Samsung Galaxy Note II

Samsung officially announced the Samsung Galaxy Note II at IFA in Germany. The new note has a larger 5.5-inch display as compared to the 5.3-inch display of the previous model. But the Galaxy Note II will be easier on the hand being a few millimeters narrower. This is because instead of the 800 x 1280 display on the old Note, the Note II gets a 720 x 1280 display.  This makes the new note taller but a bit narrower.

Like the previous Note, the display is a Super AMOLED display. Those hoping for a Plus display, it looks like that might be a thing of the past.

Physically, the Galaxy Note II takes its design queues from the Galaxy S III. It comes in white and titanium grey.

The Note is all about the S-Pen, and Samsung has improved the S-Pen with the Note II. Samsung has made the S-Pen longer, making it more comfortable to use. The S-Pen now has a rubber tip, to give it a more pen like feel when writing on the slippery glass. Pressure sensitivity is now up to 1024, from 256 of the previous Galaxy Note. This is of interest to those who like to do a little art work on their note. The S-Pen being so important, the Note II will actually warn you if forget leave the S-Pen on a table somewhere and start to walk away.

The Note II has also been given a feature called "Air View" which allows the S-Pen to interact with the UI by hovering over the screen in addition to touch input. This sounds similar to Sony's floating touch technology on the Xperia Sola.

Inside you find the same quad-core Exynos chipset you find in the Galaxy S III, but this one is clocked at a faster 1.6 GHz. RAM is upped to 2 GB. Combined this makes the Note II, Samsung's most powerful handheld device. The battery size has also been increased from 2500 mAh to 3100 mAh.

Its other specifications match the original Note, with an 8MP primary camera, secondary camera 16 GB of internal storage, expandable via a MicroSD slot and HSDPA+ connectivity. My only complaint about the new model is that, it still uses a physical and two dedicated capacitative buttons. 

All-in-all, the new Samsung Galaxy Note II is a significant upgrade from the original Galaxy Note. I expect it to hit Philippine shoes by October, with a price somewhere north of Php35,000.