Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Model)

2014-10-30 03:01:42 -0400

Woot just turned up the 10.1" version of the Galaxy Note. Since I wear a Galaxy Note 3 (which is itself an upgrade from the Galaxy Note 1) phone, use the stylus extensively and actually care about finally having decent screens, when it showed up at a decent discount (refurb) I grabbed one.

Charging/battery life

The stock charger (same small USB charger that came with the Note 3) doesn't even sustain the battery in active use - it doesn't charge at all unless it's turned off. Experimenting with an Anker charger instead.

That screen

Very nice for viewing my pictures; nice enough, in fact, that it saved me from getting a Retina iPad (I much prefer having "all the rope" available, but as a nature photographer I am still very susceptible to high quality screens.)

Thinkpad Stylus

The detected point of the stylus on the Note 3 is not where the tip of the stylus touches the glass, but is instead the "root" of that tip. The ThinkPad stylus has a longer tip, so at any reasonable writing angle there's significantly more distance between where you're touching the screen and where the writing happens.

The Note 10.1 seems to have much less of an offset, but I'm not entirely sure why at this time. It's enough that I've started using the ThinkPad stylus again.

Comixology

The Code Monkey Kickstarter shipped physical comics, but also digital ones in many forms; one of them was online on comixology, and I had an small lingering collection of Apple Store-purchased comics on my iPad already, so this was impetus to clean that up - as part of the iTunes vs. web-store conflict, comixology set up an "exit strategy" that let you connect your Apple id with a comixology web id, so I finally walked through that, then got the Code Monkey ones... and they all look really nice on the Samsung screen, plus the shape and size is right for "real pages". And then there was an "all of Atomic Robo" sale (announced on twitter) that dragged me in, and then I started picking up some of the classics, some of which I already had in paper - Kingdom Come, Transmetropolitan (and, well, pretty much everything else Warren Ellis has ever done, including Iron Man Extremis and Doktor Sleepless), Watchmen... at which point I discovered that the app (or Android itself) wasn't using the MicroSD card and memory filled up. (Google gets a lot of blame for this, with the Android KitKat SD Card Betrayal, but Comixology has had 6 months, it'd be nice if they got around to doing something clever...)

Carrying it around

It's a fine relatively light "big screen" to carry around, and I'd probably still be "wearing" it (my jacket has an "iPad pocket" that it fits just fine) except that woot also turned up really cheap Nexus 7 devices - cheap enough that I grabbed an extra one to be a Chumby replacement, just running AlarmDroid - which deserve a followup review of their own, but the 7 basically took over as my "read things" and "conference call" device; I haven't quite gotten things integrated to where I can usefully make it my photoblogging-on-the-road device but that's coming next.