Gadgetory

well hey guys it's me Arthur verge I'm here with the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 samsung stylus stable version of the Galaxy Tab as you can see it's a pretty handsome looking tablet it has samsung's new design with speakers in the front and kind of this chrome Ridge on the back it's pretty plastic it's a little bit lighter than you might expect there's a camera with a flash and IR port a microSD slot and headphone jack the screen is pretty nice it's a 10.1 inch LCD display it has pretty good viewing angles all the way around it's not nearly as good as the iPad display it's only 1280 by 800 but I think the most important part is obviously the stylist or Samsung calls it the S Pen or as I call it the spend it's actually based on Wacom technology and it has a thousand 24 points of sensitivity so as I draw kind of lightly on the screen you can see it's barely showing up but if I push harder it gets a lot darker and if I move the pen around different ways it changes what the ink looks like on screen when you pull the stylus out of the integrated slot it actually opens up quick action menu to show you some of the apps that Samsung loads on it what's weird is that you can't change this so I guess cram physics is gonna be there forever but this is actually just one piece of Android that Samsung has changed for dramatically with TouchWiz it's Android 4.0 480 so insights from sandwich but TouchWiz on top of here is really intense and it feels like it's slowing the entire system down you can see it's a little bit jerky some of these giant widgets don't do much of anything every single menu option you pick on the Galaxy Note is accompanied by a blooping sound and that level of intrusiveness by TouchWiz seems to permeate everything on the tablet there's also a lot of built-in apps the main big app that I've added in is S note s - there's pretty decent handwriting recognition so you can just write on it and he'll figure out what you're trying to say usually but you have to write directly across if you're like me and you're right at an angle it won't know what you're trying to say at all Heller is exactly what I wanted to say there obviously and if you write at any other weird angles or you don't have perfect handwriting or if you write in block print it'll think you're always writing capital letters I'm like an iPad stylus which basically just fakes being your finger the S Pen is really good at acting like a real pen the problem is that it's sometimes a little bit slow and there's not a lot of places to use it around the system only S Pen enabled understand that it's different than a finger and they'll get confused if you try to use both your pen and a finger in an app that doesn't support the s-pen Samsung's also replaced androids built-in calendar app with it its own app called s planner which doesn't seem to have any purpose for existing other than to look like a copy of the iOS calendar application with this terrible foe weather at the top it's functional it works fine it's just not clear why samsung felt the need to replace the stock calendar application another way the Samsung is building the note as a Productivity device is the ability to run two apps at once which I was initially very excited about sadly that's not meant to be only Samsung's special apps can run in multi screen mode so I can open s note hit multi screen and then open the browser and now that I've got two windows open here I'm switching back and forth between them is actually really laggy so I can right over here but it's not showing up and now that I've got s note active switching back to the browser is completely unresponsive so I can scroll the browser I'm trying to switch back to s note it's not doing anything this is even worse if you open another app like email these applications are not running simultaneously they're running kind of one at a time and they're very noticeably switching back and forth which one is active the bigger problem of course is that that's not Chrome and that's not Gmail there in fact weird Samsung versions of each application that I don't want to use in many ways this is a dream that has been turned into a terrible unresponsive nightmare it's particularly perplexing because the Galaxy Note actually benchmarks faster than any Android device I've ever used but it's really sluggish it should be able to handle this kind of workload without breaking a sweat but Samsung does let you use all that power in interesting ways you can text and watch a video at the same time you do actually use the pop-up player feature on the note things slowed down even more you'll notice that none of this is particularly responsive as I move it around but the video does keep playing because it's being offloaded to the GPU one thing that's really strange is that although the Galaxy Note phone lets you do handwriting recognition in the keyboard the Galaxy Note 10.1 doesn't seem to have any handwriting recognition the keyboard at all in fact there's just this button that shows you the last things you've put in the clipboard and not anything useful at all ultimately the biggest problem with the Galaxy Note is it's really two products in one it's a pretty mediocre regular Android tablet that's plagued by performance issues not nearly as fast as something with jellybean like the Nexus 7 and it's a space tablet that doesn't really have any compelling stylus apps yet the app support just isn't there and the apps that do support the stylists kind of don't take full advantage of it the way that you want it to for $4.99 you're probably better off buying an iPad or if you definitely want to Android tablet you should buy the Nexus 7 which is excellent but I'm willing to say the Galaxy Note 10.1 is kind of a first generation product and I'm really hoping future stylus based devices are much much better