Every year online retailing titan Amazon runs a Cyber Monday Deals Week, which begins on the Monday after Thanksgiving in the United States. Beginning this year on November 26, the seasonal holiday sale includes phones such as the Galaxy Note II 4G phablet priced at $199 on contract from wireless provider Sprint. Sprint a couple of months ago debuted their virginal 4G LTE system in the United States, and that will be the home to over 100 major Metropolitan markets by the end of 2012.
The Galaxy Note II is the very first phone from Samsung to provide Android’s 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system out-of-the-box, and that OS upgrade delivers a smoother and quicker user interface, less clutter and an improved Google Now contextual search feature and virtual personal assistant. The handset launched on the Sprint 4G LTE system on October 25, and simultaneous voice and data access is possible. This means you can send e-mails or surf the web without interrupting a voice call.
The Galaxy Note II 4G smartphone/tablet meshes Jelly Bean 4.1 with the Samsung TouchWiz UI Android overlay, and standard multitouch, capacitive gestures are supported. The handset comes with the S Pen smart stylus which debuted on the original Galaxy Note, and it returns native handwriting recognition technology. You can write, draw or doodle, and even create original artwork, or add handwritten messages to your video and snapshots.
The Sprint Galaxy Note II handset is slim at 0.37 inches (9.3 mm), and delivers the largest display in the smartphone marketplace at 5.55 inches. A layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 2 provides scratch resistance, and that Super AMOLED touchscreen delivers a true HD viewing experience with a 16 to 9 aspect ratio. Resolution runs to the high-end of the smartphone marketplace at 720 x 1,280 pixels, and the oversized, extended life 3,100 mA battery delivers up to 15.0 hours of talk time from a single charge, nearly double the 4G smartphone average.
The chip set in the hardware package is a Samsung Exynos 4 (4412) packet, including a powerful quad core ARM Cortex A9 central processor clocked at 1.6 GHz. A full 2.0 GB of RAM system memory are on board, as is 16 GB of built-in data storage. The microSD slot provides storage expansion, a rear facing 8.0 megapixel camcorder records video in 1,080P HD resolution, and a front facing chat cam provides video call support. Popular applications Facebook, YouTube, Picasa and Twitter have been pre-installed, and the Galaxy Note II offers a Stereo FM radio with RDS display in its multimedia package.
