Samsung has launched its newest Galaxy Note II smartphone in Korea, which was shown in IFA in Berlin in late August, 2012. This phone dubbed as phablet because of its oversize 5.5″ inch touchscreen, will pose serious challenge to Apple’s recently launched iPhone 5, which has been receiving huge response since its arrival on the retail shelves. This device will hit stores in 128 nations including the United States, where Samsung recently lost a $1.05 billion patent case to Apple.
Samsung will launch the Galaxy Note II phablet in India today at 2.30 PM at a press event in Hyderabad.
The Galaxy Note II, with its 5.5″ inch HD Super AMOLED display, is slightly bigger than the original Galaxy Note, which had a 5.3″ inch touchscreen. About 15.1 centimetres long (5.9 inches), 8 centimetres wide, 9.4 millimetres thin and featuring a 5.5″ inch touchscreen, it allows users to split the screen in half to view two programs at once.
This device runs on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system, layered with the company’s TouchWiz UI. The phablet has a quad-core 1.6 GHz Cortex A-9 processor with 2 GB of RAM and will come in 16, 32 and 64 GB variants, with support for microSD card having capacity of up to 64 GB.
The Galaxy Note II comes with a stylus “S pen” to write notes or draw on the screen.
For camera enthusiasts, Samsung has assimilated an 8MP snapper with LED flash on the rear, whereas the secondary camera has resolution of 1.9 MP. The rear camera can capture full HD videos at 1080p@30fps and comes with features like geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection, image stabilisation.
“We believe global sales of Galaxy Note II for the first three months will be more than three times those of the previous version,” J.K. Shin, the head of Samsung Electronics’ mobile unit, told reporters in Korea.
The world’s top smartphone maker has sold more than 10 million units of the first Galaxy Note since its debut in November and more than 20 million of the latest Galaxy S III, which was launched in late May.
Samsung’s pricing strategy for the Galaxy Note II remains to be seen, as it does not reveal cost of the product while taking pre-orders, which it started few days ago in India against advance amount of Rs. 5000/-. We believe that Samsung will fix the price of this device keeping in mind arrival of iPhone 5 in India by November or December.
