Apple picker The hottest news from Silicon Valley these days is devoted to one of the biggest lawsuits, Apple vs. Samsung, where the Tim Cook-led giant claims that Samsung copied their iPad and iPhone design and used it in its Galaxy series of phones and tablets. This is not about beans, billions of dollars are at stake. Samsung is aware of this and is therefore trying to avoid similar features with the iPad.
As an example, we can take the new Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, a tablet designed as a direct competitor to the iPad, which goes on sale this week. (Yes, another product with "Galaxy" in the name. Here, after saying the sentence "I bought a Samsung Galaxy", one does not know whether you mean a phone, a tablet or a dishwasher). The message he wants to deliver to potential buyers could be summed up as: "OK, the iPad is great for consuming content such as reading books, watching videos and browsing the Internet." But our new Galaxy Note 10.1 is also great for creating content for one simple reason. It has a stylus. Do you see the difference between us and Apple?"
Introducing a tablet with a stylus might seem a bit retrograde these days. The PalmPilot had a stylus. The Apple Newton had a stylus. Also, all those awful Windows tablets had a stylus. When the iPad was first introduced, all of these stylus-controlled devices looked like weird, broken-down toy cars. Nevertheless, the original Galaxy Note, a strange combination of a 5-inch phone and a tablet, sold very well, at least in Europe. And he had a stylus. That's why Samsung believes that it will succeed again.
The basic model, only with Wi-Fi, costs $500 (approximately 10 crowns). It has 000GB of internal memory, the same as the base iPad model, and 16GB of RAM, double that of the iPad. It has a front 2 Mpx and a rear 1,9 Mpx camera with LED flash. It has a slot for a memory card to expand the internal memory, which the iPad does not have. It also has an infrared port to control your TV and stereo speakers that sound much better than the iPad's mono speaker. Still, the Galaxy Note is a tad thinner, at 5 inches (0,35 cm) compared to the 0,899-inch iPad. It is also slightly lighter, at 0,37 grams compared to the 589 gram iPad.
However, it is only when you hold it that you realize one thing immediately: plasticity and unconvincingness. The back plastic cover is so thin that you can feel it touching the circuits on the motherboard when you bend it. The plastic stylus that hides in the lower right corner is even lighter. You have such a feeling of cheap design that it might seem like it fell out of a cereal box.
It also seems that Samsung wants you to use the tablet in a horizontal position. The logo and also the input for the power cable are located in this position, in the middle of the longer edge. The tablet is also an inch wider than the iPad. However, using the new Note vertically is not the problem.
The biggest novelty, however, is the so-called side-by-side apps, or the possibility of running two applications side by side. You can keep the web page and notepad open and copy or drag-and-drop material between these windows at will. Or you can keep the video player open for inspiration while working on a document in a text editor (Samsung uses Polaris Office here). This is a big step closer to the flexibility and complexity of a full PC.
At the moment, Samsung only allows 6 applications to run in side-by-side apps mode, namely email client, web browser, video player, notepad, photo gallery and Polaris Office. These are common applications that you would want to run in this mode, but it would be nice if other applications could be run as well. Samsung promised that the calendar and other, unspecified applications will be added over time.
Samsung also added a special menu to the year-old version of Android Ice Cream Sandwich, from which you can call up widgets such as a calendar, music player, notepad, and the like from the bottom of the screen. In summary, you can open 8 of these widgets and 2 side-by-side applications, totaling up to 10 application windows.
The stylus is sometimes helpful for common activities, but you will find the real benefit only in the special S Note application, which is ready for your handwritten notes or small drawings. This program has several modes. In one, it transforms your drawing into perfectly straight lines and geometric shapes. In the next one, it will convert your written text into typeface. There's even a student mode that recognizes written formulas and examples and solves them.
All these features are impressive, but the question is how often you will use them. The recognition of written text is not very high quality, but you can use it in any application, which is convenient and adds a significant plus to this feature. The minuses include the fact that very often the recognition misses the spaces between the fonts and there is also no possibility to modify the converted text in any way, even if you should use the stylus.
Currently, there are only glimpses of the usability of these new features in the new Galaxy Note. Samsung also added Photoshop Touch, a slightly confusing photo editor. You can also add handwritten notes to emails, calendar notes and documents in Polaris Office. However, these notes cannot be converted to typeface.
In addition, the design of the entire environment of the new Note is like the dashboard of a spaceship. Icons on buttons, without text descriptions and logos that are as helpful as the letters of the old Cyrillic alphabet. For example, would you suggest that you turn on the recognition of the written font on the printed one with an icon that shows a circle with a mountain in the background? Some icons even display different menus each time you use them.
The Galaxy Note also relies on new technologies from Samsung, such as the ability to send photos from cameras and cameras, as well as display the contents of the display on a television using a special HDMI accessory that will come to the market this fall. It also has the Smart Stay function, which monitors your eyes using the front camera and when you are not looking at the tablet's display, it puts it to sleep to save battery.
After all that, though, the new Note feels like it's just a laundry list of users. A tablet packed with features, but with zero sense of context.
It is obvious that they have no Steve Jobs at Samsung who has the power to veto anything. That's why the Galaxy Note 10.1 combines not-so-complete features with features that have potential winners but are trapped in a sometimes very confusing UI. For example, why did Samsung add a fourth button to capture screenshots of the screen in addition to the classic buttons for controlling Android devices Back, Home and Switch to the application? Do they think that users take screenshots as often as they return to the home screen?
In general, Samsung is riding high during this period. They are trying their best to compete with Apple products, creating an ecosystem of devices and accessories, as well as a network of their stores. He's also not afraid to go for big design experiments, like adding a stylus to the tablet. But it is the new Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 that demonstrates the fact that better hardware and device specifications and a much longer list of features and innovations do not necessarily mean a better product. Sometimes restraint is just as important as abundance and richness of features.
Sorry, but the article seems terribly biased... I would like to ask the author if he has at least held the new tablet in his hand? ;)
That's exactly what I thought after the first few paragraphs, but I see I wasn't the first one to be so impressed.
PS to the author: Galaxy family devices are all Android and I have yet to see an Android dishwasher (of course that doesn't mean it can't exist and in that case it's just my ignorance)
Exactly. Android devices carry the Galaxy designation. So far, it only applies to phones, tablets, and now also cameras. But if someone thinks that a refrigerator or a washing machine deserves Android, we'll see a Galaxy refrigerator ;-) I think the article should have been sarcasm. I'm glad that even on Apple's server, people condemn nonsense like the article above.
I would buy a refrigerator with futuristic functions and Android, and exceptionally not LIEBHER :-)
Even on Android Police, they write that this new piece of plastic is the worst piece of hardware that Samsung has released recently :D
Just look at his review on TheVerge, where he got about 5/10 :D
I do own a new ipad, but I take this review as total biased nonsense, perhaps suitable for Apple employees.
I'm an Apple fan, but this article is so biased and biased that I didn't even want to finish reading it.
I don't understand what is interested in the article? If the author didn't make it up completely (which I doubt), then it's a completely relevant review...
It would only be a review if he had the tablet in his hand and evaluated it based on his own experience... That's just biased nonsense, as one old lady used to say ;) Thanks to texts like this, all other Apple users are called sheep...
Well, as far as I can see, the article is a reproduction of an article from the NY Times. I'm pretty sure they held it there...
You coke! It looks like Slovak Hulan :-D
I am clear about that. I don't read Slovak articles and Slovak nonsense in discussions on Czech servers :-)