Giant Phone or Tiny Tablet? The 5.3-Inch Samsung Galaxy Note

 

Samsung continues its search for the perfect iPad-beating size.

There’s an old riddle which involves a frog trying to get across a room, or something. The trick is that every hop has to be half the length of the last one. The idea is that the frog will never make it.
Samsung seems to be using this riddle as a product roadmap: Every new phone and tablet apparently has to be exactly between the sizes of the previous ones. Thus the phones grow and the tablets shrink until we get… The Galaxy Note (which is a phone, not a tablet, in case you were wondering).

The Note has a 5.3-inch Super AMOLED screen, putting it in the same realm of absurd sizing as the Galaxy Tab 8.9. What’s more, this hefty chunk of glass comes with a stylus. In 2011.

Apart from this throwback, the Note packs in some impressive tech. The screen has a resolution of 1280 x 800, or 285ppi — retina-resolution, more or less — the two cameras have 2MP and 8MP sensors and the dual-core processor runs at 1.4GHz. Tll of this runs Android Honeycomb.

Back to that stylus. It is pressure sensitive, so it could be good for sketching apps. The problem is that developers would have to write special, Galaxy Note-only apps, fragmenting Android still further.
The launch data and price are yet to be announced, but as this is technically a phone, you’ll be buying it from a carrier at a subsidy anyway.

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