Following the success of the original Galaxy Note, Samsung expands its Galaxy Note line with a 10.1-inch model, which is now available in the US market. The Galaxy Note 10.1 is a quad-core device intended to deliver functionality and precision of a pen and paper by combining the S Pen with a 10.1-inch large display. It is powered by a 1.4GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM for smooth performance, and comes with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system with Samsung’s TouchWiz UI.
The new Galaxy Note features a large 10.1-inch 1280×800 touchscreen display with digitizer and comes with a new S Pen with 1024x levels of sensitivity. Other than S Note for note taking and sketching and S Planner, the tablet includes several other S-Pen optimized features. The Multiscreen features allows users to use two applications side-by-side at the same time on the big screen, and users can use other applications while writing or sketching ideas with S Pen on the other half of the screen. The pre-loaded Adobe Photoshop Touch is optimized for S Pen, allowing users to control brush size and opacity by just adjusting the pressure of the pen on the screen. The Kno and Polaris Office, also pre-loaded, also supports S-Pen for highlighting and annotation.
The 10.1-inch Note also includes some features first introduced on Galaxy S III, including Pop up Play that allows users to play video in a floating window that can move around the screen; and Smart Stay that will prevent the device from going into standby mode while it detects a user in front of the device. There are also AllShare Play DLNA for sharing media content with compatible Samsung products, Samsung Smart Remote that utilize the tablet’s built-in IR emitter to turn it into a universal remote control.
Other hardware features include a 5 Megapixel auto focus camera with LED flash, a 1.9 Megapixel front-facing camera, 16GB or 32GB internal storage, microSD/SDHC card slot for up to 32GB cards, MHL video output, Accelerometer and Gyroscope. Alongside Bluetooth 4.0 with Apt-X codec support, WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n with WiFi Direct, the Note also supports quad-band HSPA+ 21-Mbps mobile networks.
The Galaxy Note 10.1 is also Enterprise-ready with support for Exchange ActiveSync, On-device encryption, Cisco VPN and Juniper Junos Pulse VPN. The price is $499 for 16GB and $549 for 32GB. It comes in white or dark gray.
