Samsung Galaxy Note II review

Samsung’s original Galaxy Note was the subject of much derision from tech fans: after all, who’d buy a smartphone with a huge 5.3in screen, and a stylus, in 2012? Despite all the scoffing, customers flocked – and now Samsung has unleashed the sequel – with an even bigger 5.5in display.

The first Galaxy Note followed in the footsteps of the Galaxy S II with its black chassis, so it’s only fitting the Note II looks like a Galaxy S III on steroids. It’s available in the same marble white or pebble blue finish, has the same rim of chrome around the edges, and the Samsung logo and row of sensors even occupy the same positions above screen. The home button looks a little different, the corners aren’t quite as curved, and its 9.4mm frame is a few millimetres thicker. But it shares its plasticky build with the S III, with that flexible, flimsy rear panel and the odd creak in the chassis.

This is a very different beast, though, and you’ll realise that as soon as you fire it up for the first time. Although the Note II has a capacitive touchscreen that works like any other, this device is all about the S Pen stylus, which can be stowed away in a slot in the bottom-right corner, and the screen’s Wacom-licensed digitiser technology. To get you started, there’s a bevy of creatively geared list and note templates, but the S Pen makes its influence felt throughout the rest of the heavily tweaked version of Android 4.1.1 (aka Jelly Bean).

Hovering the tip of the pen over a gallery folder, for example, opens up a thumbnail preview, while waving it over a contact flashes up their details. Removing the S Pen during a call launches a small notepad app, and the phone even sounds an alert if you begin to walk away without the S Pen stashed in its slot.

A button on the stylus unlocks more options. Hold it down and flick up on the home screen, and you’ll unlock Quick Command, which enables fast note-taking. It supports gestures, too: by default you can write an “@” symbol to draft a quick email, “?” to open the search box and “!” to load Google Maps. You can also define your own gestures for opening apps or performing other functions: we told the Note II to open the Amazon app every time we scrawled “a”, and it worked flawlessly.

Other software features don’t need the S Pen to work successfully. A tab on the left-hand side of the screen opens up a menu of common apps, and Samsung acknowledges the screen’s potential awkwardness by including options to move the dialler, keyboard and calculator keypads to the left or right sides of the screen. And many of the features we loved on the S III appear on the Note II. Smart Stay monitors your usage to turn the screen off, the processor can be reined in and haptic feedback disabled to save power, and S Voice also returns.

Inside, there are more small differences: it employs the same quad-core Exynos 4412 processor as the S III, but runs at a slightly faster 1.6GHz rather than 1.4GHz, and the RAM has been doubled to 2GB. That results in a stellar set of benchmark results: the Note II scored 5,892 in Quadrant, ahead of the S III’s 5,413, and its SunSpider score of 1,042ms isn’t far behind the 932ms of the iPhone 5.

The Note II runs Jelly Bean and this makes for a wonderfully smooth experience when combined with Samsung’s TouchWiz UI tweaks. There’s no sign of slowdown during navigation, and high-end games run without a hitch: N.O.V.A. 3, Shadowgun and Dead Trigger all run flawlessly – an improvement over the S III, which struggles on occasion with the toughest titles.

Size aside, there are few differences between the Note II and S III’s screens. Both have an aspect ratio of 16:9, a resolution of 720 x 1,280, and the 239cd/m2 measured brightness and Super AMOLED panel’s perfect black levels make for a picture quality that’s bright, punchy and has plenty of depth. The larger diagonal does mean the pixels aren’t as dense, but you’ll be hard-pressed to see any of them unless you look very, very closely.

The Note has an 8mp camera, which is standard fare on phones these days, but Samsung has carried over many of the software enhancements we loved on the S III. The burst mode still takes 20 shots at just over 3fps, and the face detection and HDR modes work just as well. Technical users will be pleased by the glut of advanced options, from metering and white-balance options to manual ISO selection, and quality is still excellent.

One feature that is out of the ordinary is the 3,100mAh battery, which is larger than the power pack in most other smartphones, and in our tests it proved its worth. After 24 hours during which we carried out a series of controlled tests, the Note II had 78% of its battery left – one of the best results we’ve seen from any smartphone, and a big improvement on the 60% result of the original Note.

This powerful, long-lasting and intriguing device doesn’t come cheap. It’s free on a £31-a-month contract, and you’ll have to shell out £522. That’s much more than Samsung’s Galaxy S III – almost enough to buy a 16GB iPhone 5. And its undeniably odd form factor won’t appeal to all. However, the design of the S III scales up well, TouchWiz is still slick, and stylus-specific software is implemented well. The awkward size means the Galaxy S III is still our smartphone of choice, but if you’re after a device to bridge the gap between smartphones and tablets, this is as good as it gets.

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