is inserted in the email for us and all we have to do is enter Hymas name send them the screenshot and it is done no typing necessary this is also probably a pretty good opportunity to demonstrate the handwriting recognition more on this once again in our full review see if we can get our focus back doing the best I can boom it has auto-completed up here we hit it there it is send he's going to get that with no context at all and you know that'll be alright and of course though this is not going to be news to many folks at the end of the day you're done using the s-pen you pop it right back in the doc phone gives you a little haptic buzz to let you know that it knows that the s-pen has been replaced and you are free to use your fingers about the interface that's going to do it for the Galaxy Note 2 S Pen lesson I hope you learned some things that you didn't know before and hopefully you can teach me something I didn't know before leave me a comment in the post at pocketnow.com not here on youtube we generally don't check those very often follow us on twitter at pocket now twice philomene on twitter at captain two phones stay tuned for a lot more a Galaxy Note 2 coverage as we continue getting our hands all over this device learning everything there is to learn about it and of course our full review coming a little bit later on next week thanks everyone for watching throw us a thumbs up if you liked the video and we'll see you next time