Galaxy Note 10.1 (Jelly Bean 4.1) 2012
NoahDesign 5
Samsung’s tablets currently have a trademark design material: plastic. This is far from a good thing. Some manufacturers have managed to pull off a sturdy, good-looking plastic backs, but Samsung seems to be content with a glossy, flimsy design that looks bad and feels worse. While typing on the Note 10.1 I could feel and hear the tablet creak and groan as I gently torqued it while reaching for those middle keys with my thumbs. Now that I have harped on the poor materials of the Note 10.1, I can gladly say that the placement of the speakers and buttons is excellent. The power and volume button are placed on the left of the top side of the tablet, and although I have to shift my hands slightly from their normal position to reach them, I never accidently hit them. The speakers are placed on the front of the tablet, between the bezel and the silver strip of plastic that runs all around the edge of the tablet. They are fairly inconspicuous, and the only way to muffle them is to place the tablet facedown, which I doubt you’ll be doing very often. Display 6 The display on the Note 10.1 pales in comparison with today’s 1080p and higher displays. At a mere 1280x800 ppi, pixels are visible without too much trouble. Despite this, colors look great. Perhaps they don’t stand out as on some displays, but they’re accurate enough to make pictures and movies enjoyable to view. Viewing angles are so-so. Text and pictures are acceptable, but the brightness drops greatly at such angles. There is a wide range of brightness available on the Note 10.1. At the dimmest setting the screen was comfortable to view in the dark; however, as is usual with tablets, the brightest setting could be brighter, as the screen content is hardly visible in direct sunlight. Battery Life 8 This tablet will certainly get you through a day of heavy use, two days if you’re careful. Maybe it doesn’t compete with the likes of iPads, but it’s definitely one of the longest lasting Android tablets I’ve used. Samsung’s Touchwiz UI does much to drain battery life, so I would recommend turning all unnecessary features off, and removing the load of widgets that come on the device. User Interface 7 Android 4.1 is overlaid with Samsung’s own Touchwiz skin, which heavily modifies stock Android. Touchwiz adds some features which I think are great, but as always, it comes at a cost; namely, lots of bloatware and some extra lag. When turning the device on from sleep, there is a notable pause between pressing the power button and the screen actually turning on. On the lock screen there is a large amount of customizable apps that can be launched directly from the screen. This is very useful for accessing your favorite apps quickly. Touchwiz totally relocates the notifications panel; it lies in the bottom right hand of the screen. I can see why they placed it here, as it is rather hard to swipe down from the top of the screen on a 10.1” tablet. Still, it’s more consistent, and in my opinion satisfying, to drag my finger from the top, as opposed to tapping a little area in the bottom right hand corner. They also moved the apps tray icon to be located in the top right corner of the homescreens. I think it’s a fine location, as it’s easy to reach without readjusting your grip, but in all truth it feels like Samsung trying to differentiate their interface from stock Android. A great feature of Touchwiz is the ability to easily add and remove pages, and choose which one is the homescreen. Simply pinch on any one of the homescreeens and you’ll be presented with a view of all the existing pages, as well as the option to add or remove them. The notifications panel is another part where Samsung has improved upon stock Android. You can easily toggle on and off many common functions here. There is also a brightness slider and a shortcut to settings. Web browsing 8 The stock browser on the Note 10.1 is loaded with features. Sharing the page, saving for offline reading, printing and viewing in desktop mode are all very easy to do, as they are located in the same tab, along with a few other functions. Performance itself is wonderful. Pages load rapidly, and I never experienced stuttering while scrolling. Pinch-to-zoom is soundly smooth, although text does take a moment to readjust immediately after zooming in. In general use everything I’m viewing looks great, but if you take the time to look closely, you’ll notice that text doesn't have crisp edges. Social 7 With full access to Google Play, the Note 10.1 can easily be equipped with all the standard social apps. However, many are not optimized for tablet-sized displays, making many segments far too large and pixelated. The front facing video camera is awful for video chat. Colors are represented very dull: black looks like navy blue and blue like gray. The user also looks quite pixelated, and there is persistent lag. I found myself using it only in the greatest need. The standard Email and Gmail apps are great. Simple tasks such as moving and marking are made very easy, and the Gmail app allows you to delete emails by simply swiping them away. Samsung’s touch keyboard gives me rather mixed feelings. There are large spaces between the keys, which I found to increase typos, as the size of each key is rather small. The swype-like feature of the keyboard works only OK, not as accurate as Trace or Swiftkey. Also, there’s no emoji or dedicated smiley-face menu key, making chatting or texting quite a bit more tedious. All in all, I recommend downloading Google’s free keyboard. Gaming 7 The quad core processor and 2GB RAM found on the Note 10.1, combined with the low resolution screen, make for a smooth gaming experience, albeit a less than good-looking one. Real Racing 3 runs seamlessly, while The Dark Knight Rises plays as fluidly as I’ve seen on a tablet. However, it still has its moments of lag. Graphically undemanding games such as Temple Run 2 run effortlessly. Where the real problem arises is in the appearance. Temple Run 2, usually visually consistent across all tablets, looks unusually pixelated and rather blurry. Ropes are flat and jagged edged. TDRK was mixed; textures look great at close range, but load slowly and too close, so that buildings in the distance look like flat grey squares and rectangles. Black colors in the environment look splotchy and grey. Another very weird glitch, which I have not seen on any other tablet, is that random buildings in the distance are bright pink. The cars in Real Racing 3 look alright, with vibrant colors and realistic reflections, but they have jagged edges. The landscape looks horribly flat, but this is partially the way the game was made. Media 7 I was mildly surprised by the camera on the Galaxy Note 10.1. It is able to take color-accurate and fairly clear pictures (at least for a tablet). However, you can forget about snapping a pic while zoomed in; the picture becomes incredibly pixelated and unrecognizable. The camera app is loaded with software. Many effects and modes and be activated for taking the picture, while Photoshop Touch and Paper Artist allow you to edit it afterwards. The speakers on the Note 10.1 are very well placed, as I mentioned in the Design section. On the front of the tablet, they are hard to muffle and project the sound directly at you, a rarity in tablet design. The speakers themselves are very loud for their size, and easily fill average sized rooms. Unfortunately, although they can provide lots of volume, they utterly lack bass and clarity. Heavily orchestrated pieces become mush, rendering it hard to distinguish between instruments. |
DanielDesign 6
Plastic is just gross. I'm sorry for throwing a wrench in the gears of almost every Samsung device ever made, but plastic casing is not cool for a high end smartphone, and horrid for a high end tablet. To my utter despair, when I first lifted the Note out of it's box, I realized that it was all plastic, except for the screen, which I think feels more like plastic than glass. Terrible stuff. It’s thin and light, as you can imagine, but doesn’t feel substantial in your hands. It almost feels a little empty, as if Samsung didn’t use all the space inside. Anyway, moving on from my ravings about plastic, there is some good to be noted about the Note's design. The speakers are on the front, along both edges close to the top; this I like, it's probably the best placement I've seen for speakers, as far as performance. Up top is a micro SD slot for additional storage, and an IR blaster if you're wanting to use the Note as a 10" TV remote. The S Pen has it's own slot at the bottom, and a nice little sound with a vibration plays when you remove it: way cool for any 4-year-old who ever lived. Speaking of noises, please mute the note, in fact, mute any Samsung device you ever own. The bloop bloop sounds are just detestable, period. At least mute the bloopy bloop. The Note has decent haptic feedback, which can be turned off if you hate it. Display 4 The first thing I noticed about the Note’s display was how separated the glass seemed to be from the LCD, which I have affectionately dubbed “The Gap”. When I use most tablets, it seems like there’s nothing between me and the display, this is not true with the Note. I suppose that makes it easier to repair, but it feels really weird. Practically speaking, I didn’t have to push harder on the display for it to register the touch, but it sort of felt and looked like that was necessary. If I push hard on the glass (which you should never do) close to the center, I could barely make the pixels start to discolor, and closer to the bezels, it was pretty much impossible to put pressure on the LCD. This is great if you’re addicted to pushing too hard on tablet screens (since it won’t damage the display as much), but it made glass seem oddly plasticish, and it was just plain weird. Viewing angles are still pretty good, but they definitely suffer from The Gap. Pixelation is as out of style as tie-dye, but it’s a feature that Samsung felt necessary to include on it’s very outdated display (pixelation, not tie-dye). The Note has a resolution that 2013 has judged passable in smartphones ¼ the size. Overall, the screen falls very short of a handful of tablets with 4 times the number of pixels and creators that actually thought about The Gap. Battery Life 7 Samsung packs a 7000 mah battery in the Note, which gets great life on all the tests, but in my experience, I found myself plugging it in a lot more than my iPad. I think the standby time is lacking, but perhaps my settings are a little too taxing on the juice. The battery life looks great on paper, but I thought it was rather unreliable. User Interface 7 The Note runs Samsung’s Touchwiz Android skin, which is one of the best skins, but not as good as Google’s stock Android, in my opinion. From the lockscreen, it has the date and time, as well as 5 apps that I can open straight from the lockscreen. The home screen is much like any android home screen: a highly customizable page of your apps and widgets. The bottom left corner of the screen contains the standard Android buttons: back, home & google now, multitasking, as well as a screen capture button. On the far right is that set of cool symbols like wifi and battery life, and tapping it brings up Samsung’s standard notifications and quick settings menu. In the dead center of the bottom is a button that brings up the real multitasking tray, which shows all the apps that you can do real multitasking with. When I say real multitasking, I mean you can run two or more apps at the same time, side by side. That means watching youtube and emailing at the same time, which is kinda cool. I actually found it kind of annoying that Google Now is accessible in so many places: no matter where you are in the UI, there’s generally more than one way to get to Now or see cards or search. I like that Apple’s Siri only has one way to access her, which can be done from anywhere in the UI. Google Now access seems a little redundant and confusing. Web Browsing 7 The Note comes preinstalled with a fairly pointless web browser called "Internet" (they're bursting with creativity), which I did not find necessary to use, and I quickly installed Google Chrome from the Play store. I noticed few glitches when browsing with Chrome: pictures did quirky stuff, scrolling stuttered from time to time, but over all it was a great browsing experience. If you use Chrome on your computer, you'll feel right at home using it on the Note. Social 7 Like most android devices, the Note has access to all your favorite social apps via the play store, most of which have great integration once they are installed. Samsung includes an email app, which isn't totally worthless, but if you can avoid using it, do so. Widgets are ever helpful, the Note comes preloaded with a few good ones for Facebook, Google+, and contacts in general. Swype is fun to use with the pen if you're tired of the finger deal, but whatever you do, don't push the button on the pen. It basically kills the word you're swyping, which is just annoying. Swype is also irritatingly inaccurate with the stock keyboard, in that sense you're better off with regular typing. There's also Google's voice to text feature, which is as good as ever. If you can get yourself a physical keyboard, or download a favorite third party keyboard (I recommend Google's keyboard), you'll save a lot of headache when typing. One odd thing I encountered while typing was lag, which seemed to randomly start happening, pretty much no matter which keyboard I used. Essentially, there was an irritating delay at random times for a random period of time, then it would work fine again. Video chat was decent, but not impressive. Gaming 6 I found the Note loaded games quickly and ran them quite smoothly. The Dark Knight Rises played with little to no lag, but rendering was noticeably slow and a little glitchy, which I didn’t notice on the iPad 2. One thing I noticed in games was that usually black or dark surfaces, such as shadowy buildings in TDKR or blacktop in Real Racing 3, were very discolored, sort of an oily texture. I believe that's because of the color saturation in the screen, it seems most apps aren't optimized for the colors of the Note. The Play store is one of the best for selection of apps in general, but it's like pulling teeth to find a very high quality game. I thought playing Angry Birds with the S Pen was fun, certainly a differnt twist, but I still like playing normal better. Games held in portrait mode such as Temple Run feel a little awkward because of the wide ratio and the big screen, but still fun to play once you get used to the extra height. I definitely enjoyed myself while gaming on the Note; Real Racing 3 is one of my all time favorite tablet games, and the awesome engine sounds blasting through the dual front facing speakers was pretty epic. Media 6 Media on the Note is kind of a love-hate relationship for me, some stuff is really good, and some stuff is just horrible. Like I mentioned in Gaming, the speakers are sweet: definitely loud enough for most music or video, quite crisp, and it offers pretty decent surround sound. I really don't understand why Samsung didn't put a better display on the Note 10.1. Watching videos in 720p is fine, but the reading and picture viewing experience is a bummer with the low pixel count. The cameras are decent, you have my permission to share photos taken with the Note on Facebook, but I still say 10" tablet cameras should be used for video calling only. Music is fun, but to take full advantage of the speakers, you should be sitting down holding it as though you're using it, which generally gets boring unless you're really enthralled with the music you're listening to. Other than that, you're typically better off plugging in some speakers or headphones, in which case any music enabled device will work just as well. Honestly, everything media does fine on the Note, but I wouldn't want to use the Note for any of it. |
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