Ever since Samsung came out with the Galaxy Note, I was already interested. It has a 5.3” screen and a pressure-sensitive stylus.
Because I use my phone mostly for web browsing, the larger screen allows me to see more of a website without zooming in and out. I’m also not one who fears big phones. I got HTC’s HD2 a couple years ago when its 4.3” screen was the largest of its time.
My only concern with the larger screen for the Note is would it fit into my pocket and how easy is it to operate with one hand. I went to a T-Mobile store and played with it for a little bit, and my fears were allayed. As long as I’m not doing fancy Wushu kicks with it, I can move around comfortably. But, of course, everyone will notice that there’s something in your pocket. Although I could handle the phone adequately with one hand, it’s better with two.
The other feature that piqued my interest was the stylus. I’m an artist. I like to draw. I still have fond memories of doodling with my Windows phones. I was slightly disappointed with the stylus because it does lag a little bit.
Overall, I was still pretty impressed with the Note, but I decided to hold off when I found out the U.S. version would only be running from a duo-core processor. I still had my HTC HD2, and it’s single core processor was crashing regularly when I open up more than a few tabs on the Dolphin browser. Or if I open up a heavy page, the browser or phone would crash. The phone was already reaching its processing limits. Whatever phone I would get next needs to last at least a couple years.
So I waited for the Galaxy Note 2 and finally got it a couple months ago. It has a quad-core processor and an even bigger screen: 5.5 inches. Yeah, and you know what? It still fits into the pockets of my pants pretty comfortably.
The 8MP camera takes really good pictures for a phone. Same with the camcorder: it records really high quality videos.
The stylus is much improved. It’s much more responsive. I like the sketching app that comes with it. My biggest complaint is that it’s still not very accurate. It’s like a millimeter off when I sketch - that’s the distance between the tip of the pen and the dot on the screen. But it’s not a deal breaker. You just have to watch where the indicator is and not rely on the tip of the stylus. I did a few sketches above just to test it out.
My other complaint is the version of Swype that comes with the phone is the buggy one, and you can’t install the latest version with gestures and other cool features without rooting the phone.
Web browsing on the phone is great. When you you’re viewing a webpage horizontally, the text on the entire page is legible, but it’s still too small for long term reading.
