Samsung Galaxy Note - the total package?

[Kumabjorn]

On a trip to London the other day I came upon Samsung's brand store in Stratford. Curiosity and some free time on my part got me to fool around with the Galaxy Note for about 15 minutes.
It was still running Honeycomb. As far as I could find out there weren't a whole lot of accessories available. I was sorely tempted to make a on-the-spur purchase. However, it only came with a UK plug which is only useful in the UK, so my cooler side prevailed. However, I have to admit that I'm intrigued. So hoping some members here already have some experience from it I hope to find out a few things.

1) How is it as a eReader? Kindle as well as ePub. Can you hold it in one hand and turn pages that way? Or will you need a free finger from the other hand?

2) As phone? It doesn't drop connection or create noise with less than stellar cellular connection?

3) As Notetaker? The function sure looked cool. What about in practical life? Is it something you use? Even after a month or two? Have you lost a stylus?

4) As value? It is fairly expensive, especially compared with an inexpensive 7" tablet. Do you feel it is worth the extra €200/£150/$250?

5) Anything else a potential buyer should think of? Is it upgradeable to ICS? Will you need to root it?

[afv011]

I don't have the note, but I would like to point out that it originally came out with Gingerbread (not Honeycomb), and the upgrade to ICS is now available source).

Also note that the ICS upgrade comes with a suite of pen-ready apps.

[DuaneAA]

I have had the ATT version of the Note for almost a month now, so I'll take a stab at your questions:
1) It is excellent as an ereader. I don't think I have used my Kindle since I got the Note. It's 5.3" screen is close in size to the 6" screen in the Kindle. I use white text on a black background and this seems pretty easy on the eyes. However I rarely read for more than 30 minutes at a time (and I didn't with the Kindle either). I most frequently read while eating and simply lay it on the table and change pages with one finger. If I am holding it in one hand, I typically change pages with a finger of the other hand. The biggest advantage over the Kindle is that the Note fits in my back pocket and it is always with me versus carrying a second device.
2) It seems as good as my previous phone as a phone. I'll admit I don't make many phone calls and rarely when I am in a moving vehicle, which is when I suspect most dropped calls occur.
3) I played with the stylus a little the first day and then haven't pulled it out since. Since I never had a stylus before, I haven't adjusted to it being available now. I would say my primary uses for the Note are:
A) Read books and fanfiction (Highly recommend the fanfiction app in the google store, if you like fanfiction)
B) Watch videos while on the treadmill at the gym (replacing my old 7" tablet. It had a bigger screen, but much poorer picture quality and its battery was dying.)
C) Listen to audiobooks in the car (I love the audible.com app)
D) Check email and occasional lite web browsing when I am out and about.
E) Phone calls.
4) I definitely think it was worth it to me. I consolidated from three devices (phone, Kindle, 7" tablet for videos at the gym) to one device that is always with me.
5) My phone is stock. I will probably upgrade to Ice Cream when it becomes available from ATT and has been out for a while to verify it doesn't create problems. Truthfully, I have never seen the point of rooting and modding phones unless it adds something you really need and the phone can't currently do. But this phone already does everything I want without wasting my time doing those things.

Hope this helps,
Duane

[macminer]

My impressions (and I'm a Note owner):
1. It is excellent as an ereader. However, I still do use Kindle. Note is much better with picture-heavy books, PDFs, academic books etc. With other books Kindle is my reader of choice, for the paper-like, non-shining screen.
On Note I mainly use the Kindle for Android application and PDF readers.
2. The phone leaves nothing to be desired for me. The main advantage of Note is that it is a phone, tablet-like PDA, GPS, mp3 player, e-reader in one. I have been using standalone PDAs (Palm, WinMobile) for a long time and having both phone and PDA in one device is now a must for me.
3. I use the stylus almost every day and it is realy useful for drawing, sketching and note-taking. There are some replacement apps for the built-in S-Memo, like Freenote (from Android Market) which make an excellent use of the stylus. The built-in note taking app is OK, but somewhat limited. Supposedly the new version of S-Memo, coming with ICS, is much more advanced.
It also depends what kind of notes you take. If you mean reminder notes (or something of the kind), the S-Memo will be just OK. If you need structured notes, Catch or Evernote seems more sensible. If you mean longer notes (like lecture notes) you would have to use an external keyboard (bluetooth or USB through the OTG cable), since scribbling really long notes all day long would be rather uncomfortable - the hand movement is rather limited on a 5.3" screen (compared to a paper notebook).
4. Tablets are too heavy for constant use (IMO). The advantage of Note is that you can really carry it on you all the time, like a small notepad. Even if you carry a tablet, you also take a phone, which adds still a bit more to the weight - think of Note as several devices in one and you will see where the value is.
5. Note is upgradeable to ICS. Samsung has just released ICS for German users, with the others to follow soon. However, with GB 2.3.6 the Note is very useable and even if you don't upgrade, you don't miss much.
Rooting is also possible - it really depends what you expect. If you need to tweak the device to your taste, rooting gives you much more possibilities. However, not all ROMs are directly rootable and it is often necessary to first downgrade the Note to an older firmware, root it and only then upgrade to the newest firmware (which will keep the root).

[wodin]

I've had my Gnote for about six weeks now, and I can only agree (enthusiastically) with what's been said. It's biggest advantage for me is that I've gone from carrying a 7" Galaxy Tab and a 4.3 inch phone to just one device.

I'm normally not a big fan of compromise, but this thing's got it right!

[Kumabjorn]

Thanks for all the input, deeply appreciated. Made me confident enough to enter some bids on Swedish eBay.

How is the hand writing recognition in the SNote app?
Does it learn (AI) or do you have to adapt? Not like grafiti (if you remember the Palm) I assume.

[DuaneAA]

I think S Note is part of the new software package coming with the 4.0 software update, which isn't available yet here in the U.S. I wasn't aware it was going to have handwriting recognition built-in.

Right now all we have is S Memo with an option to export as pdf, so I guess you could externally use Adobe for the OCR function.

I spent a few minutes playing with the S Memo app and I am not impressed. The biggest problem for me is if you touch the screen with your finger or side of your hand, it reads that and puts marks on the screen. I have a Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet and it uses a different stylus technology (Wacom?) so it only reads the stylus in well-written apps. So you can rest your hand on the screen and write in a more natural feeling way.

With the Note, I am trying to write without letting my hand touch the screen and my handwriting looks terrible. Even with a grid background, it is extremely difficult for me to write a line of text on a straight line without it drifting up. My penmanship is typically pretty good, but based on what I see on the screen of my Note, I think handwriting recognition software would have a hard time reaching a high accuracy rating.

The Note looks useful for quick things like adding a note to a photo and the like, but if you are looking for something to take large quantities of notes and then OCR them, I think you will be disappointed.

(Even my Lenovo tablet, which is much more oriented towards writing, is terrible with handwriting recognition, at least in the couple of apps I tried. It would try to do it in real time and change things as you were writing them. After playing with it a little, I turned it off. Fortunately, handwriting recognition wasn't important for what I wanted to do.)

Duane

[Kumabjorn]

In the Samsung store in London the attendant showed me hand writing recognition so it should be built-in from the beginning. Now he is obviously trained to handle the equipment so I didn't take his claims at face value. I would imagine he has written the same sentence a few hundred times to impress prospective buyers, hence I wanted to know what a "real life experience" might be like. The demonstration was truly cool, but unless it translates into actual usefulness it is a moot point. I did like what you could do with screen capture and send as mail attachment or MMS.

[macminer]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

In the Samsung store in London the attendant showed me hand writing recognition so it should be built-in from the beginning. Now he is obviously trained to handle the equipment so I didn't take his claims at face value. I would imagine he has written the same sentence a few hundred times to impress prospective buyers, hence I wanted to know what a "real life experience" might be like. The demonstration was truly cool, but unless it translates into actual usefulness it is a moot point. I did like what you could do with screen capture and send as mail attachment or MMS.

Handwriting recognition doesn't work and probably never will. I have tried many major handwriting recognition systems, including vintage Apple Newton version, Penreader, MS Transcriber, WinXP tablet version, also the Samsung one built into Note. They seem to work for a while when tried in a shop, but in real life situations they are too error-prone. Handwriting should help me catch my thoughts (or somebody's elses thoughts). If frequent errors happen, you have to go back and correct badly recognized words, the whole thought-catching process is impeded and disturbed and this is precisely the problem with all the systems I tried.

What works is the old Palm Grafitti, which recognizes simplified letters (and I mean the original Grafitti, with no double-gesture letters). It is slower than regular handwriting, but at least I don't have to go back and correct words. Even if Grafitti makes a mistake, it is "typical", so I can easily recognize and correct the mistakes when I edit the text later.

As for the Samsung handwriting recognition, it is passable for English (English dictionary as the background technology) and unusable for other languages I tried.

[Kumabjorn]

Is there a Polish hand-writing recognition engine available for the GN? Or does it just use single character recognition. In the store he obviously showed me English recognition.
The reason I was hoping was that Korean and Japanese hand writing recognition is usually fairly good as long as you write the characters in correct "order". That is how they create their engines for rather complicated character sets (Hangul less complicated). When I write Japanese Kanji they have a high rate of recognition (98 %+) as long as I write the character with the strokes in the expected order, it doesn't matter if it is cursive writing, the engine still picks up the character.

[macminer]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

Is there a Polish hand-writing recognition engine available for the GN? Or does it just use single character recognition. In the store he obviously showed me English recognition.

I can choose "Polish" as the input language for Samsung keyboard/handwriting or in S-Memo for "handwriting recognition". The Note also lets me choose single letter or word recognition both for Polish and English. But with Polish the results are miserable. It doesn't really seem to use Polish dictionary to check my input (even though there is a T9 Polish dictionary in the system).

[Kumabjorn]

From that I gather that non-English input (perhaps with the exception of Korean) is more of an afterthought.

[macminer]

Originally Posted by DuaneAA

The biggest problem for me is if you touch the screen with your finger or side of your hand, it reads that and puts marks on the screen.
Duane

This is user configurable. You can enable "only accept input from the s-pen" setting and then no palm or finger touch is registered while scribbling in S-Memo.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

Is there a Polish hand-writing recognition engine available for the GN? Or does it just use single character recognition. In the store he obviously showed me English recognition.
The reason I was hoping was that Korean and Japanese hand writing recognition is usually fairly good as long as you write the characters in correct "order". That is how they create their engines for rather complicated character sets (Hangul less complicated). When I write Japanese Kanji they have a high rate of recognition (98 %+) as long as I write the character with the strokes in the expected order, it doesn't matter if it is cursive writing, the engine still picks up the character.

Chinese character input by handwriting works well in Android,, iOS, and WebOS. This is a function of the keyboard, not handwriting recognition in the usual sense. (The pen doesn't make it any better.) It is, however, slow and cumbersome (fast and sloppy as most people do when writing on paper won't work, though the software usually starts guessing after the first few strokes). I don't know Japanese input methods, but for Chinese phonetic input methods beat handwriting on speed any time. The only reason people use handwriting because there is no learning curve.

[DuaneAA]

Originally Posted by macminer

This is user configurable. You can enable "only accept input from the s-pen" setting and then no palm or finger touch is registered while scribbling in S-Memo.

Where do you find this setting? I am running android OS 2.3 and I didn't see it within S-Memo App or in the Pen Settings within Settings.

Thanks,
Duane