Back in the day, niche devices were hard to come by in the smartphone market. This is expected because this type of devices are manufactured for a certain portion of the population only. Also, there is not much interest in these devices in the past which further explains their rarity. Take the example of the ill-fated Dell Streak 5 from a couple of years back. It was the first smartphone slash tablet hybrid to get released in the market and its concept at the time of its release was very nice. It didn’t get the warm reception it was expecting though because the handset suffered from an identity crisis that got it confused whether it was an oversized smartphone or undersized tablet.
Samsung however sought to change that view of niche devices when it unveiled its first generation phablet, the Samsung Galaxy Note. At first, the more pessimistic in nature doubted the capability of the device claiming that our smartphone-crazed brethren are not ready yet to tote a device as massive as the Samsung Galaxy Note. However, after the smartphone-buying population realized the advantages of the handset’s bigger than your average screen real estate – plus the fact that its specs sheet placed it at par with the bad boys of the smartphone-competition – the Samsung Galaxy Note immediately became a hit.
However, the original Samsung Galaxy Note is already on its way out because its successor, the Samsung Galaxy Note II 4G, is now available off the shelves for mass consumption. However, the first generation Samsung phablet is not ready to call it quits yet and instead will give its users something to cheer about before the device finally bids us all adios.
That being said, word on the street is that the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean ROM with N7000XXLS2 build has been leaked and recently surfaced. What this means is that those of us brave enough and with enough technical know-how can now take the N7000XXLS2 build of Jelly Bean and have this flashed onto the original version of the Samsung Galaxy Note. By the way, this build of Jelly Bean for the phablet still doesn’t have Multi-View feature but there are reports that the Korean electronics giant is already working on getting the functionality included in the N7700XXLS3 build. Sad to say, there is still no solid word as to when we can expect Samsung to rollout the official Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update to the original Samsung Galaxy Note.
As for the Samsung Galaxy Note, its operation is powered by a QualComm MSM8660 SnapDragon chipset which gives the phablet a dual-core 1.5 GHz Scorpion processor and a full gigabyte of RAM. Storage space on the phablet comes up to 16GB but a user can use the microSD card slot of the phablet to have this expanded. As for its display, the Samsung Galaxy Note sports a massive 5.3-inch SuperAMOLED panel with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels while its camera department features a rear 8MP shooter and a front 2MP video call and self-portrait camera.
