Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Edition) first look and use

Do you write a lot of stuff ? Or better still, do you feel that there are better ways to interact with your tablet besides the standard on screen keyboard? I had just purchased a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 edition) recently and here I am writing a "first look and use" review for the curious ones.

Why a large Galaxy Note ?
If you're a Galaxy Note (Note 1, 2 or 3) user and had been using the stylus as it was meant to be, you ought to realize that the stylus remains one of the most important feature of the device itself. I had heard of people using it to sign documents, crop and edit pictures, annotate documents, draw pictures, play games and so forth but then again, isn't the standard 5 inch Galaxy Note which is pocket-able is large enough?

Let's check with the basic paper and pencil; most of us were brought up with these tools and I can bet that most of us would always be more happy if we are greeted with a large enough paper to continuous writing without having to go back to the next line (Just compare a small notebook against a larger one). More still if you're doing a sketch or drawing, the size of the canvas is more important as you can draw in more creativity on it.

Fast forward and look what what we have today - the stylus. The real estate of the canvas which you can interact with would now be one of the important aspects for your text scribbling as well as multimedia editing. Can you imagine the hardships of writing on a device when you need to wait for the handwriting recognition to kick in and recognize your handwriting after 2 or 3 words due to lack of canvas to write? Here are some other means of using the stylus which I had found difficulty in the Galaxy Note 2:

• Trying to read a scanned document and sign the big lovely handwriting
• Having to zoom and read the fine prints at Arial size 6 when the whole bloody document is all size 12 with 10,000 words in total 
• Trying to explain a diagram to your peers or customer while trying to annotate on the same canvas together

I had blogged about this before in my past writings over at this link
http://androidss.blogspot.com/2013_05_01_archive.html

Weight, dimensions and "feel"

While the size of the canvas which you can interact with remains important but there are also other aspects to consider - the bezel. So what the heck is a bezel ?

The bezel of the tablet is the additional space between the side of the device from the screen. The larger the bezel, the larger the overall size of the device. Samsung had made it so that the previous Galaxy Note 10.1 bezel had been shrunk a bit yet still offering the same 10.1 inch canvas size for interaction. In other words, you're still holding a 10.1 inch device but with an overall smaller dimension in size. This upgrade is very welcome because many of us would be using a case and with it would had added a few more inches to the device itself rendering it to be bulky and hard to handle.

Leathery Feel

Grip Lines

Weighing about 550g, while it may not be the lightest tablet in the market but the reduced weight is very welcome in terms of long usage for browsing and annotating without a hard surface to put the device on. The back of the device is now like the Galaxy Note 3 - which offers a "leathery" feel while the side of the device is also engraved with grip lines which saves your device from chance of slipping and making it one of the "drop test" videos in YouTube.

615gm of the original Note 10.1

548gm of the Note 10.1 (2014 edition)

 

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RAM and processing power
Galaxy Note 10.1 is packed with 3GB of RAM and powered by Quad core Krait 400 processor  running at 2.3GHz (For Malaysian market). While these specifications looks impressive on papers but the test of performance is more than meets the eye until you throw in tons of software running in the background. Some sites had been testing it out with some heavy duty and graphics intensive games but I think the best test of it all is when it works along your everyday life.

Display
Just when I pop in my old MicroSD card and use the in-built Gallery app to view all my past photographs on the device (which was taken by my Galaxy Note 2 at 8 megapixels), it totally blown me away ! I had never seen so much details over the device which I took and preview the photographs! The 2560 x 1600 Super LCD screen was like you're watching HD movies compared with the non-HD version ! Every single detail in the photo had been shown in it's most awesomeness ! Perhaps the next logical step is to buy a larger MicroSD card and store more HD movies :)

Picture taken from my Note2 camera directly from the device screen. Some may see it as a normal picture but with a HD display, it's totally different

Other welcome upgrades (Nitty gritty but still useful)
The stereo speakers are still available as with it's predecessor, it's now facing sideways on both side of the device giving you loud and crisp sound to go with the awesome display. The sync and charge port is now based on the standard micro USB - which means you can jack in your Galaxy Note 2, Nexus, Sony Experia, LG, Nokia charger on to it - just make sure you provide it with sufficient electricity/current for charging (No lightning connectors please, *ahem).

Micro USB port is most welcome !

And finally, the stylus is symmetrical - which means you can insert the stylus back to the slot in any orientation you want, this is useful when you wish to pack and go immediately when you had hijacked someone's meeting room and that party is here to claim it from you - shooing you away IMMEDIATELY

Now we can slot in the stylus anyway we want ! (Comparing with the old Note 10.1 stylus in white)

Not so welcome upgrades

Fingers on the back button, look where's the back button !

The software buttons are now removed altogether. You're provided with 1 hardware button (HOME button) and 2 touch sensitive area (for Menu and Back button) like many standard android device. These buttons are located in the middle of the device when positioned in landscape mode. While it seems right when using the device in landscape orientation but when you're using it in portrait position, the buttons is awkward to reach upon. You may end up having one hands on the left hand side trying to reach the back button from time to time...



In-Built Software and functionality
Admittedly, this is a section which I can write a 10k words essay and I can still go yada-yada like a grandpa. Samsung had made this device internal software so integrated with the use of the stylus which makes you a dummy if you just buy it for mere PDF reading or web-browsing. Let's detail some features which comes with the device

Air-Command (Also available in Note3)
This is the main feature of the device (which had made me upgrade as well). Pulling off the stylus from the device (or hovering the stylus near the device and click on the stylus button) and you will be greeted with a small (almost full) circle of feature. Divided into sections, this air-command menu allows you to perform one of the following:-

Translate your scribbles into content via Action Memo

Action Memo -  Action Memo is like a popup note which you can quickly jot down some small pieces of information (like phone number, email address, street address and such). After which, you can use the software to recognize what you had written and translate it into content (like add to Contacts for a phone number which you had jot down or activate email on the email address which you had written earlier). Moreover, you can also save these pieces of information, publish it as a Widget memo and work on it later

Capture contents and store in your collections

Scrap Booker - We usually read a lot when using a large screen device like this (at least I do). There are times when we see something of interest in the contents we read (like magazine, websites or news article) and we wish to clip a section of it to work on later. This Scrap Booker feature allows you to immediately capture any part of the screen which you're interacting with (any app) and lets you categorize it in your device called ... "ScrapBook" (No surprises there). Some contents would automatically be OCR (Optical Character Recognition) after the clipping and the translated into text. You also can tag these clippings for easy reference and search over in the next feature called "S-Finder"

Highlight sections of the screen and share !

Screen Write - More often when you're using the device and you wish to share some screen shot or take a snapshot of the screen and immediately share it to other applications (like posting it in Facebook or Whatsapp). The Screen Write feature allows you to capture a snapshot of the current screen, crop a section out from it, annotate and immediately share onto the next application. If you're an existing Note2 user, you would realize that you can perform the same but with more iterations compared with this.

A very necessary search utility

S Finder - S Finder is basically a universal search functionality for contents (video, music, images), calendars and tags in your device. If you had been creating a lot of contents in your device, this feature would had been very useful in locating all related contents under a single interface

Actually you can't launch 5 YouTubes here...

Pen Window - With 3GB of RAM, it is all ready for those who are crazy enough to launch 5 YouTube videos and run all of them together. The Pen Window allows you to draw a rectangle area in the screen which you can launch the app of your choice (like YouTube). The app would only be encompassing the area which you had drawn the rectangle. While you can only launch a selection of predefined app but those apps remains one of the more important usage for your everyday life (like Calculator, Phone, YouTube, Internet Browser, Google Hangout, Contacts... etc)

MultiWindow enchancement

MultiWindow is a multi-tasking feature by Samsung. In a nutshell, it simply means you can launch 2 apps side by side to each other. But if you had been using the other Samsung Galaxy multi-window feature, it is now enhanced with drag and drop feature. You can drag contents from one window and drop it over onto another. For example, you can browse the internet on the right hand side while doing whatsapp chat on the left side. Of which you can drag and drop contents from the browser onto your whatsapp window to share URL, Images and text also.

Drag and drop files from one Window to another

While the cascade window feature (in previous Note10.1) had been removed  (We have Pen Window now !), you can also launch multiple applications at the background of each section of the MultiWindow. The new MultiWindow allows you to move active apps at the background whenever you do not need it.

Other in-Built feature: 

Hovering your stylus on a text entry would bring out a small icon which you can tap on. Upon tapping on it, a handwriting recognition box will appear and you can write over it (which will translate into text for you). This saves you the time to interact with then standard keyboard which is at the bottom of the screen

1. Hover the stylus over the entry box and tap on the appeared icon

2. Handwriting recognition entry appears

Summary

In a nutshell, I am quite excited with all these new features and functions which comes with the new upgrade. The ROI would be priceless if it is able to fulfill all my work related tasks - which I think it would. If you're asking me if it's worth YOUR upgrade ? I can't be sure about that, you need to know if this big brother of Galaxy Note would be of useful to you and your daily life with that price tag.

Wait, did I forget to mention that it's also a phone with LTE capabilities ? :)