Samsung announces Galaxy Note 10.1
Samsung is releasing stuff left and right these days, and for once it’s a product that is actually somewhat new and not just a slight edit of an existing one. The Galaxy Note 10.1 is essentially the offspring of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Galaxy Note smartphone. It has a 10.1-inch 1280 x 800 display which has Samsung’s S Pen digitizer system, meaning you have a very accurate pen to use on it. The tablet even comes bundled with Photoshop Touch and Ideas, which should be useful with the digitizer, as long as they’re free. The cameras aren’t exactly up to the job of providing content to edit though, with the standard 3 and 2 megapixel back/front cameras that you find on many tablets.
The rest of the tablet is pretty standard. GPS, up to 64GB of memory, microSD slot, Ice Cream Sandwich, blah di blah. You know the drill by now. The chipset, however, is a mystery. The press release states “1.4GHz dual core processor”, which is a statement that should get the person who wrote it fired and blacklisted from ever working with electronics again. The company has so far used the Tegra 2 chip in two tablets and the Exynos chip in two others, with the latest announcements for the Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) and (10.1) just stating clock speed and hence adding mystery to what chip it is. While the Tab 2 devices’ 1GHz dual core chips heavily hints at Tegra 2, the 1.4GHz in the Note 10.1 heavily hints at the same Exynos chip that the Galaxy Tab 7.7 uses. Why does it matter? Exynos’ GPU is a lot better than that in the Tegra 2, and I would personally not buy anything with a Tegra 2 in it at this point. It had a lot of the blame for the shaky launch of Android tablets last year due to being a better smartphone chip that it is a tablet chip, and that hasn’t changed. The press release does however say “its real-time video streaming and Full HD video playback (…)” which hints to Exynos, but why not just put that one word in there then? God dammit Samsung, learn to write specs.
[Engadget]
