Samsung Galaxy Note is an IFA Berlin highlight

Rating: Half smartphone, half tablet & half notepad. It ain’t half good

One of the big hits from the IFA Berlin show has undoubtedly got to be the Samsung Galaxy Note. As the name implies, this is a smartphone pretending to be a hybrid of a handset, a tablet and a notepad. On paper this might even work because it boasts a 5.3 inch WXGA (1280 x 800) HD Super AMOLED screen. So we’re are talking high res is us. The really clever bit is that while the device is actually running a smartphone OS in the shape of Android O 2 .3 (Gingerbread), it also has a touch pen capability courtesy of S Pen (Advanced smart pen) support. What GoMo News noticed in particular about this device is the breadth of the marketing efforts behind it. Not only are there dedicated apps (Android & Samsung), but also pages on the Facebook social networking site and a standard web site dedicated entirely to the product here.The most puzzling report about the Galaxy Note which GoMo News spotted was the suggestion that this device might not be made available in the USA. General availability is given as October [2011].

It’s a strange suggestion because the device 4G LTE supports and the USA is exactly where we’d expect Samsung to try to market this product.

The bit we find bizarre is that products like the Galaxy Note formed part of Samsung’s IFA launches which in turn were part of the Samsung ‘Unpacked’ launch.

The handset vendor even felt the need to produce apps specifically the Android and bada OS.

We downloaded the Android app from here and basically you’re now sitting there waiting for the next Unpacked event to be announced.

We noticed that the Samsung version of the Unpacked app is only for the bada OS and the site is actually in Korean. Which shows where the company expects to attract major attention.

Having a web site all of its own is another usual feature to the launch of the Galaxy note. The main feature of the site is, of course, a video about the Note which can be viewed below.

Full specs for those anoraks amongst us can be found here.

What we think

A hybrid such as this could easily work. It harps back to the by-gone days of the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) when pen input was as much as a requirement as a touchscreen is today. It remains to be seen whether this device can be updated to Honeycomb to run apps built for tablets.