It is late 2011, and Samsung has just performed a daring technical experiment that has the UK tech press alternating between awe and ridicule. They’ve released the Galaxy Note, a device with a 5.3-inch screen that is so massive it has necessitated the creation of a new word: the ‘Phablet.’ In the aisles of a British mobile shop, the Note looks like a giant amongst men, making the iPhone 4S look like a postage stamp. It is a 178g slab of ambition that asks a very simple technical question: How much screen is too much?
The technical headline is that 5.3-inch HD Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1280 x 800. In 2011, this is a staggering pixel count for a handheld device, offering a density of 285 PPI. Because it’s a Super AMOLED panel, the colours are almost hyper-real and the blacks are deep enough to lose yourself in. It is the first phone that truly makes web browsing feel like a desktop experience; you can read a full Guardian article without ever having to pinch-to-zoom. Under the hood, it’s a beast, powered by a 1.4GHz dual-core Exynos processor and 1GB of RAM. It handles the ‘TouchWiz 4.0’ overlay on Android 2.3 Gingerbread with a fluidity that proves Samsung’s silicon is now the class of the field.
But the real technical ‘party piece’ is the S Pen. This isn’t just a cheap plastic stylus from the PDA era; it’s a sophisticated, pressure-sensitive input device developed in partnership with Wacom. It slots neatly into the bottom of the chassis and allows for 128 levels of pressure sensitivity. You can use it to annotate screenshots, create digital art in ‘S Memo,’ or perform ‘Air View’ gestures. It’s a technical masterclass in precision that transforms the phone from a consumption device into a creative tool. For the UK architect or designer, the Note isn’t a joke; it’s a digital sketchbook that fits in a (very large) jacket pocket.
Connectivity is, as expected, exhaustive: 21Mbps HSPA+, Wi-Fi n, GPS/GLONASS, and an 8-megapixel camera that captures stunning 1080p video. Because of its sheer size, Samsung has been able to pack in a massive 2500 mAh battery. This is a technical necessity to power that gargantuan screen, and it pays off, the Note is one of the few high-end smartphones of 2011 that can comfortably survive a heavy day of usage and still have juice left for the train home. The Galaxy Note is a polarising, magnificent, and ultimately visionary bit of kit. It proved that the world was ready to go big, provided the screen was good enough to justify the stretch.