I mentioned that I need to hand on Samsung Galaxy Note before make the decision to buy it. I went to Samsung Galaxy Note Road Show at Queensbay Mall, Penang (1 hour drive from my town) immediately after I knew that Samsung Galaxy Note can be bought at RM 2088 with Celcom Prepaid (RM 8.50) from Lowyat Forum. And it has free flip case (cost around RM 100) for the first 9999 customers too. So the Samsung Galaxy Note actually cost around RM 2000 compare to RRP RM 2299. This is a very interest offer…
Not much people at Galaxy Note Road Show at Queensbay Mall, Penang during 3pm Friday since most of the people are still working. So I can play with several Samsung Galaxy Note there. I read a lot of Samsung Galaxy Note users commented issues from XDA forum. So I know what are the things that I need to double check during hand on.
Haha… The very first Samsung Galaxy Note that I tested has green tint display issue. Luckily, no issue on 4 units that I tried later. So it was a manufacturer defect unit. Another issue ~ Lag. Yes, all the units that I tried suffer slower scrolling on home screen when compare to Samsung Galaxy S II. Must be caused by lot of widgets and 720p resolution. Hopefully, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich with GPU hardware acceleration can improve it (or it is already GPU hardware accelerated? Then this is bad).
Another issue ~ high memory consumption. Samsung Galaxy Note eats lot of memory. Maybe due to S Pen required services. It easily used up 600 MB from 800+ MB total memory by just open few applications. Anyway, custom firmware (or latest official firmware) should fix this easily. As I though, 3D performance is poorer when compare to Galaxy S2 due to higher 720p resolution. But it should run smoothly on most Android 3D games. By the way, did I mention Samsung Galaxy Note is big? Yes, it is bigger than I thought. Definitely not for one handed usage (for me).
I love 5.3″ HD Super AMOLED display. It is big and great for web, movie and games. 720p resolution really pop up here. Only 1 downside ~ it is using RGBG PenTile. Texts are not as sharp as iPhone retina display. I still can see PenTile effect on texts when close up pixel peeping. But rest assures that you won’t notice it on normal usage. 720p resolution helps here. Of course, there is lot of other goodness in Galaxy Note just like Galaxy S2. I won’t mention them one by one here. Go discover yourself…
Yes, I was going to buy Samsung Galaxy Note after hand on. Really can’t resist it with RM 2088 promotion price. I can live with those issues on this price. However, I did not buy it at the end. Because Celcom guy told me that RM 2088 promotion price is for KL only. And asked me to drive to KL to get it. Why double standard, Celcom? Err…
Quad-core smartphone is coming at Q1 / Q2 next year. RM 2299 for a dual-core smartphone seems like a bit pricey now. And I do own Samsung Galaxy S2 for 4 months only. No point for me to upgrade. So I decided to wait for quad-core CPU, better GPU and 720p RGB stripe display (instead of RGBG PenTile) smartphone. Looking forward for Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Galaxy Note II, HTC Edge, Apple iPhone 5…
