Reference Auto

Despite a slew of launches (numerous versions of the iPad and iPod) by Apple, we still consider the mind blowing Samsung Galaxy Note to clearly be ‘the gadget of the year’, even though the gadget is a tablet packed inside a smartphone.

The Galaxy Note’s a heady mix of a tablet and a smartphone.

And yes, after bringing in the hefty Galaxy Tab for which Samsung had to face a lawsuit a few months back, the Korean company has come a long way with the Galaxy Note, a new invention that puts it in between a tablet and a smartphone.

The Note may be termed a tablet which is convenient to carry and use, just like a mobile phone.

The Galaxy Note is 5.3 inches in size and holding it on your palm wouldn’t be much of a bother. The Galaxy Note is bigger than the already hefty Galaxy Nexus, whose 4.65 touchscreen was till recently the biggest in the market.

Samsung prefers to call the Galaxy Note a high-end smartphone rather than a tablet as it can allow normal phone operations while on the go.

The Galaxy Note’s stylus-oriented interface will allow you to take notes. This amazing gizmo lets you draw and you can take screen caps also. You can do things like take a photo of say a house, draw a tree and combine the images, giving it a realistic look. And even send it by email.

With the onset of 3G, video calls are the talk of the town everywhere. But users, who’ve had the opportunity to own a Samsung Galaxy Note, say that with the device it is possible to make video calls with 2G SIM cards and get high-quality resolution video.

The mind boggling features of the Galaxy Note include an 8-mega pixel camera, geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection, image stabilisation Android OS, v2.3.5 (Gingerbread) talk time of up to 26 hours and 10 min (on 2G) and up to 13 hours 30 minutes (on 3G) and memory card up to 32GB, among others.

It features a 5.3-inch HD Super AMOLED screen, the largest in any phone available in the market. The Note is powered by a 1.4GHz dual-core processor.

Samsung also has some other smartphones like the Galaxy S II and the Galaxy Nexus.

There is buzz that the Samsung Galaxy S II can be updated to Android 4.0.1 Ice Cream Sandwich build XXKP2.

There is also the Galaxy Nexus, one of Samsung’s USPs. Comparing the Nexus with the Galaxy S II, we see that the Galaxy Nexus comes with the superior AMOLED display, while the Galaxy S II has super LCD display. Additionally, Galaxy Nexus has a display of 4.65-inches, against the 4.3-inches of Galaxy S II.

Galaxy S II comes with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels (218 pixels per inch), while the Galaxy Nexus has 1,280 x 720 pixels, which is far superior.

As far as the Galaxy Note goes, Samsung is set to sell over a million units and could stay as a trendsetter (by creating a new category in the tablet-smartphone market) before we see the likes of Sony, Motorola, LG, or for that matter, even Apple, bring in devices that could be a tablet as well as a smartphone.