review the samsung galaxy note 10.1

hello i'm walid (the reviewer) and today i will you talk about the samsung galaxy note 10.1 :

Samsung’s Galaxy Note line has always been some of the Korean company’s highest-end hardware. But with the new 2014 model update, the Galaxy Note 10.1 has been outfitted with a slew of top-of-the-line specs: the highest resolution screen on any tablet (even beating the iPad), a whopping eight processor cores, expandable memory, and a host of other features. Not to mention Samsung’s specialty “S-Pen” and all the apps and options that go with it.

On top of all that, Samsung also throws in a huge load of bonuses with the purchase of a Note 10.1 before the end of 2013: $50 in credit for Samsung’s “Hub” content store. $25 credit for anything on Google Play. A 50GB Dropbox account, free for a full two years (valued at $100). Three free audiobooks from Audible, 12 months of free Boingo hotspot access, three months free of Hulu Plus, and the list goes on. Most people probably won’t use half of these, but it’s clear that Samsung wants its customers to feel the full usefulness of their new tablet. Make no mistake about it: the Note 10.1 2014 is aimed directly at fighting the iPad for the title of best high-end tablet. And with all it has going for it, it might actually win.

Build and Design
The second-generation Note comes in two colors, white and black; we received the white version. The front is classic Samsung: a white (or black, on that version) bezel surrounding the screen, with a physical central home button and two capacitive buttons for Menu and Back.

If (like me) you weren’t a fan of Samsung’s recent tendency toward glossy plastic backings, you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised by the newest Note. The back is still made of plastic, but it’s textured to resemble leather, complete with “stitching” around the edges. I suppose some people might find this tacky looking, but I felt it looks pretty good, and more importantly feels good in the hand. It not only gives traction, it also won’t take fingerprints, so you don’t have to worry about smudges. The edges are all done in a plastic faux-aluminum look — which admittedly, I could have done without — but it’s not that overly showy.

Overall, the Note’s design is solid. The quality feels great, it looks good, and the design decisions are largely done right, with the exception of the buttons (more on that later). It avoids the cheap-looking glossy plastic backs of other Samsung models, and it covers all the areas you want to be covered. It’s a very well built piece of hardware.

Screen
The Note 10.1 2014’s screen is simply awe-inspiring. It boasts a whopping screen resolution of 2560 x 1600, which is incredibly high; far above even the highest HD standard (defined as a mere 1920 x 1080), and sitting right at that ~300 DPI number where the human eye can’t really appreciate any higher resolution. To that end, it actually significantly outpaces the Apple iPad and iPad Air’s “Retina” displays in both raw resolution and pixel density (299 PPI vs 264).

And it doesn’t just impress based on the specs. Looking at it, you can see the clarity easily. Comparing it to my personal tablet — a Galaxy Tab 10.1 LTE — looking at the same photo on the Note 10.1 2014 makes my GT10 look muddy, weak, and pathetically low resolution. Compared even to another high-res screen, it’s as clear and crisp as you could possibly get. Looked at side to side, it bests any other tablet I could compare it to — even a Retina iPad — for color quality and contrast. Simply put, it’s the best display I’ve ever seen on any tablet. I’m sure you could do better with an OLED display, but until those are practical in a 10-inch size, the Note 2014 is as high quality a display as you could ask for in a tablet.

Other Buttons and Controls
The power button on the Note 10.1 2014 has moved to the left part of the top edge (if you’re holding it landscape) alongside the volume controls. Microphone jack, top of the left edge. The top of the right edge holds the famous “S-Pen,” the active digitizer pen that makes the Note series devices unique. More on that later.

Be warned, you might get your edges a little confused at times, because both the “bottom” and “top” edges have small, semi-circular dark spots in the exact center. The difference is, the bottom spot is a microUSB connector for data and charging, while the top one is an infrared port to let you use the tablet as a remote control for your TV. (More on that later as well.) So far I haven’t tried plugging the charger into the infrared port, but I can see how someone would do that, especially if they weren’t paying attention.

But that’s a pretty minor item. As far as design goes, my main complaint about the second-gen Note 10.1 is the buttons. Samsung opted for capacitive Back and Menu buttons, and a physical Home button, similar to the other Galaxy Note devices. Personally, I would have much rather seen them use on-screen buttons that rotate along with the orientation of the device. Given how much you’re likely to be moving the tablet between landscape and portrait, fixed buttons just provide way too many opportunities to be accidentally pushed or touched, especially in portrait mode. You can brush up against them with surprising ease. Virtual buttons would rotate along with the user, and wouldn’t be an annoyance if you were holding the Note by the side. As it is, there’s an inevitable ergonomic issue in portrait; either you’re holding it by the side with the buttons, or you’re brushing them with your free hand as you go to touch the screen. I suppose this might be a minor gripe, but on a device as otherwise sleek and cutting edge as the Note 10.1 2014, I wish the designers had thought it through a little more.

While the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Note (2014 Edition) is usually described as having an octa-core processor (In fact, it’s even named the “Exynos Octa 5420”), this isn’t quite accurate. It does have eight cores, but they aren’t all used at once. Instead, they’re organized into two quad-core systems. The first is a set of four 1.9 GHz A15-class cores — cutting edge designs which produce a LOT of horsepower. Case in point, over three runs of Quadrant benchmarks, the Note averaged a somewhat startling score of over 18,000. In comparison, Samsung’s own flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4, only hits 12,000, and it wasn’t that long ago that even high-end smartphones were coming in just under 5,000. As you might imagine, that kind of speed eats some serious battery power, though.

That’s where the other processors come into play: a set of four 1.3 GHz A7 cores. These kick into gear when you’re not taxing the processing abilities that much — things like casual web browsing, lightweight games, etcetera. They still provide quite a bit of power to run the device, but they’re much more energy efficient than the A15 cores, and let you browse or YouTube to your heart’s content without having to bother the more power-intensive cores to do it. Overall, the system works remarkably well, as mentioned below in the “Battery Life” segment.

The Note comes with either 16GB or 32GB of internal storage (of which 25 GB was accessible on our 32 GB review unit). Granted, some other competitors offer 64GB or even 128GB options, but never at this price point. And on top of that, the Note has a microSD slot, allowing you to expand its memory. Using a 64GB microSD card (the largest currently available), the Note could be easily set up with 70-85 GB of available storage, for much cheaper than any comparable device.

Multi-Window
The software side offers a lot of interesting little tidbits. As many apps as there are in the Note’s software package though, my opinion still is that the “killer app” really isn’t the famous S-Pen, as useful as it can be. Instead, it’s Samsung’s “Multi-Window” option. I first ran into this when I reviewed the Galaxy Note 8.0, which allowed you to run two apps side by side on-screen. There, it was already a cool and useful add-on, allowing you to do things like look up an address on Google Maps while keeping the email open, surf the web while you were replying to messages, or a host of other useful things. It was a nice, useful little app that the multitasking user could appreciate.

On the Note 10.1 however, with more screen space, it’s come into its own, and become an absolute essential. A 10-inch tablet has almost exactly twice the screen area of a 7-inch tablet — with two windows running, it’s essentially like having two smaller tablets in your hand at once, sharing the same data. Granted, only certain apps can run side-by-side out of the box, but this includes many of the standard Google apps like Maps, Chrome, Email and Gmail, music and video players, Youtube, and a lot more. Most users won’t have any trouble going without the other apps that can’t be split-screened. You can even cut and paste both text and images from one window to the other, and run different instances of the same app at the same time. Watching something while a friend messages you? Looking up an address while doing something else? Browsing the internet while YouTubing? Multi-window allows you to do any and all of those things, without interruption. Even with the limitations on what apps can use it, you’ll find most of your common uses are probably covered, and then some.

Of course, that isn’t to say that the Note 10.1 2014’s many other apps aren’t useful, sometimes extremely so. Even putting aside things like the Dropbox app’s 50GB free promotion, there are a ton of nifty options mostly geared towards the use of the S-Pen.

S-Pen
Although it might seem like a “gimmick” feature to those who don’t need it, the S-Pen is extremely handy if it falls into your area of use. For starters, it offers 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity; way more than any built-in app takes advantage of, but enough that the avid artist could certainly consider the Note with a good drawing app as a poor man’s replacement for a Wacom tablet.

A custom version of Sketchbook Mobile is included, with extra S-Pen functions, although I think an upgraded app could probably take it a lot farther. There’s also some relatively straightforward note apps and limited handwriting recognition. Evernote is thrown in for note-taking, as well as Samsung’s own “Scrapbook” app designed to take advantage of the S-Pen’s cut and paste options.

Communication
The Note 10.1 2014 features a pretty standard gamut of wireless features for high-end devices, with dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. Curiously though, it doesn’t seem to have NFC, possibly because Samsung decided it wouldn’t be very useful in a tablet. Otherwise, performance of all the wireless options was just as expected.

There has been no word yet of a 4G LTE version. However, its predecessor was available with 4G LTE.

Productivity
Basically the only real dedicated productivity app on the Note, besides Google’s email/sync/calendar options, is Polaris Office for working with documents. It works well enough for that purpose, even though it’s not as popular as the bigger names in the mobile office market.

Entertainment
Besides the standard music and video players, plus Hub (Samsung’s equivalent to Google Play, a music and video content store), the Note 10.1 2014’s entertainment apps are fairly low key. The most notable is the software for the device’s IR port, which lets the Note mimic a remote control for most home theater components. It had no problem talking to my Olevia TV and Dish Network satellite box, and control was quick and easy. You can even have a panel in your notification shade, to quickly access the channel up/down, volume up/down, and power buttons from any other app. My only real complaint in that department is software; the included app doesn’t want to just give you a straight up remote control interface, instead giving you a simplified one along with a program guide. I prefer the Peel Remote that shipped on other Note models, but fortunately you can install that onto this model.

Also included is screen mirroring via Samsung AllShare, which allows you to wirelessly mirror your device’s screen to a compatible TV — in essence, HDMI without the wires. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a compatible Samsung TV available to try this out on.

On more conventional methods of screen output though, the Note 10.1 2014 does have HDMI capability… somehow, at least. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find it. It’s theoretically supposed to be available via an MHL connection, but even hooking it up to my TV via a Samsung brand MHL adapter doesn’t seem to do the trick; neither the TV nor the tablet seem to recognize anything is connected. It’s possible that I did something wrong in this equation, but I can’t figure out what it might be.

Camera
Equipped with an 8MP rear camera and a 2 MP front camera, the Note delivers decent image quality, but nothing special. It’s comparable to most 8 MP smartphone cameras, which is really all you can probably expect on a tablet, where camera quality is going to be a secondary priority at best.

Battery Life
With all the features it has thrown at it, and that massive set of processors, you’d expect that the Note 10.1 2014’s biggest weakness would be its battery life. Surprisingly, that would be wrong. While it’s not going to set records, in average use this tablet’s battery holds up quite as well as any of the other 10-inch models are likely to.

Depending on brightness settings, you can reasonably expect somewhere in the range of 8 to 10 hours of life from it, doing things like browsing, reading, and playing light games. It should be kept in mind, though, that if you decide to push it to the maximum with a lot of high-end 3D games or the equivalent, you’re going to get a lot less out of it than that; in extreme circumstances, you might see as relatively little as 4 hours. Still, that’s an awfully long time to be running extremely demanding apps or games.

Speaking of power… although it does come with its own 2 amp charger, the Note 10.1 2014 is very forgiving about charging off other, lesser power sources. It’ll charge (albeit very slowly) off a supply of just 500 mA, and a 1 amp phone charger does quite a good job charging it overnight. So while you might want the main charger with you if you’re draining the battery every day, on the whole you can comfortably rely on whatever other standard chargers you happen to have around you.

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