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It’s that time of year again; yes the pre-iPhone madness announcement season has kick started and it is off with a bang. On Wednesday, at the IFA 2012, Samsung unveiled a set of intriguing new products, among which was an Android-based camera and a Windows RT tablet yet the Galaxy Note II hybrid Smartphone takes the cake.

Last year, when the first Galaxy Note arrived, it was welcomed with a lot of praise and appeal, with global sales that rank up to 1 million in only two month, 5 million in 5 months and have surpassed ever since a whooping 10 million. For those of you who thought that the Galaxy Note could not get any bigger, well you were wrong. The second gen phone/mini tablet, whose specs were leaked a few hours early, has jumped from a 5.3 inch screen to a 5.5 inches.

Moving on to what concerns us most; the specs: The new Galaxy Note II is powered by a 1.5 GHz quad-core Exynos processor and runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Either HSPA Plus or LTE connectivity will be supported. Buyers will be able to choose between, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB of storage, with an 8 megapixel rear camera and a 1.9 megapixel front-facing camera.

Samsung is proudly boasting that the Note II’s HD Super AMOLED screen, stating quite boldly that it offers a “perfect viewing experience”. While we still don’t know how valid this actually is, but once we see it we’ll believe it. The S Pen also received a redesign from the company for it is longer and thicker now.

Though Samsung has not set a fixed release date for the device yet, it has confirmed that it will launch in Europe, Asia and the Middle East in October and will arrive in the US by the end of this year.

We could not help but compare between the Galaxy S III and the second generation Galaxy note. In fact, Samsung itself did not shy away from making the comparison. Director of product marketing for Samsung
Mobile US, Ryan Bidan, told the publican in an interview:

The best way to think about the Galaxy Note II is that we took kind of that experience that we created with the Galaxy S III, both in terms of design and software experience, and brought that to the Note platform. So, you’ve kind of got the refinement and evolution of what we did with the original Galaxy Note, along with all of those great sharing features and the power of the Galaxy S III device. So thinking about it along the lines as the Galaxy S III I think is absolutely fair because it does feel and act a lot like that, but now you’ve got the further advantage of having the S Pen and the Note characteristics with that.

However, Bidan was careful to note that the Galaxy S and Note families of devices remain separate:

[Samsung] started it with the original Note, kind of creating that unique category where we took a very powerful smartphone and integrated a lot of great tablet functionality. And if you look at kind of what we did with the S Pen with the Galaxy Note 10.1, kind of extending that paradigm a little bit further to content creation and a bunch of the unique tablet functionality, and now continuing to extend that category even further with the Galaxy Note II, so absolutely look at it as being a very different device than our Galaxy S III.

While we’re curious to find out how far this screen creep will catch on, but as far as we’re concerned, if you’re already at massive, what’s another 0.2 inches. It seems these “phablets” will keep on growing.

While Tech Crunch compared the device to a Chevy Corvette; “not for everyone” and the Galaxy S II to a more practical Chevy Camaro, Engadget’s first impressions were pleased with the new simpler and more cohesive features that are less business and more pleasure. What are your thoughts? Are you sold on the new Note? Let us know.

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