A few hours ago I finally got my hands on Samsung’s new tablet, the Galaxy Note 10.1. Having been a fan of the Note smartphone, I was very eager to try this out.

The 10 inch tablet has many of the same benefits of its smaller sibling, plus some new tricks. The Note is available on August 16th and will start at $499 for the 16GB version.

Design-wise, the Note 10.1 looks very much like the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1. They’re just a few fractions of an inch difference in their sizes and weights. So no, it’s not the thinnest tablet ever. It is thinner than the new iPad by .02 inches and a few milligrams lighter, too.

I like that Samsung put the speakers on the front so that watching video doesn’t require a quiet room. And lining the majority of buttons and ports along the top edge makes everything feel much neater. Up there you’ll find the microSD card slot and the headphone jack. The 30-pin proprietary port is alone on the bottom.

So far, the quad-core processor inside is doing its job and keeping everything running smoothly even with multiple apps open in the background. This thing is built for multitasking.

Speaking of: I like at there’s a Multiscreen function so you can put apps side-by-side but am eager for more apps to work with this technology. As with any new and proprietary technology, the more third-party partners you get to work with you for launch, the easier it is on consumers. The apps that work with this now at least make sense.

The S-Pen is the star of the show, and so far I really enjoy using it. The way the pen moves on the screen feels more natural than other pen/tablet combos I’ve tried, including the ThinkPad Tablet (Android version). I also like that several apps already work with it, including a chunk of the pre-loaded ones.

Watch the videos above for more of my impressions. Given what you’ve seen so far here and elsewhere, will you be buying the Galaxy Note 10.1?

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6 replies on “First Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 hands-on”

  1. How is the palm rejection? That is, can the tablet be set up such that when you rest your hand on the tablet’s screen, the tablet ignores anything your hand does? Palm rejection has been the bane of many tablets. In some devices with both capacitive touch screens and active digitizers, you can disable the capacitive screen so you can write using the digitizer, which is far more accurate than your fingers or capacitive stylus.

    1. In a CNET “First Look” video review, Eric Franklin reports that when you have the S pen active digitizer in your hand, and your hand is on top of the screen, the Note ignores all capacitive touch input.

      Windows Tablet PCs (such as the Lenovo X2xxt ThinkPad Tablet PC with multitouch) with active digitizers have apparently been behaving this way for a long time, so I don’t see what the buzz on the Note is all about.

    2. So far palm rejection is really good. I may do a separate video just on that. The only weirdness is that every now and then my arm hits the bar at the bottom and the tablet sometimes thinks that’s me tryng to to stuff outside of the app I’m in. It occurs far less often than with the Note phone, though.

    1. Not yet, but some other reviewers said that it got slower as they used, so I’m going to go the whole day with it and see what I find.

      1. Mine arrived last night and so far the UI only has slight lags. It’s shocking to see a quad core with 2GB ram no smoother than my single core i9000 with 512meg RAM on JellyBean.

        Hopefully there’s a CM10 ROM soon.

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