Samsung Galaxy Note 2

The contents of the box were shining and there were no marks or blemishes on them. The same can be said about the device itself with no scratch marks and clean shining white look from all sides. Samsung Note II has a familiar design with its brethren from Galaxy family. The front is covered mainly by its humongous 5.5" screen. Above the screen, there's earpiece, proximity sensor and secondary camera, whilst below it is Samsung's standard button layout with two capacitive buttons for Options and Back surrounding physical Home key button. Right side has power key and volume rocker is available at the left side, the buttons are a bit lowered down for easier access with one hand. The back of the device has a rear camera with LED flash, Samsung branding and speaker grille at the bottom left. The back is removable for inserting battery, microSD card and microSIM. Highlight of the Note series- S Pen (stylus) is hidden at the back.

I was very excited to start the device and immediately popped in the battery inside and a microSIM. The smartphone opened with its usual boot animations and was welcomed with TouchWiz interface. TouchWiz interface tweaks the notification menu, home screen, lock screen and little bit of app drawer. The large screen gave a huge real estate to app menu and home screen and helped in showing more rows of apps. The display is beautiful and offers good viewing angles. It has adequate brightness settings making it viewable even under direct sunlight.

Before going further with the review, let’s check the specifications of the phablet-

The quad-core processor and 2 GB RAM powers the device to offer smooth navigation and absolutely zero lag. During my test, the device performed like a charm and I was able to quickly browse through menus and use any apps. Multitasking was also very easy with absolutely no problem in switching between multiple tasks.

While the hardware of most of the Android devices can be same, real differential comes from software and that’s why Samsung is trying to push the limits with its TouchWiz customization baked over Android. And, mind you the customization is not limited to interface changes only, it brings tons of useful features and apps. Let’s see some of these features-

As mentioned earlier, unique proposition of the Galaxy Note II is the S Pen which allows anyone to unleash their creativity with S Notes, write faster or simply enjoy better precision with it. Whenever one removed S Pen from the device, it detects the same and opens a  as discussed in Page Buddy feature. S Pen is thick enough to be felt like a pen and offers good grip. It has a button which . Samsung has added Air View functionality which gives a glance to messages, emails, pictures, videos, etc. whenever S Pen is hovered over them. S Pen also support Quick Command to search internet (?), email to someone (@) or even navigating the screen (<,^, etc.) by drawing gestures on the screen. Apart from default screenshot technique in Android, S Pen also allows to take screen grab with a shortcut and the best part is that one can immediately annotate it.

Galaxy Note II flaunts an 8 MP camera at its back with LED flash and auto-focus. The camera UI is customized by Samsung providing access to several effects and features for both image and video. The image quality is really impressive and is greatly complemented with tons of features from Samsung such as geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection, image stabilization. For video, it’s capable of recording of Full HD videos at 30 fps. It even allows simultaneous recording of HD video and image.

Today devices are majorly used for multimedia consumption and Galaxy Note II offers more reasons for doing the same. It’s big screen is absolutely a delight to watch movies so much so that I ended up watching up whole movie on it. The music player can play most of the song formats and has an interesting feature of Music Squares which can play the song based on one’s mood.

I must say that till now I’ve always heard the wonderful battery of Note II and after my usage, it has left me impressed. The massive 3000 mAh helps it to give awesome battery life even during extensive usage. I was able to get battery life of almost 1.5 days while watching video for 3-4 hours, listening to podcasts for around 1 hour and using internet over Wi-Fi apart from moderate messages and calls.