Last year’s Galaxy Note 10.1 promised to finally bring all the stylus power of Samsung’s Note smartphones to a big-screen tablet, but its upsides were utterly defeated by the device’s crippling performance issues. Samsung is back with a new and improved 10.1 that aims to win with its screen and new S Pen features.
Samsung has greatly improved upon many of the original's shortcomings; it even added more storage space! Unfortunately, though, Samsung also boosted the base price by $50 as a result. Sporting a 10.1-inch display, measured diagonally, the Note tablet goes on sale in the U.S. on Thursday at a starting price of $550.
Samsung also added a touch of elegance to the back of the device by swapping out the standard glossy plastic back,here, we have a soft, textured "leather-like" material that's meant to resemble a leather book cover.
The Note 10.1 sports a beautiful WQXGA (2,560 x 1,600) TFT LCD panel, which is precisely the resolution bump we wanted to see in last year's unit, and under the hood there is an octa-core Samsung chip clocked at 1.9GHz, and an impressive 3GB of RAM. The Note 10.1 2014 features an 8-megapixel main and a 2-megapixel front cameras. It will arrive in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models.
The first of the multitasking features, called Multi-Window, has been available in Samsung devices for about a year, but it works with many more apps now. You can run two apps side by side, such as Facebook on one side and YouTube video on the other.You can change how much of the screen each one takes, a capability coming with Windows 8.1, but you can't choose to have a window take up just the top left corner, the way you can on PCs. In addition, Multi-Window isn't a universal feature. You currently have about 18 apps to choose from, including Facebook and a variety of Google and Samsung apps.
 |
| Credit : The Verge |
At the center of the S Pen experience, on both the 10.1 and the Note 3, is a new widget called Air Command that gathers together a bunch of tools designed specifically for the stylus. The Air Command widget automatically appears when you remove the pen from its holster, or it can be invoked at any time by holding the pen near the screen and clicking its one button. The semi-circular popup provides quick access to five S Pen tools: Action Memo, Scrap Booker, Screen Writer, S Finder, and Pen Window.
Removing the stylus from its slot will start the Air Command feature, which allows users to quickly access features such as Action Memo, Scrapbook and S Finder.
For a pen-enabled tablet, it's not geared toward pen users, with its high price and sluggish performance, the $549.99 Note 10.1 feels old and clunky; it’s certainly not worth the price when the iPad costs $499 and the Nexus 10 $399.
