At $99 on contract, the True HD Galaxy Note II running on the 4G LTE Sprint network is offering a substantial discount from its previous price tag. Though the Galaxy Note II has only been around since late October of last year, the handset is going to hit the 10 million global sales mark shortly. That figure is rarefied air for any smartphone in its lifetime, and the lower retail price for the Sprint Galaxy Note II at the Amazon Wireless store certainly will not hurt the handset’s popularity. The Sprint 4G LTE system currently numbers more than 58 major markets in the US.
Sprint is aggressively rolling out their 4G LTE network in the United States, and has vowed to have nationwide access by the end of 2013. When the original Galaxy Note exploded onto the mobile handset scene with a large 5.30 inch display, traditional industry analysts immediately decried the phone as being too large for the typical consumer. But the high-resolution, smart stylus S Pen and native handwriting recognition technology all combined to make the Galaxy Note an instant hit.
The Galaxy Note II returns all of those features, making the display even larger, and adding hover technology and a split screen feature which enhances multitasking and productivity. The hover feature works exactly as it sounds, and when you hover the stylus or your finger tip directly above the display, you receive data like website magnification, link previews and other contextual information. The split screen feature is also self-explanatory, and the large 5.55 inch True HD screen is split into two equal parts.
This feature works in either landscape or portrait orientation, and the powerful quad core processor has zero lag when switching the position of your handset during split screen use. The Multi-Window feature basically gives you two entirely different displays, and you can use them independently, or integrate your activities and operations between the two. The Samsung Galaxy Note II is the first smartphone from the Korean manufacturer to present the Jelly Bean 4.1 Android operating system out-of-the-box, and measures a slim 0.37 inches (9.3 mm).
A Stereo FM radio with RDS joins a YouTube video player in the handset’s multimedia package, NFC capability is present out-of-the-box, and popular applications Facebook, Twitter and Picasa have been pre-installed. The large display mentioned above is a 5.55 inch Super AMOLED model, with 16:9 aspect ratio and 720 x 1,280 pixel resolution. Talk time runs nearly double the 4G smartphone average from a single charge at 15.0 hours, and the CPU is a powerful quad core chip that has been clocked at 1.6 GHz. A microSD slot joins 16 GB of internal storage and 2.0 GB of RAM memory in the hardware package, and the Sprint Galaxy Note II provides video capture at 1,080P HD resolution with its rear facing camera of 8.0 megapixels.
