Take Note of the World’s Most Powerful Phablet

It’s tough to believe we’re already three generations into a device that launched a category few thought would take off. Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3 is a shrewd re¿nement of the company’s mainstream phablet—two words I never thought I’d put together—and continues to be an excellent combination of power and practicality in an oversized phone. It’s also considerably more powerful than the Galaxy Mega on AT&T, despite the latter phone’s even-larger display. The Galaxy Note 3 is the most powerful phablet we’ve tested to date.

DESIGN, DISPLAY, AND CONTROLS
No one will mistake the Galaxy Note 3 for a regular smartphone. It measures 5.95 by 3.12 by 0.33 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.92 ounces, which makes it a little thinner and lighter than last year’s model. I really like the new sides of the Note 3; the edges are flat, not tapered, and there’s a plastic chrome band engraved with ridges that make holding a supersized device like this easy. The rest of the comfort comes from the stitched faux leather back panel, which is flat save for a small raised protrusion for the camera sensor and flash. The overall look is classier than the Note 2’s and a nice step up from Samsung’s usual polycarbonate body.

The 5.7-inch, 1,920-by-1,080-pixel, 386ppi Super AMOLED display is a stunner, with vibrant colors, deep blacks, and wide viewing angles. Typing on the onscreen keyboard is a cinch even in portrait mode, and I love having the extra row of number keys at the top. Below the screen are two capacitive Menu and Back buttons, which stay hidden until you push them, and an oversized hardware Home button in the center.

The left side contains a Volume rocker, and the right side the Power button. On top you’ll find a 3.5mm headphone jack and infrared sensor. The bottom edge of the phone houses a micro USB 3.0 connector, which charges the phone and transfers data more quickly when connected to a computer, as well as a mono speaker and a small microphone. This being a Note product, you also get a stylus, which parks neatly underneath the phone’s bottom-right edge.

CONNECTIVITY AND CALL QUALITY
The Note 3 is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1,800/1,900MHz), quad-band HSPA+ 42 (850/1,700/1,900/2,100MHz), and 4G LTE phone. You also get 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, GPS, NFC, and Bluetooth 4.0. In Midtown Manhattan, the Note 3 scored 9-10Mbps both down and up whenever I could latch onto T-Mobile’s new 4G LTE network. Stepping back to HSPA+ 42 I saw 4Mbps down and just 200Kbps up, with ping times around 150ms instead of under 40ms like on LTE. As with many T-Mobile phones, the Note 3 features Wi-Fi calling, which helps keep you connected in areas with poor cellular signal.

Voice calls sound clear, crisp, and full in the earpiece, and it gets plenty loud. Transmissions through the mic are a little on the soft side, with some hiss detectable around words, and a bit too much external street noise
leaks through the mic. Reception seems strong. Calls sound ¿ne through a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset. I had no problem triggering voice activation over Bluetooth, but the phone never recognized my voice dialing commands through the headset. The mono speakerphone sounds clear and loud, and should be no problem to use outdoors.

HARDWARE, OS, AND APPS
American-spec Note 3s get a quad-core 2.26GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, along with 3GB RAM and Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, which is the latest version of the OS. This is one fast processor; it aced
every benchmark test we ran, and we noticed no hiccups while playing even the most resource-hogging games you can buy from the Google Play Store. As with all Samsung Galaxy devices, the Note 3 is about as far from stock Android as is imaginable. But in day-to-day usage, the Note 3 always felt fast to me and didn’t bog down anywhere. 

There are five home screens you can customize and  swipe between. The new Air Command is a half-moon bubble that opens when you pull out the stylus, or when you hover the tip over the screen and press the button, thanks to the stylus’s proximity sensor. Through it you can fire up a Post-It–style notepad, clip items from the screen and save them to a virtual scrapbook, snap and annotate screenshots, search your device, or use an improved version of Multi Window that greatly increases multitasking flexibility by allowing for multiple, resizable windows with different current tasks running. You can also drag and drop apps into different windows more easily than before.

S Note remains a fun-to-use, full-featured note-taking app, packed with voice memo, video, images, illustration tools, a clipboard, the new scrapbook, and Google Maps integration. The pressure-sensitive stylus writes accurately, and 1080p seems to be enough resolution that you don’t see any pixelation even when writing small.

Though S Health is an excellent health monitoring tour and Multiple Window mode is handy, some of the bloatware is near-useless and continues to undermine the stability of the OS. Samsung Hub is an abomination; it exists just to sell you DRMed media that only works on Samsung devices, and is completely redundant with Google’s Play Store. S Voice, though good, doesn’t really accomplish anything you can’t do with Google Now. With just the default apps installed, I saw a couple of process-stop error dialogs just with the phone sitting on my desk, which wasn’t con¿dence-inspiring. And unfortunately, this is one dialog box–laden phone; every time I did something new to test it out, Samsung popped up a large dialog with further instructions, and often yet another EULA to agree to.

MULTIMEDIA, CAMERA, AND CONCLUSIONS
There’s a roomy 32GB of internal storage, but Samsung’s huge amount of preloaded software knocks more than 7GB off the total, leaving 24.9GB available for your apps and media. My 64GB SanDisk card worked fine in the microSD slot beneath the battery cover. All of our test music tracks played, including FLAC files, and sounded fine through a Plantronics BackBeat Go stereo Bluetooth headset. Our 1080p movie files, including H.264 and Xvid, looked fabulous in full screen mode, although DivX files wouldn’t play.

Samsung bumped the Note 2’s autofocus camera sensor up to 13 megapixels, matching the one in the Galaxy S 4. This being a Samsung camera, there are many extra features and modes, including a useful Eraser that eliminates a person from a series of photos, Best Face for merging group shots and getting the right expression on each person’s face, and Rich  Tone (HDR) for intensifying color and improving contrast. The main camera is fast to focus and fire, but the shots are soft—clearly “cell phone camera” and not point-and-shoot camera quality—and shots from the front-facing camera are usable, if a bit warm color-wise. The video side is excellent: Both the front and rear cameras record smooth, sharp 1080p video at 30 frames per second, and the rear camera’s stabilization and detail look really good.

Should you get a phone or a phablet? Samsung isn’t making the decision easy, thanks to its dizzying array of devices with all manner of screen sizes. For example, the Mega steps up to an even larger 6.3-inch display, but it’s lower in resolution, and its dual-core processor is signi¿cantly behind the quad-core, nextgeneration chip in the Note 3. Heading back down in the other direction, the Galaxy S 4 still has a 5-inch display, and because it’s also 1080p, its pixel density is even tighter. The LG G2 splits the difference, with its 5.2-inch display, and it has the same processing powerhouse internals, but it’s not in the same league software-wise.

All told, the Galaxy Note 3 is the best phablet on the market and an easy Editors’ Choice for T-Mobile. There wasn’t much wrong with the Galaxy Note 2 that some spec bumps and software refinements couldn’t fix, and we basically got them here.

Source: PC Magazine Novemer 2013

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Samsung’s Smartwatch Is Not Quite Smart Enough

Is the age of the smartwatch dawning? Not just yet, at least if the Samsung Galaxy Gear is any indication. Like other smartwatches currently on the market, it isn’t a standalone product—it’s a companion device for your Samsung Galaxy smartphone or tablet. The Gear is a nice accessory and certainly has potential, but some serious operational snafus make it more of a compelling science project than something worth buying now.

DESIGN, DISPLAY, AND HARDWARE
The Galaxy Gear currently only works with the new Galaxy Note 3 and the Galaxy Note 10.1. Samsung says additional products will become compatible as they’re upgraded to Android 4.3—the Galaxy S 4 is high on the priority list—but they’ll still all be Samsung-only. That makes the Gear a $300 accessory that virtually guarantees your next phone will also have to be from Samsung if you want it to keep working. For this review, we tested the Gear with a T-Mobile Galaxy Note 3.

The bulky Gear measures 1.45 by 2.23 by 0.44 inches (HWD) and weighs 2.6 ounces, not counting the Àexible plastic band. The metal clasp is stiff, but precise; I had to press fairly ¿rmly to close it, but it stayed put, felt
comfortable, and opened without much trouble.

The single best thing about the Gear is its screen. The 1.63-inch square Super AMOLED display features 320-by-320-pixel resolution, vibrant colors, and deep blacks, and is surrounded by a sharp-looking metal frame. On the top side of the band you’ll  find a 1.9-megapixel camera sensor, and the right side of the frame holds a Power/Home button; there are no other hardware controls.

One of the reasons the Pebble smartwatch uses an e-paper display is for preserving battery life. The Pebble’s display may be monochrome and lower resolution, but it can stay on continuously. In contrast, the Gear stays dark most of the time to conserve the battery; you shake the watch or press the Power button to wake it up.

Inside the Gear there’s a 800MHz processor, 512MB RAM, Bluetooth 4.0, an accelerometer, and a gyroscope, but no proximity sensor or compass. There’s also 4GB of internal Àash storage for holding apps, photos, and
recorded videos.

CHARGING, SETUP, AND USER INTERFACE
To charge the Gear, inexplicably, you insert it into an included leather cradle that fits just the watch body itself, not the strap. Then you plug the micro USB charger cable into the back of the cradle, and the AC adapter into the wall. It’s easy enough, but ideally you wouldn’t need the cradle at all, and would just plug the charger straight into the Gear.

Samsung says the Gear lasts up to about 25 hours on a charge, depending on how much you use it. With moderate use throughout the day, the watch still had 68 percent battery left the next morning, which is better than I expected, if not quite in Pebble territory.

To get started with the Gear, you need to install the free Gear Manager app on your phone or tablet. You can do this via NFC; just tap the charging cradle to the back of the phone or tablet, at which point it pops up a dialog to install the app. Once you’ve done that, you power up the Gear, tap the cradle to the back of the phone again, and it automates pairing. At this point, I had to agree to several EULAs, as well as update the Samsung Apps store on the phone.

Once powered up, the watch face defaults to showing the time, day, date, and current temperature and weather conditions. There are plenty of custom clocks in the Settings menu, and you can download additional ones from Samsung’s app store (more on this later). Swipe right and you’ll step, somewhat sluggishly, through Noti¿cations, S Voice, Voice Memo, Gallery, Media Controller, Pedometer, Settings, Apps, Logs, and Contacts before returning to the default display. Swipe down and you’ll bring up the camera app; swipe up and you’ll get a calculator.

INTERFACE QUIRKS AND APPS
You can only view one app icon at a time, and there’s no back button—you have to tap the Power/Home button, and that takes you back to the opening screen, which could force you to swipe through multiple screens again to check another setting. Another problem: Every time you wake the Gear from sleep, it returns to the time display—not whatever screen you were on.

Most of the built-in apps work pretty much as advertised; they’re all simple, but nothing special. The Media Controller pops up volume, track skip, and Play/Pause buttons for your phone. Logs shows you recent calls. The Gear picks up your Google contacts from the phone. To exit out of each app, you must press the Power/Home button, or swipe up to go back a page. Notifications shows recent alerts, such as missed calls and text messages, but not software or app updates. There’s no way to check email from the watch, which is an odd oversight.

Seventy additional apps are optimized for the Gear, broken into categories in Samsung’s app store. At publication time, there were four entertainment apps, one ¿nance app, three fitness apps, and a dozen or so each, in the lifestyle, social networking, utilities, and clock categories, with some overlap between the last two. Few of these are interesting, with the possible exceptions of bigger-name titles like Evernote and MyFitnessPal, and  Samsung is big on its own ChatOn platform, and there are no real “killer” third-party apps presently available.

VOICE CALLS, CAMERA, AND CONCLUSIONS
For voice calls, there are two built-in microphones, one of which handles noise suppression, and there’s a mono speaker. Voice quality is pretty tinny, and it doesn’t go very loud, though my own voice sounded clear enough
through the mic. Otherwise, S Voice usually recognized my commands, including for voice dialing, but it took several seconds to process each one. You can also dictate text messages, which is as hit or miss as it is on
Galaxy smartphones.

Speaking of pictures, the built-in 1.9-megapixel autofocus camera is fun to use. You activate the camera by swiping down from any home screen, and then fire by tapping the screen on a focus location. It’s pretty fast
to snap off shots outdoors, but slows down to several seconds for focusing indoors. Photos can be 1,392 by 1,392 or 1,280 by 960, and look like those you’ll get from a good front-facing camera on a smartphone:
a little fuzzy, but with decent detail both indoors and out. Exposure compensation was off, though; a shot of a brick building looked fine when it took up the entire photo, but aiming the Gear down a sunny street, I ended up with a lot of dark murkiness in shaded areas.

An icon lets you switch to the camcorder, which you can con¿gure to record 1,280-by-720-pixel (720p) or 640-by-640 H.264 MP4 files. Both sizes of video play smoothly, although there’s no image stabilization. Recording time is capped at 15 seconds per video, which is pretty limiting.



At the moment, there are few smartwatch alternatives as powerful as the Gear, but most are easier to work with. Our current Editors’ Choice for smartwatches is the Pebble, which costs half as much, has a much longer-lasting battery, works with iOS and Android devices, and supports nifty hacks like IFTTT recipes. But the Pebble can’t make calls, and it lacks a color display and a camera. It’s not as ambitious a product, but it’s a lot easier to recommend for what it is.

All told, you’re better off either getting the Pebble now and having fun with it, or waiting for Samsung’s inevitable revisions to the Gear. Some pundits theorize that the Gear makes using Samsung’s huge phones more palatable, but I don’t think that’s going to be a driving factor here; people like Samsung’s huge phones. Really, it’s just that $300 is a lot of scratch to spend on something that is more frustrating than enjoyable to use, and
that needed a longer development and QA cycle. The Galaxy Gear is definitely cooler than I expected, but it’s not worth buying yet.

Source: PC Magazine November 2013

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Samsung SynchMaster 2053BW

Very good despite the small size


THE SAMSUNG SYNCMASTER 2053BW ($279.99) is a modest 20-inch LCD monitor that delivers great color, excelent text readability, and a wideformat 1,680x1,050 resolution.
The 2053BW's specs include a pixel pitch of 0.26, a pixel response of 2 milliseconds (gray to gray), a brightness of 300 candelas per square meter, and a contrast ratio of 1,000-to-1.
The monitor is a beauty, but the architecture has one big, misleading feature. That thin acrylic ledge is etched with the legends of the monitor's onscreen display (OSD) controls, and at first glance, they seem to be the "buttonless touch controls" that Samsung promises in the documentation. As it turns out, they simply serve as a roadmap for the actual controls, which are tucked away behind the bar and up the bottom of the bezel. It's not devastating, but it's a peculiar design choice. To use the buttonles touch controls, you'll have to install Samsung's MagicBright and MagicTune utilities onto your computer, which will allow you to adjust monitor settings with your keyboard and mouse. That only applies, of course, if you feel a compelling need to adjust anything: Our 2053BW test unit needed no tweaks whatsoever.


In the Displaymate (www.displaymate.com) tests, the 2053BW was absolutely perfect in the gray-scale test, displaying the full range. In white saturation, the monitor lost detail at the upper end of the scale, but that loss occured well beyond what's considered acceptable for a consumer-grade display. Q quick press of the monitor's auto button cured some jitters produced by the VGA connection during the pixel-tracking test. Color, geometry, and overall performance were just as good as with the digital connection.-Bill O'Brien.

source: Computer Shopper October 2008.
www.samsung.com

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Samsung Instinct SPH-M800

Samsung Instinct SPH-M800
Ever since the first-generation iPhone came out just over a year ago, it has been generating quite the buzz in the cell phone industry. In response, many cell phone manufacturers and features in hopes of competing with Apple's popular multimedua phone. One such phone is the Samsung Instinct, which is available exclusively through Sprint.
The Samsung Instinct incorporates some of the cool touch functions reminicent of the iPhone's controls, including finger scrolling and sliding buttons. In addition, the phone has haptic feedback, which means the phone vibrates when you press a button or tap on icon on screen with either your fingernail or the pad of your finger. This is nice-the soft buttons feel more like hardware buttons.
You'll also find a full HTML Web browser on the phone. When opened, the Web browser will change the phone's display orientation to landscape. Various views and controls within the browser make it very usable. For example, you can zoom in and out of a page or view a n overbiew of the page. You can also toggle between a standard view and mobile view for a single-column rendition of the page.
Call quality on the Instinct was good, even when using a Bluetooth car kit. The Instinct also incorporates its own version of visual voicemail, making it easy to see and check messages. For data access, the Instinct supports EVDO Rev. A speeds where available.
Unlike the high price of iPhone, the price of the Instinct drops to a mere $129.99 with a contract and other discounts. To take advantage of all the phone's features, you'll need a Simply Everything plan, which starts at $69.99 for 450 anytime minutes, unlimited mobile Internet, messaging, and more.
Which is better? The iPhone or the Instinct? At the end of the day, it really comes down to personal preference, choice of network, and budget. Bottom line: Unless you're an Apple freak, the Instinct is definitely worth a look.
by Jennifer Johnson

Specs: 4.6 x 2.2 x 0.5 inches (HxWxD); 4.5 ounches; up to 5.75 hours talk time; GPS navigation; 2MP camera with video; Bluetooth; 2GB microSD memory card included; two standard lithium-ion batteries; 3.5mm stereo headset jack; personal organizer.

www.samsung.com

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Stone Player

Striking in its simplicity, the $39.99 Samsung S2 Pebble music player looks like a rounded, polished stone-and a colorful one at that. Available in five colors, the 1GB device offers MP3, WMA, and OGG file playback and includes support for a mobile playlist. All controls are located on its back face, and a hidden LED along the bottom edge flashes in different colors and patterns to indicate your selected playback mode and EQ setting.

source: Computer Shopper August 2008.
www.samsung.com

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Review: Samsung TruDirect SE-S204S Drive

Everyone has a camcorder now a days, and some people are having a hard time getting that content directly onto their computer and burned onto a DVD. Samsung has made it their mission to make that process easier with their TruDirect drive.

The Samsung TruDirect drive allows you to record directly to a DVD. You do not need to view your video in any other programs. You just stream it to your computer, and TruDirect will put it on a DVD at the same time.

So how exactly do you do this? Well you plug in your camcorder via Firewire, or you can use a product like Pinnacles MoviePlus. Once your camcorder is connected, just place a blank DVD in the drive and fire up the TruDirect software by simply pressing a button on the drive.
www.samsung.com

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