Samsung Galaxy Note2 S-Pen Lesson

OK, let's take a look at the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 S Pen.
So on the bottom of the phone
you have the S Pen drawer
and inside there is the S Pen. And as soon as you take out the device
the phone will actually detect that it's going into S Pen mode
So you'll get the S Note pop up so you can very quickly jot a note down
you can alter all these things through the settings.
and then you also get a new home screen which gives you quick access to S Notes
and S Notes functionality.
You can then
draw on the screen
and it will record that information.
You've then got various functionality within the S Note that allows you to do erasing
and so on or you can use the typing tool
which will automatically pop you into OCR mode
so it will then try and
detect
my awful handwriting,
the word I'm trying to say, and remarkably got it right.
Very, very nice feature
Now previously whenever
anyone's had a go at doing digitisers and so on
phones or any sort of portable device they've not done a brilliant job of it
and you tend to find it's not very responsive or
you end up losing the stylus.
Now what Samsung have done, they've teamed up with Wacom this time
so what you have is the market leader in tablet design and pen design
working with Samsung
to create a proper stylus which is actually intelligent in the sense that it is
talking to the phone.
So you have a button on the side here
which can enable extra funtionality. In this case
I can use it to grab a screen write region
just by pressing down that button there, and as soon as I press the button down
it communicates that button press to the phone
and I can then copy that to the clipboard automatically.
or share it with a particular application if I want to.
Another key feature
is that when you take the S Pen out of the phone
you actually get an audible chime and then a vibration setting as well.
So you know it's been taken out, and again
popping it back in causes the same thing to happen.
you get a bit of feedback when this is properly secured.
Another really nice feature
because the Pen is communicating constantly with the device, if you
happen to leave the Pen on the table, walk away and haven't put it back into the
phone
you will actually get a message on the screen saying the Pen hasn't been attached properly and please
go back and get it.
A really, really useful feature, given how often these styluses tend to get
lost.
The S Pen functionality is really, really nicely done.
Being able to actually draw on the screen rather than having to stab it with your fat fingers etcetera,
you get a lot more control but likewise because of the way the stylus has been
created it doesn't actually have to touch the screen to interact with the options.
So you can see here,
even though the Pen is not quite touching the screen, it's about two millimetres away

I'm still able to get functionality, hovering over these
menu items.
And then when I actually touch
than it does its thing.
And likewise
go into there
but not until I actually want that item.
So I can basically do that in peek look
just peek at what these options are before I actually
go ahead and make use of them.
This also works in other
applications as well so if i come into gallery
in here, I can hover over an image
and have it peek it for me
and so I can see what's actually inside that image.
I go into the image
I can then also
add a photo note.
It flips the image round
and I can draw on the back of the image,
save for later.
So if you take a particular image and you want to add a bit of extra context to it
remind yourself later where you took it or anything like that
or just want to add a funny little note
you can
and then you can just tap on the image to see the message written on the back.
Really, really nice little feature
although something that's pretty much just locked to the Note 2.
You can't then share this image and have the information written on the back of the
image.
You just end up sharing the front of the image.
But it's just a nice bit of functionality to add
into the Note 2 experience, as it were.
And this hovering option works at different levels
within the gallery as well

really really nice.
If you happen to be working in an application which has a lot of scroll
for instance,
you can actually hover your mouse down at the bottom
not actually working on Chrome
but you can actually see here
it is working to actually highlight links. The Pen isn't actually touching
the link, but I'm basically peeking on to the link.
In certain applications, it doesn't seem to be working in the
Chrome browser.
Let's just try it in normal browser,
or should we say in android built-in browser
and
let's see if it's actually working. You can just see the arrow appearing at
the bottom here.
Let's just get it into something where we've got a long list to scroll.
If we can ever get there,
doesn't look like it.

This is the Androidizen website
and if you can see there, the mouse
as soon as I've gone with the stylus down to the bottom of the page,
it's starting to scroll, but I'm not actually touching the page.
Makes for a very very nice experience, it's a shame this hasn't been ported
over to Chrome yet.
Presumably this functionality will be coming over to the Chrome browser
but for now you can use it within the standard android browser if you want to.
It just makes for quite a nice
fluid experience when you're
using the Pen you don't actually have to physically touch the screen to move up and down
Would have been nice to see this as a
directly into the android operating system at this level by Samsung
but sadly not so we'll have to wait for apps to physically update for
this functionality
which is a shame,
but it's there anyway.
But it just makes for a much smoother experience when using the Pen
you don't have to keep flicking between Pen and finger
all of the time, or at least in those apps that do support it.
But those are the key features of the S Pen.
and everything else is pretty much up to your imagination and what you can do with it.
Samsung have provided some really good basic functionality
and some quite clever twists on the idea of using the stylus
but really from there, it's what can you think to do with it?
I think for certain strategy games and certain games where you have to draw paths and so on, this would be
much more accurate
than stabbing it with your finger, basically.
So there you go, that is the Galaxy Note 2 S Pen.