Until a couple of days ago we’d heard surprisingly little concerning the Galaxy Note, a handset rumored to be launching alongside the Galaxy Tab 7.7 and Wave 3 at IFA. It’s ironic, really, due to each of the phones to have kept a low profile, this can be a memorable one. Behold, a 5.3-inch handset with a stowaway pen for note-taking, drawing and grabbing screen captures. In other words, a Dell Streak-esque hunk of a tool that blurs the lines between phone and tablet. You are looking at a Gingerbread-running HSPA+ handset with a WVGA Super AMOLED display, dual 8MP and 2MP cameras, a removable 2,500mAh battery and the similar Samsung-made dual-core 1.4GHz processor you can find within the just-announced Galaxy Tab 7.7 . For a phone this gargantuan, it’s actually quite thin at light, at 9.65mm (0.38 inches) thick and an inexpensive 178 grams (6.3 ounces). We had a couple of minutes to deal with the telephone earlier than today’s press conference, and located it surprisingly easy to grip, even in our small hands. As with the Infuse 4G –whose own 4.5-inch screen once seemed impossibly sprawling — the skinny shape makes it tenable, as does the lightweight, textured plastic lining the back.
As you’d expect, Android 2.3 comes layered with TouchWiz on top and, subsequently, seven home screens and a little-optimized interface dubbed “S Pen” designed to exploit that pen. These include S Planner, a local calendar and to-do list app, from that you would be able to drag and drop appointments, changing time slots with no need to open an entry. S Memo for note-taking, meanwhile, accepts voice, photo, text and handwritten input. We also got a fast glimpse of Virtual Whiteboard, a more collaborative sort of note-taking. On top of that, Samsung says it’s releasing the S Pen SDK to 3rd-party developers, and the company’s banking on more apps for organizing photos and drawing, among other things. For now, that is merely an international launch: Samsung says it’s still in discussions with carriers worldwide, so counting on your neck of the woods it would be awhile before you hear anything definitive about pricing or availability. Find the some fancy press shots after the break, and stay tuned for our hands-on.
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