Samsung GALAXY Note Pro Reviews

There’s much to like about the Samsung Galaxy Note. The screen is quite simply stunning; colourful, radiant and as finely defined as the word "dictionary". It’s super quick, and Samsung’s Touchwiz UI on top of Gingerbread is a joy to use. Watching movies on the display is a great experience, and it’s, perhaps, better suited in size to economy class flights than a 10-inch tablet. The camera is more than decent, offering both stills and video capture at high definitions. And there’s that stylus, the S Pen, which has true potential if app developers take up Samsung’s challenge. However, there’s still the issue of what the Galaxy Note actually is, and more to the point, who it’s aimed at. We can’t help but feel that it’s not the humble, everyday, consumer. Even the most fervent Android fanatic would find it hard not to feel like a plum holding one to their ear, and, at around £600 SIM-free, we find it hard to believe that the general public would plump for this over an equivalently priced iPad 2 or Galaxy Tab 10.1. But business types, we reckon, will lap it up. You don’t have to hold it to your ear when you’re conference calling. And it most definitely replaces the notepad in meetings (whether you’re seriously taking minutes down or just drawing pictures of male genitalia). For this demographic, it replaces a tablet with gusto. As useful as a larger device, yet more portable. We can certainly see office workers up and down the country loving a bit of Galaxy Note action. For them, this is a godsend. Oh, and did we mention that, because of the 5.3-inch screen, it’s also the best handheld games console around? We didn’t, well…

It should be clear that the Samsung Galaxy Note is a niche product. It's not a phone designed to take over the mass market. Why is that? The big dimensions of the Note make it much more uncomfortable to handle and use than any other smartphone. Some people with extraordinarily large hands may have a chance of finding it okay, but those cases will be extremely rare. Just to give you an example, the device's size means that it's absolutely impossible to use it with one hand only. As a matter of fact, it also makes some normal everyday stuff like typing out messages and emails too much of a hassle.

The Samsung Galaxy Note is a very likable device with portability, a great screen and responsiveness on its side. The issue, of course – other than with its possibly high price tag – is whether there really is a market for something that straddles the smartphone and tablet divide.