The Samsung Galaxy Note is officially headed to AT&T, as revealed at this year's Consumer Electronics Show. And Daryl Deino of The Examiner reports it might show up on Sprint and Verizon as well, possibly as the Samsung Galaxy Journal.
At any rate, the Galaxy Note is somewhere between a smartphone and a tablet, with a design inspired by a traditional paper notebook (or Palm Pilot). Deino describes it as "a high-powered mini-tablet that uses a stylus", and which "can also be used as a phone."
So how does it compare to the world's most popular tablet and smartphone?
The first difference: Size
Tablets like the Nook Color and Amazon's Kindle Fire, with 7-inch screens, are roughly half the size of Apple's iPad. Meanwhile, the iPhone is towards the smaller end of smartphone screen sizes at 3.5 inches across, and Android "superphones" tend to be 4 inches across or larger.
The Galaxy Note, with its 5.3-inch screen, is somewhere in between a superphone and a 7-inch tablet. According to Samsung, it's designed to fill both niches, and to replace every gadget that you'd usually carry with you: Smartphone, tablet, game console, and paper notebook. (That last part is because of the Nintendo DS-esque stylus that comes with it.)
Whether or not it actually can will depend partly on how comfortable you are talking into a mini-tablet like a smartphone and partly on whether you consider it the best or the worst of all worlds.
The second difference: Operating systems
That's the software that powers the tablet or smartphone. In Apple devices' case, that's iOS. Most people consider it to be extremely well-designed, and its App Store to have the best selection of pay-for apps. And the latest version of the iPhone, the iPhone 4S, also has Siri, a "personal assistant" that you can ask in plain English to do things like set alarms or look things up on the Web.
The Galaxy Note is powered by Android, Google's open-source operating system that's found on most other smartphones and tablets. Currently, it uses the Gingerbread version of Android, but it will be upgraded to the Ice Cream Sandwich version -- which introduces a number of major improvements and a significantly more polished design -- in the first quarter of 2012.
The Galaxy Note's screen may be too small to run tablet versions of apps even after the Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade. There are very few tablet apps available for Android to begin with, though, compared to the tens of thousands for Apple's iPad. Smartphone apps should run properly, although some buttons may appear small compared to the screen size.
The third difference: Hardware
Apple doesn't reveal too much about what goes into the iPad and iPhone. The biggest hardware features the Note has that they don't are its vibrant Super AMOLED display, its 4G LTE wireless radio, and its stylus. The iPhone, meanwhile, has a Retina Display, with pixels too small to be seen by the unaided eye.
Stylus accessories are available for the iPhone and iPad as well, but do not incorporate the Galaxy Note's pressure sensitivity. There are few, if any, third-party Android apps that make use of it, however.
Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.
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