Big Screen Slot

Samsung Galaxy Note's big-screen experience

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Samsung’s research also found that customers like to carry notepads and pens with them, so it has added a built-in stylus and software to eliminate that baggage as well.

I found the slide-out pen a little hard to extract from its dock, easy to mislay and fiddly to hold. But once I mastered the technique of pressing a button on the barrel and tapping twice on the screen to bring up a memo pad, writing on the touchscreen was as smooth as silk, with the help of the pen’s pressure sensitivity.

Some features I failed to master or appreciate – there are some gimmicky new gestures introduced by Samsung, such as tilting the screen to zoom in or out, which I found hard to make work. Placing your hand to cover the screen pauses music or a video being watched, but I could not see the sense of obscuring a picture I was looking at, when it was easier to just hit the pause button.

The screen itself is a vast, wide canvas by smartphone standards and the first to feature Samsung’s vibrant HD Super Amoled technology – which means that videos looked great, photos taken with its excellent 8Mp camera displayed well and I was able to see more of web pages and to frame magazines and newspapers to great effect.

Source: Financial Times (blog)