Samsung Galaxy Note 2 Review inc Camera, S-pen, Settings & Jelly Bean

So here we are with the Samsung Galaxy Note 2. We are going to be taking a look at the hardware
and the software
and seeing really what Samsung are offering in this rather large but almost
perfectly formed package.
This is Samsung's latest and greatest phone
coming in with a 5.5 inch super AMOLED RGB screen.
It really is a monster,
this is one big phone
compared to something like the Galaxy S3
or the iPhone 5
you're really going to notice the size of this phone.
That's not to say that it's too big
but it won't suit certain people.
You're going to find it too difficult to hold in your hands I'm afraid, for a long period of time.
Now, other than the huge 5.5 inch screen
they've put a 1.6gighz Quad core
Xenos proccessor backed up with 2gig of system RAM
and either a choice of 16, 32 or 64 gig of storage.
This is a big beefy phone.

A 1.6 GHZ processor
quad-core
it absolutely flies
for gaming
and for practically anything else you could throw at it as well for that matter.
Anyway, on the front of the device we have a 1.9 mega pixel
front facing camera,
a couple of sensors
and the grille
for your ear piece.
On the bottom we have
a physical home button.
i know a lot of people prefer soft buttons as dictated by Google for Jellybean,
it does make a bit of a difference having a physical home button there though, because
you've got double click options, long press etcetera,
it seems to feel a little bit more solid. Using soft touch buttons on the Nexus 7
or the Galaxy Nexus, sometimes it just doesn't feel right, having that physical
button there does make a bit of a difference.
The side
of the phone
is very very thin.
It's about the same thickness
as the Galaxy S3 and so
feels good in the hand. If you've got big hands
you'll be more than comfortable holding the Galaxy Note 2.
The tapered edges again really aid the feeling that it's sitting comfortably in your hand,
and actually sitting in the palm of your hand properly,
not kind of just raised up on the edges, or anything like that.
It makes for a very pleasurable holding experience.
On the left hand side of the device are the volume rockers,
volume up, volume down.
On the other side of the device,
is your power button,
which for my
liking is a little bit on the small side maybe,
and also just on this edge here
you can see the back cover pop
get your fingernail or something into the corner there and pop.
The back cover is a bit on the stiff side.
On the top of the Galaxy Note 2
you have your 3mm headphone jack
and a small noise cancelling microphone,
and on the bottom of the device the micro usb
and another noise cancelling microphone.
On the back,
an eight megapixel shooter which is exactly the same as the Galaxy S3

and an LED flash which for my opinion is slightly on the blue hue side
when using it. It's not the best flash in the world but it gets the job done.
At the bottom of the device is your speaker grille
which is actually covered over by more than 50% with a small
piece of plastic effectively, the backcover. A little bit of an odd design decision there
but this speaker is very, very loud anyway,
certainly much louder than the S3
probably around twice the size of the S3 although it is buried in the plastic.
And then we have the Galaxy Note 2 S-pen
which is available at the bottom of the device
and this provides
touch control using a pen stylus device.
It's actually a digital stylus
meaning that it's actually communicating with
the phone
simultaneously
and we'll get onto those features in another part of the review.
Inside the back cover of the device
we have a very, very large 3100 ma battery.
That's going to be driving
the device for
really a good two days on standby general usage, so if you're just
checking your email,
playing the odd game and so on
two days is very viable out of this battery.
However, if you're really hammering your phone, making lots of phone calls
wi-fi turned on, GPS,
really running that screen at the highest brightness settings
then about a day out of the battery is what you are going to get.
But for a device of this size, running a 5.5inch screen,
that's still pretty spectacular, it has to be said.
One interesting thing to note is they've actually moved the NFC chip,
from the battery
onto its own
back cover
so now the NFC is part of the back cover
not the battery. If you want to go and buy aftermarket battery third-party you
no longer have to worry about
does it have NFC
built-in
Now the NFC connectors are there and that powers the NFC chip.
The SIM card tray is here, underneath the battery,
You will need to take the battery out to get to the SIM
but crucially
no longer do you have to take your battery out to get to the resource,
you can now just pop the memory card in as and when, really quickly.
Pull the back cover off,
pop the card in,
pop it back together.
And hear you can see the speaker,
big chunky speaker. But if you look at this piece of plastic here,
you can see effectively they have covered it over.
Little bit odd. Big speaker
tiny hole. Bit of a shame.
Other than that though, this really is a beautifully well made piece of kit.
Some people complain that the back cover is a bit flexible. I would probably agree with you
but
bearing in mind that there's plenty of really good quality back covers out there,
with various extra features on there,
much much simpler.
Whether we'll now have to also be keeping our eyes out for ones which have the NFC chips
built-in
or if someone is going to be enterprising and come up with a way to remove those
and attach them to your back covers, I'm not sure.
But all in all, a stonking piece of hardware, certainly this is the cutting
edge right now
of mobile phone design and specs. A truly beautiful piece of kit.
So the Galaxy Note 2 is running the latest and greatest version of Google's android operating system
code-named Jellybean.
The main stand out features here are really for Jellybean.
and for what Samsung have done in general
to integrate their touchless operating system
Samsung features and apps,
and then into the Jellybean operating system has been beautifully done.
If you've already got hold of the Samsung Galaxy S3
update Jellybean
then not a huge number of surprises here.
If you're brand new to Jellybean, if you're previously coming from Ice Cream Sandwich or
something like that
you're in for real treat.
OK, so first off
the main changes are the notification area.
The notification area has been completely overhauled now,
to make it much more user friendly.
Notifications can provide expanded information if the application has been set up for it

and Samsung have added their own
quick look shortcut bar at the top
and the brightness controls
work really nicely and you have settings available at the top here if you tap that
straight into your settings.
On your button placements, you have
a long press button here,
which is actually your back button as well and that will bring up the multi window
support which allows you to run two applications simultaneously.
Long pressing on the home button
brings up the running tasks list
which you can then quickly close if you want to and that will clear all your running
tasks.
This option on the side,
on the left hand side takes you into your applications, that are installed, your
system memory, 1.75gig available,


and your storage.
if you long press but go into the centre option it will take you into the
Google Now functionality, which is new from Google for Jellybean,
and what this provides is
contextual based information
about what you are doing.
So for instance, what's the weather like
today where I am?
If I happen to be going out to a meeting it will check to see whether the traffic is
bad
and it will reroute me if necessary and it will tell me, would you like to be rerouted,
there's bad traffic, that's going to add an extra 10 minutes on to your journey?
It will provide
the latest sports
results.
If you happen to be stood at a bus stop or outside a cinema
it will provide the latest listings or bus timetables for you so you know
exactly how long you are going to be waiting for your movie or when the next bus is going to be
coming along.
This level of deep integration with the handset
is absolutely fantastic and
on quite a few occasions now I've found it really really useful.
Something certainly to check out. You can access it also,
via this Google search strip here
which you can also use to trigger
the Google voice service as well
which will then
produce a search for you based on what you've said.
It can search through images and absolutely anything you need
but all powered by Google services, a really really nice introduction and it
completely out Siri's Siri!
One of the pieces of functionality that Samsung have included
which I'm not a big fan of, is S Voice.
It's their version of Siri.
Personally I don't think it works very well.
It's better at some things than Siri and worse at others.
Personally, I've disabled it. I much preferred Google Now
and I really don't think Samsung will continue with S Voice for
too many years.
I think Google Now will effectively take over from it.
But good on Samsung for at least putting the functionality in there of voice assistance
but none of them work very well and I think Google kind of got the
one up on that one by not really doing the personalised
voice searching as such,
but really relying on the data it holds about us to
produce better voice responses
and provide data alongside that.
All in all,
the Jellybean functionality is a massive improvement over
the previous Ice Cream Sandwich on the same hardware.
The responsiveness of the screen,
how quickly
menus open,
and applications load is absolutely stunning
and while this does have a faster processor and more RAM
we've seen very similar speed gains and performance boosts in any device that gets Jellybean
installed on to it.
Everything is much more snappy
So if you are coming from an old handset for android apps or an old iPhone
you will really notice the difference in speed.
If you're one of those people that has an existing android phone
and you're just waiting for Jellybean at the moment, don't be too alarmed that there's a new
device come out that's faster.
Wait until you get Jellybean, you'll find your phone will suddenly be
like brand new again,
very very quick and responsive.
A lot of
the software
is pretty much standard
from an android perspective.

Some of the new Samsung
applications that they've added on
are really more updates to the existing stuff to take
account of
things like the S Pen so S Note and S planner have been updated
to make use of the S Pen
feature.
You now have paper artist which is a fun little drawing game.
They've added a reader's hub ... which is really like a Samsung books and
subscription service.
A lot of the time you kind of think they are duplicating
applications they have already provided, like a Samsung apps.
Why have Samsung apps if you have Google apps which have all the same apps in
there.
Occasionally a little bit cheaper
sometimes a bit more expensive
doesn't really make a right lot of sense.
They've also bundled dropbox
Chat On which is Sansung's chat app
A bit like what's app.

The learning hub which
for the life of me I don't really know why that's been included but
I think they're aiming this very much at
people in academia as well so
you have like a periodicals and journals option in there as well.
and then, really,
the standard Google stuff
like Google maps is there
Flipboard has also been included by Samsung which has all share which is
which is their DLNA sharing tool and
there's also the music hub
and game hub as well.
Most of the time though, you will find that you will be defaulting back to the Google ones
because they're what you know and love,
although I must say, I do actually quite like music hub and music
app that they've installed
it does quite a good job and it's quite
pleasing to use.
I always found that
the music app on IoS6
or, well on any
Apple product
was always a bit lacklustre really. Great sound quality but
not really the best app experience.
I think they've got it really, really well done
on the Galaxy Note 2.
OK, let's take a look at the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 S Pen.
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 SPen 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 on phones
or any kind 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 have 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's
talking to the phone.
So you have a button on the side here
which can enable extra functionality, in this case
I can use it to grab a screenwrite region by pressing down that button there and

and as soon as I press that 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 get an audible chime
and then a vibration setting as well.
So you know it's been taken out and
putting 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, and 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 actual S Pen functionality is really, really nicely done.
Being able to actually draw on the screen rather than kind of stabbing it with your fat fingers etc,
you get a lot more control, but likewise because of the way the stylus has been created it
doesn't 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 just hovering over these menu items.

And then, when i actually
touch, it does it's thing,
and likewise
go into there,
but not until I actually want that item
so I can basically have a peek look and
see 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.
If 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 fun feature
although something that's pretty much just lock 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 sharing the front of the image effectively,
But it's just a nice bit of functionality to add into the Note 2 experience as it were.
This hovering option works at different levels
within the Gallery as well so you can use it on the top ends 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 the link there.
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 the android built-in-browser.
Let's see if it's actually working. You can just see the arrow appearing at the
bottom here.
Let's get into something where we've got a a long list to scroll
if we can ever get there
doesn't look like it.
Let's just...
So this is the Androidizen website,
and if you can see there, now 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 into the Chrome browser but for now
you can use it within the standard android browser if you want to.
It just makes for a quite a nice
fluid experience when you're
using the pen, you don't have to actually physically touch the screen to move
up and down.
Would have been nice to see this is a
date 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 particular functionality.
Bit of a shame,
but it's there anyway.
It just makes for a much smoother experience when you are 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.
Those are the key features of the S Pen,
everything else is pretty much up to your imagination and what you can do with it.
Samsung provided some good basic functionality and a
quite clever twist on the idea of using the stylus
but really from there it's what can you think to do with it?
For certain strategy games, and certain games where you have to draw paths and so on, this would be much more
accurate
than stabbing with your finger basically.
There you go, that is the Galaxy Note 2 S Pen.
To activate multi window mode,
long press on your back button and you get this charm bar appearing.
Then all you do is select the
first app you want multi window
and drag it in,
and then grab the next app you want multi window
and drag that in. And there you go...
So now, we can watch YouTube,
whilst browsing the web.
A very very
cool feature.
It doesn't work with every app. Samsung are encouraging developers to add the feature.
Some of the guys over on the XDA developer forums
have discovered a final manifest which seems to suggest it will be
fairly easy
to add additional apps into this multi window support
but out of the box
you basically have YouTube,
Chrome, messaging, SNote. Gmail, video player, the gallery, maps,
Facebook, and alsoTwitter but I don't use the official Twitter app.
I prefer Slices.
Each of those apps can then appear in there and if you go to edit you can change
that running order as well.
Multi windows support,
really really is the outstanding feature on the Galaxy Note 2.
The increase in usability because you have this larger screen
and being able to
use two apps simultaneously
is just fantastic. If you want to get rid of one app temporarily you can just
scroll it down to the bottom using this bar
which kind of sits
at different points so you can actually have the window displaying as much or as
little
as you'd like.
And it works in kind of four stages on the screen.
You can see there.
It just makes the the whole user experience you know,being able to throw a map
there whilst you're also browsing the web and pulling off phone numbers or
the address... it's just genius.
Why this hasn't found its way onto tablets before now is beyond me.
I would've thought that every Samsung device moving forward with a large
screen will have this feature.
I wouldn't be surprised if
this is copied by more manufacturers as well.
Frankly, Google, you need to get this into your next version of the android operating system
which I think is
dubbed key lime pie.
This is actually brilliant and i think would work on
anything over about four inch display.
I think this could actually work quite nicely on the Galaxy S3.
Certainly I'm looking forward to seeing what the guys over at XDA developers are cracking and hacking this
on to
the S3 and it's going to be
fantastic.
\this is an eight megapixel shooter
exactly the same one that comes on the Galaxy S3 so don't expect a sudden
leap in quality.
it's side backlit for low light,
but my personal feeling is the low light performance is still
very poor

However,
when you're using the camera outside and have plenty of sunlight,
it is one of the best shooters around.
Not quite at Nokia pureview levels but then who wants a 41 meg pixel camera in your phone when it
doesn't actually work as a very good phone.
So I'd rather have a
good balance between the two.
So, what kind of features
are we going to have here?
Let's move this in a little bit more.
A lot of the same features as on the previous Galaxy S3

You have your options down here at the bottom
which allow you to
edit the various
shooting modes.
You have a host of different shooting modes
from burst, best photo, which will take a series of shots and then show you what it thinks is the best
one
best face, which is the same principle again but using faces, face detection...
panorama
share shot, the now obligatory HDR mode,
beauty, smile shot, low light
and buddy photoshare.
Buddy photoshare
If you've set up your friends in your phone and tagged them
on a photograph
and it then sees one of your friends in a photograph it will then
share the photo with them automatically.
Quite a cool feature
How useful that is for most people I don't know.
You've got effects
which are sort of Instagrammy but not quite as good,
but they're actually operated
as a pre process so you actually get those instantly.
You also have
exposure values, focusing
mode which can be metered or spot
or centre weighted I think,
white balance, those outdoor visibility which really just
appears to be a contrast booster if you ask me.
and auto contrast which basically just blows out the contrast on your images,
makes them look a little bit 1970s.
Clearly, I don't think it works well in low light, it's more of a
well lit option.
Anti-shake which just makes sure that the .
image is absolutely stable before it fires the shutter.
just allowing you that extra fraction of a second
just to get the image perfect.
You can take pictures using Voice, you can GPS tag
and obviously you've got your image quality and your storage options as well.
Now the real surprise on this device was actually video.
You get all the same features again that you normally expect
so self-recording
turning the flash on
as a permanent beam
so it illuminates the scene.
In recording mode exposure, anti-shake
guidelines, all of that kind of stuff
but the interesting thing I found
was recording mode.
Now in here you've got limit for MMS which is normal, we've seen that before
on the S3
but then we have slow-motion
and fast motion.
Now, what these do, is
allow you to record
very very fast moving things but slow them right down and you can slow them down
by a quarter, a half or one eighth.
What actually happens is the
image sensor inside reduces the quality
down to about 480p
and that allows it to run much much quicker at grabbing the images
and then slow down that footage.
And what you find is really
nice, kind of slow smooth motion without motion blur
and works remarkably well actually
even though it has dropped the quality
it's still passable.
and if you're out and you just need to take a picture of
some cars going around a track
or kids playing
football or something like that , where you've got a lot of fast motion
It really makes a difference.
You do lose sound quality unfortunately as you might expect
but even so, a really nice little feature
quite surprised to just see it sitting in there, and again,
be nice to see if this gets back ported to some of the other devices in the same
vein you also have fast motion as well.
This will basically crank
the frame rate up to about sixty frames a second i believe
uh... maybe.
Surprisingly, it reckons it can even go up to eight times which would
be nearly

320, 240 frames a second! I'll have to try that later when I'm outside.
and I'll pop some video footage up so you can see the different speed settings.
Quite surprising little feature to have
inside a phone.
Very, very nice indeed.
But that is the main features you'll find for the camera on the Galaxy Note 2.
Let's take a look at the Note 2 settings.
If you're used to Ice Cream Sandwich or any previous version of android you'll find
things have been moved around a fair bit by Samsung.
Partly that's because of Jellybean
the latest operating system update from Google, and partly because of criticism
that some of their stuff was just buried under
many levels of menu.
So, the top area here
which is wireless networks is pretty much unchanged. You've got your wifi access
to bluetooth.
You can check your data usage
so how much data you've actually been using.
and also set warnings and thresholds on there
to prevent you from going over any bundles you may have
In more settings
you have flight mode, access to mobile network changing, tethering important hot
spots is in here
as is virtual private networks
and where you can turn your NFC and communication features on and off.
and also dnlas with nearby devices as well.
and if you happen to be using keys via wifi, which is Samsung's
updating pushing software you can push that information back up
between the device and the pc.
Home screen mode
allows for two different modes really, for using the device.
If you're someone who's new to android or you're coming from an iPhone where it's a bit more basic

you can switch to a basic mode it just cuts down on the number of home screens and the
amount of clutter.
Basic mode is the standard mode
and you' have easy mode that puts it into a more
slimmed down fashion,
so it's much easier to use.
This is really aimed at those people who aren't all that au fait
with mobile phones or are coming from a different
operating system and might become overwhelmed by the pure
number of features that
Samsung provide here.
If you come into blocking mode, this allows you to turn off particular types of alerts and alarms
between certain times
so you can send your incoming calls, and notifications
and set up times etcetera,
a really really useful feature
and something that in the past was done by third party apps.
Sound. Self-explanatory this is where you can be setting up your ringtones
vibration settings
everything related to how the phone is going to communicate
to you by audio, vibration intensity is in there as well.
You've also got the screen lock sound which we've got turned off
that ripple effect is quite annoying.
Display
self-explanatory again but
in here is where your wallpapers will be found but also LED indicator as well.
The phone has a little LED.
When you get notifications that LED will flash particular colours depending on the
notification you've got.
You can go in and tweak all of this here
along with the wallpaper.
Page buddy...
This is a really useful feature which detects
what you happen to have just done with the phone
If you pull the S Pen out it will then automatically
flip to S Pen mode.
Put your earphones in, it will switch to music mode. Docking, it will go into dock mode, etcetera.
Really really useful and it saves all that fiddling around that I need to go into this mode or
where's that music app.
if you put the headphones in clearly you want to use music.
You also have your brightness controls
auto rotation and screen timeout
and two useful features that I found were turned off by default...
which is smart rotation and smart stay.
Smart rotation and smart stay use the camera and sensors to work out whether it needs to leave
the screen on
or when the screen needs to be rotated intelligently.
So if you happen to be lying down when using the phone you may notice on some devices that
the screen will sometimes start flicking backwards and forwards because it can't quite
work out if
you're lying down
or standing up.
Smart rotation helps to alleviate that problem
and smart stay makes sure that screen stays on
if you happen to be looking at your phone.
It uses the camera, detects your face, it says you are still looking at the device I'd best not
turn the screen off now, he's probably using it!
A worthwhile feature and
quite welcome actually
to see that on a device. Little user experience things can make a big difference
about how frustrating
using a device can feel.
It's really good to see that coming in.
You can change the font styles as well if you are that way inclined.
Touch light duration, which is how long these lights stay on at the bottom
display battery percentage if you want at the top, personally I always find that rather scary.
I'd rather
not know!
It's about 50%.
Auto adjusts screen tone as well.
The storage areas
this provides
a running list of
what you are storing on your device and what category that would fall into
and you can then go into those areas and see those individual apps as listed and
remove them etcetera as you need to.
Power saving...
really really useful if you happen to be out and about and the battery's going low and you're going to be
away from charge for a while, flip this on, it will drop

your power
to the CPU
and the processor that's running the phone and doing all of the action.
Power saving will be turned on for the screen, it will drop the brightness right down
background colors will be muted
on the internet so
if you've got a lot background colors strong background colors use more power
white doesn't really use an awful lot of power
and turn off haptic feedback, again anything that happens to be drawing a lot of power off this battery.
All of that can then be disabled on the fly.
You could check your battery usage
and you can see which elements are actually using the most battery power.
Clearly the screen is always going to be pretty close to the top
but it allows you to see if you've got an application running in the
background maybe drawing a little bit more power than you wanted
you can then close that down.
And the application manager provides very similar functionality to the storage
area
provides everything you've got and all of your running apps as well and you
can see the cash processes
useful if you need to free up
memory or if you are trying to find something that happens to be chewing up a lot of
system run times
Locations...

How is it going to find out where you are?
Use GPS, it will drain the battery very quickly
usually wants a wireless network.
It's pretty much ok and still reasonably accurate, good enough to get your basic
fix.
Your lock screen has loads of information here. This controls
how your phone is seen
when you first turn it on and
before you actually enter so this area here basically.
Within that lock screen
you have various security options, so swipe, motion, face unlock, face and voice,
pattern, pin
and password.
And each of these options then gives you even more options
depending on what kind of security you are going for.
And then you've got the lock screen options as well
so the lock screen itself can have more information included on there
like a ticker, dual clock, weather,
you can turn the ripple effect on and off in there if you want to,
quick access to the camera quite useful, with that turned on if you take the phone
out of your pocket like this
put your finger on the screen and then rotate it will automatically go into
camera mode for you so you don't have to fiddle with the buttons or anything like
that
and with the camera starting up in
a fraction of about one-and-a-half seconds
really really quick and nippy way to work with your camera on the fly.
So those are all your lock screen options, worth having a play in there
to see what kind of functionality you want to turn on.
One handed operation
Security next.
This handles all of your encryption on the device
so if you happen to be working within a business network
there is a very good chance you will need to have this turned on and enabled
It will allow all the data that goes in and out of the phone
and the data stored on the phone to be encrypted.
Very very useful and very important if you're working on a corporate network.
One hand operation...
because this is such a big device, 5.5inches
the vast majority of people can't actually reach with their thumb from one side
to the other
of the screen so what they have is one-handed operation.
What it does is it puts the keyboard into a floating window which allows it to
drift to one side of the screen or the other or for you to drag it and position it exactly
where you want on the screen, whatever's comfortable to then one thumb boarding.
Literally it's a small size keyboard but if you measure it
and compare it to something like a Galaxy S3 or something else
you're actually getting the same size screen,
keyboard properly positioned
for where you want to use it.
It actually works pretty well and I've found the accuracy is
just as good
but you've got that flexibility there,
really useful if you're a one-handed operator like I am.
Language and Input... Another self-explanatory one.
This is where you are configuring what language your device is going to be
operating in and also what language it will respond to for
voice recognition and so on and text to speech input.
All of that can be fully controlled in there.
Cloud services are from Samsung.
That allows you to back up all of your data on your device such as SMS messages,
MMS messages and logs.
It's a bit weak, frankly.
I don't know why they include that and Dropbox.
It's useful I suppose but so limited that there are better options out there,
third party for it.
Back-up and reset allow
you to back up the physical device
and also reset and wipe all the data on the device.
And this is where accounts are held now.
If you are coming from Ice Cream Sandwich accounts used to be a
separate option called accounts and you had to go into that
and into the account you wanted, then settings and everything like that.
Now just down at the very bottom of your settings list
and you can then go in and configure each one of these independently
or add a
new account.
Add a new account gives you oodles and oodles of different options including Mircrosoft active sync and
bespoke customer service as well if you want to
LDAP's in there,
everything you could possibly need.
As you add new apps to your device
if they have an accounts option
it will appear in your account settings.
At the very bottom you have the system settings. Motion controls are from
Samsung
and these are very
useful ways that
you can use your device by using various motions
to create actions
within the device.
So direct call
If you have the phone number up on the screen you don't have to press the call button you
you can just
lift the phone to your head
the phone will detect that you want to make that call
and it will then start the dial for you.
Smart alert for catching messages
everything available in here there's some really, really useful features,
hand to move the icons.
If you turn over the phone you can then immediately mute or pause whatever it's
doing.
Some useful stuff in there that's worth taking a look at.
S Pen controls are in here as well including detachment sounds, dominant hand
battery saving
popup notice
and the alert if you happen to
walk out of the room and not put the pen back in.
Accessories, date and time, accessibility and developer options are all pretty standard
stuff really,
I won't go into those in too much detail.
But if you go into developer options you can actually make
your device just a little bit faster again.
Where you have window animation scale transition scale and animated duration scale,
put all those on point five
by default they are on point one. If you've got a really fast device,
the phone won't actually need to wait at all for
the animation to redraw on the screen. It's fast enough to just transition
really, really quickly.
It works on the S3, it works on the Note 2 beautifully
and just makes the phone feel
a little bit nippier again by
a fraction of a second. Hey, we're all about squeezing every last bit of performance
out of these devices.
So those are the settings and the software of
the Samsung Galaxy
Note 2.
Truly a beautiful device, truly a beautiful software implementation as well.

OK, we're going to benchmark the Galaxy Note 2.
Let's go for it.
So what this is going to do is run through things like the CPU, memory,
input output power, 2D graphics and 3D graphics, and it will generate a score.
You can see it running through these various options at the moment.
Obviously,
the more powerful the device
the higher the score is going to be.
There's the 2D test going on. Fractals.
Very very smooth app, this is a very powerful phone.
2gig of RAM
and a 1.6 gig quad core processor.
Certainly you should expect some really high numbers out of this.
Very smooth.
do the double helix test
five-five six five
that is something else, there you go.
So the HTC 1X is quite a way behind there and
pretty much everything else is just picking up the rear.
So there you go,
the Galaxy Note 2
5,565
the benchmark. Beautiful.
Here we are with gig bench 2's benchmark
let's have a quick look and see what score we get.
Unfortunately there's no nice pretty pictures or anything to look at while it does this
You can just watch this nice spinning circle instead
while it does it's thing.
I feel like I should play some mood music or something.
1907
which is not bad at all.
There you see the spec
1.75gig of memory android 4.1.1.
and running at 6gig.
1907, beautiful.
I had to bring you this fantastic game.
It came out
a couple of days ago. It's called Death Dome.
If you've played an infinity game on the iPhone
this is a really, really similar principle
better graphics though in my opinion
it has like a
cell shading animation borderland style.
You level up your character, you get better weapons, you buy bigger bosses
you collect more loot
infinitum, keep levelling up until you
conquer the entire map, by the looks of it. So take a look
As you can see, the graphics are
gorgeous.
Here you're playing it on the new Galaxy Note 2 by the way.
So at the beginning of each
stage you have to collect by doing
tapping actions
and this gets you more coins etcetera and can get you power ups
and then a boss comes along
and we have to beat him up.

So you have to dodge his actions
and then attack him.
As you level up, your weapons do more and more damage,
you can block etcetera.
If you build up enough
special power
then you can unleash that to do like a really really big attack
sort of nice scavenging again.
Played on the Galaxy Note 2 it is a very fluid game.
Really really nice.
Haven't noticed any major slowdowns or anything like that
i think overall this is a
stonking release from
Mobile
Beat that guy in one go.
The basic back story is that a virus has been unleashed on the
world and made everyone go crazy and you're one of the last sane people and
obviously you have a really really big weapon
but that is Death Dome
free to play on the Playstore now. Go grab it.