Gadgetory

I'm David with the verge and this is the Galaxy Note pro Samsung is great at copying other companies and mimicking their cool features but it had one really good idea that no one's been able to copy it making everything huge this is a twelve point two inch tablet one of the biggest I've ever used and for all intents and purposes it's just like every other Samsung Galaxy Note tablet except you know bigger the note pro is 11.6 inches wide and eight inches tall it honestly feels a little like I'm holding a television it's surprisingly thin actually at less than eight millimeters but at one point six pounds it's just about the heaviest tablet you'll find it's made of Samsung's traditional cheap plastic either white or blue but it feels a lot better than some older tablets it has this fake stitched leather coating on the back that doesn't look or sound like a good idea but it makes the note Pro a lot more comfortable and pleasant to hold it's thin enough that you can kind of dig it into your palm and hold it in one hand but that gets tiring really fast this thing is meant to be held in two hands and probably not even held at all but used on a desk it's also meant to be used in landscape mode the twelve point two inch 2560 by 1600 display is really beautiful though it's the same resolution and a little larger than the note 10.1 screen which looks a little better as a result for watching a movie having so much screen real estate is really great so it can actually be too much for a game I got dizzy playing asphalt airborne which was just stuttery enough and so close to my face that I got a headache the screen is obviously ridiculously tall in portrait mode there is one time it's useful though if you hold the tablet in portrait play a video in the bottom half and do something else in the top it's almost like you're using two tiny tablets side by side it's great the Galaxy Note pro runs a heavily customized version of Android 4.4 kitkat with Samsung's TouchWiz software layered all over it the most useful addition is the multitasking the note Pro actually lets you run up to four apps at once dragging them all into place one by one is kind of a pain but once things are set they're really easy to move around and adjust it's not exactly smooth all the time but it's honest-to-goodness multitasking which a tablet like this which is clearly designed for getting things done really needs the other useful addition to the standard Android tablet experience is the s-pen which has always been the hallmark feature of Note devices here it's the same tiny pen as ever and it works impressively well it's responsive enough that both writing and drawing are smooth and accurate the problem with the s-pen and actually with the multitasking too is that there's just not enough to do to the multitasking only works with a handful of apps so you can't pin Evernote next to a browser and take notes that way they're only clunky workarounds and with the pen the only real benefit over your finger is if you're using a few Samsung blessed apps like s note or action memo when you first pull the pen out of its slot in the top corner of the tablet it pops up the action command menu which offers a few things you can do you can draw a rectangle on the screen and open an app in that space you can take a screenshot and draw on it or quickly pop up a notepad it's handy and I found myself using the pen basically constantly when I was using the note Pro but it's still way too limited in almost any other app I'm stuck just tapping and swiping there's also basically nothing here taking advantage of such a gigantic display Samsung's Flipboard powered live tile Style magazine UX homescreen is neat but it's huge and just shows news or your calendar it's like Windows 8 but without a lot of the options or customizations Samsung did make some changes to the OS itself to better suit such a big screen there are bigger settings menus a huge notification pulldown and a horizontal multitasking window across the bottom of the screen and of course that's all in addition to the standard blooping and rippling of nature UX Samsung's real focus here is on the business friendly features that seem appropriate for a device with Pro in its name there's a utility built-in for sharing your laptop screen on your tablet one for sharing your tablet screen on your laptop and a couple of apps for running meetings the note pro is designed for work and it does feel more productive than most tablets its keyboard is huge and easy to type on the pen is handy in spots and the multitasking helps to but this is not a replacement for a laptop or even really a competitor for something like the surface pro which is a full-fledged PC and a tablet body it's just a tablet basically it's the same things that Note 10.1 only bigger it's fast and responsive thanks to an X eNOS processor and three gigs of ram the ram also helps a lot with multitasking but there's nothing that really differentiates it from any other Samsung product other than its sheer size and starting at seven hundred and forty nine dollars you're paying a lot for a little more screen real estate it's not going to replace a laptop or even really let you leave it at home the no pro is great for meetings and it's great for watching movies and for everything else it's just exactly the same as any other tablet only bigger and heavier and more expensive there's a million miler businessman out there who might get a lot from the Galaxy Note pro but most people won't get nearly enough you