[Galaxy Note 10.1 General] jayjay90:
Most web site reviews tend to completely overlook the SPen

Every tech site review I've read tends to completely ignore the SPen and some even go so far as to just add that it has an SPen but not describe any details about it. It's no wonder that the complaints I hear about it are about going back in time like the old stylus of the Palm Pilot days. Some people even complain that they don't want to have to use the pen all the time as if your fingers won't work anymore. It's sad that ignorance and miseducation are causing people to overlook this device. One reviewer said that the stylus was scratching the screen everywhere and you can see them if you turn off the screen and hold it in the light. I've been drawing on mine and playing around a lot with the SPen so I did just that and noticed very tiny pen marks everywhere. My first thought was initially happiness that the pen was so fine then I wiped my finger past these and it was perfectly smooth again. They weren't scratches on the screen! They were just scratches through whatever grime and oil was on the screen.

I've had mine since Friday and I love it. I primary got it for the pen especially for note taking during meetings but the multitasking feature has completely won me over. I used to draw often but really haven't lately but one of the coolest things I've found is you can play a movie and if there's something striking you can just pause it, start up SNote then draw away with the movie right there! What better way is there of practicing? If you're just starting out this is especially useful. You can even take a picture of something you see then use the same method to draw it.

I do wish you can pause a video when it's in that detached mode, which by the way is absolutely awesome for us multitaskers, but oh well. You can still resize it and place it anywhere but if you tap it it'll open up the full player.

Since I've gotten mine I have purchased Autodesk Sketchpad pro. It's tablet optimized and has support for the pressure sensitivity and includes a ton of advanced features, layers being especially useful. With layers you can pencil away all you want then add a layer for the inking, then another for the coloring. It allows you to change what you don't like extremely easily this way and get rid of that pencil layer when you're done. Absolutely amazing. It has no palm detection yet but I don't doubt it'll be coming soon.

KNote is the application to use for reading books and writing notes on them. It works great with PDFs and you can take notes anywhere. I do wish when you put it in a view showing multiple pages that it can display your highlights so you can quickly go to the pages with highlights or Notes. I'm sure there'd be a huge performance hit but that would be a nice way to see what you thought was important. There is an area on the bottom you can always write on but if you want to write or highlight on the pages themselves you have to click on the right of the page then click on the pen. Kind of weird at first but you get used to it.

I do have a few gripes though.

1.) The Peel remote application sucks. It wants a TV, receiver, and Bluray player and that's about it. With my Sony Clie from 2002 the remote program allowed me to draw out buttons, resize them, relocate them, label them, then program them with any remote I had. THIS is what I would want. The Peel application tried to automate as much as it could and in so doing did the Apple thing of not giving me any control. Give us a better app, Samsung. There doesn't seem to be any IR apps at all so that piece of hardware is sadly going unused. It's disappointing since it has such great potential.

2.) I let the tablet completely drain the battery and to charge to 100% it took almost an entire day. That's a pretty long time. I'll admit though I had wifi left on CheetahSync syncing with a server every hour and two email accounts syncing. Still, a whole day is a long time. It did last for almost three days though before it finally powered itself off which is also pretty incredible considering all that I had running and how much I was playing with it.

3.) When you hold it in portrait mode to draw I hold it with my left hand. The optimal placement of my thumb seems to be about the middle of the left side. This unfortunately often blocks the light detector so the screen goes dimm. I guess I can spin it the other way but then my drawing hand blocks it sometimes. I guess it would've been best on the top right when in landscape mode to prevent this although I could just turn off the auto brightness I suppose which only takes two whole taps.

4.) No good case for it yet! I've been wanting to use it at work but there's no good case for it yet. I ordered the i-Blason one but it's not coming out until Aug 30th. Hopefully the official Book Cover comes out soon since I think that'll work best.. we'll see. For now I have it stowed in a cheap neoprense sleeve.

5.) Not a major gripe but hopefully Samsung can release an application that'll work with Ever Note so I can view the synced up snb files. Ever Note or Google Docs will sync with SNote but all your writing and drawing will show as .snb files which don't open natively.

Other than that it feels wonderful in the hand and the screen has been fantastic. I'll take greater performance, thinner, and lighter over a HD screen any day. The speakers are loud and it can play every media file I've tried so far. The ActiveSync features are great and with on-device encryption it was quick to encrypt and works just fine. It also supports other ActiveSync features that many devices still don't including out of office management. It even syncs all the corporate photos, something the Motorola devices all lack.

One of the things I do with my devices is remote into my home computer or work computer. With any other device without a physical keyboard the software keyboard covers a huge portion of the screen. With this you can resize the keyboard to a tiny little thing. I LOVE this feature. Then with the SPen you get pinpoint clicks like with a mouse so you don't have to constantly zoom in and out all the time which plain sucks.

Overall a great tablet especially for what I wanted.

---------- Post added at 01:02 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:41 PM ----------

I ordered an adapter to go from that Samsung plug to a USB slave port so we'll see how well it works when it eventually shows. I did read somewhere that this does work though at least on the Tab so I have hopes it'll work fine with the Note 10.1. The 4GB size limit on FAT32 makes it hard to play some files and with this it should let you work just fine.