I just collected a Samsung Galaxy Note this morning courtesy of the good folks at Samsung. I have a week to review this and I must say, I’m very impressed with my first impression. It’s straddles between a tablet and a smartphone. Exactly how the market will react to this remains to be seen. It’s a bit awkward to use as a phone, yet it fits snugly into the palm of my hand. Very portable indeed, with a great user interface especially with the stylus included. We were assured that this is no ordinary stylus (S Pen) and one can see why as the S Pen has a button which opens up a whole set of commands for easy navigation. Finding the button on the side of S Pen is a bit difficult but I’m sure it’s very useful..if you can remember all the commands. So far I like the user interface although I’ll take a bit of time getting used to an Android phone.

The 5.3-inch HD Super AMOLED display is very bright and super impressive. There were some videos preloaded and the quality is just mind blowing. What I like a lot is the data entry. You can type as per the usual smartphone style or you can write with the S Pen like below. So far it performs really well in recognizing my handwriting. It’s about 90% accurate which is a lot. I remember the days of my palm devices where I needed to learn keystrokes for handwriting recognition. We’ve gone a long from that generation of smart devices. Also, for note taking, the resolution of the screen (285ppi) is so high that everything is so smooth and fine. I love to take notes and doodle so this is a real plus point.

I’m going to have a lot of fun with it the next week or so, so stay tuned for more updates! I’m very interested at how the 8 Mpix camera performs so do come back.

Oh at the Samsung showroom at Vivocity, several prints from my earlier review of the NX11 are up on display. Look out for them if you drop by the showroom!