I have owned the original Galaxy Note for almost 9 months now...
My opinion about the original:
- Battery life in normal usage (messaging, calling, email, idling, light web browsing) is excellent. Better than any smartphone I have owned before. I had to charge my old smart phones every night (every other night is enough for Note).
- Battery life in heavy usage (GPS navigator, graphics intensive 3d games) is not good. It's dead in just a few hours. But if you have a car charger plugged in, it becomes a very nice GPS navigator indeed (big screen is very good for this).
- The size is not an issue for me. It (barely) fits in my jeans pocket. But I must warn that the size is likely an issue for those who use very slim jeans and are not willing to carry it in a bag. Try before you buy!
- I still find iOS slightly better than Android (I used to have an iPhone before the Note, and I have an iPad as well). Even with ICS (4.02 currently) the scrolling isn't always smooth. That's unacceptable for a 1.4 GHz dual core CPU (as an 800 MHz single core CPU can scroll/animate iOS smoothly).
- The Android market is becoming better all the time, but AppStore still has some games and software that are not available for Android (for example a good symbolic calculator is missing).
- Galaxy Note is the best pocketable web browser. Nothing comes close. If web browsing is your most important task in addition to basic phone functions and email, this is the phone to get. Web browsing on Note is very close to browsing net on iPad. It's so much better compared to my old iPhone.
- I don't use the pen much. Basically I use it only during winter, when I have gloves on and need to use my phone outdoors (it can become really cold here in Finland, so taking gloves off is not a good idea).
My thoughts about the new one:
- Bigger screen is of course welcome, as is is mostly done by reducing the up/down bezels instead of making the phone just physically larger. The original one was already very well optimized for size, but this seems even better.
- At first I didn't like the idea of 16:9 screen aspect ratio (16:10 is perfect for web browsing after all). But after noticing that the phone has a physically narrower body (even with the bigger screen) I changed my opinion. Narrower body would make it easier to hold it in hand when using it as a phone. The current model is slightly awkward to hold with a single hand. Narrower body also makes it easier to slide the phone in/out of jeans pockets. Current model is not easy to get out of your pockets when you are sitting.
- Hopefully Jelly Bean (4.1) finally fixes the Android choppiness problems. If not, at least it has bigger clocks and double core counts to reduce the problems further
- Bigger battery is always good. Especially as it doesn't seem to add any weight, and it's even slightly slimmer now (9.4mm).
- Personally I haven't noticed the pentile at 285ppi in the original Note, but RGB stripe in Note 2 is surely better. Makes up the slightly lower resolution (267ppi).
= very nice improvements. They have pretty much fixed all the "flaws" in the original design... and it has already sold over 10 million units. Pretty good for a "niche" product.
