Samsung Galaxy Note II… WOW

My wife upgraded my Droid X to a Samsung Galaxy Note II for Christmas… WOW!

So this is how a smartphone was supposed to be all along.  Don’t get me wrong, the Motorola Droid X that she gave me 2 years ago was the most advanced thing that anyone could get at the time.  But who knew that in about 6 months time Verizon would bring 4GLTE to Sioux Falls? 

That changed everything and we had to wait another year and a half before we could updrade.  But it was worth the wait.

The Galaxy Note II has a much larger 5.5″ 720p display and just using the keyboard is a great deal easier for me with my big fat fingers.  In fact, I am actually typing using the on-screen virtual keyboard now, to write this post.

Even better is the fact that this device supports the external bluetooth keyboard that I had bought to use with my Droid X.  So I guess getting that kb on sale at Kohl’s was actually a smart move, afterall.

Thanks to its quad core 1.6 GHz processor, the Note 2 flies.  This Note II is remarkably fast when compared to my old Droid X, which seemed to require a daily reboot just to run well. While the GN2 will run all day on a battery even when using it as lot.  And I have only reboot a few times just because I am superstitious after having to do it all the time with the Droid.

I have a great deal more memory to work with, as well.   The Droid X maybe had about 500MB working RAM, less than 2GB internal storage and whatever size microSD card a user could get.

The Galaxy Note II (GN2) comes with nearly 1.75 GB of working RAM and another 2 GB cache with over 10 GB of on device storage memory. Plus, it supports the microSD format flah memory card for additional photo/video/app/data storage. I happen to think that that is a really big deal, because so-called “top of the line” devices such as the HTC Droid DNA don’t even support the microSD card anymore. They want you to buy cyber drive storage though one of the offered cloud drive services and everyone has a plan to cash in on this. But that also eliminates an easy and inexpensive means to upgrade to a new device quickly. It also eliminates simple backup systems and sneaker nets. That is a poor choice, I expected devices to have already started supporting multiple SD Cards as standard equipment on all smart phones by now.

For me, since this thing (and most modern smart phones) now captures 1080P video, not providing at least one memory card slot is sinful… we want to keep the videos we recird of our kids, not lose them in the cloud. C’MON MAN!

The GN2 is quite a handy little tablet, as well. The stylus setup is extra cool because it works so well. It compliments my Asus EeePC Transformer tablet, perfectly.

There are some things that I will miss about my Droid X, though. One is that it is all paid for. But they charge us less on the new 2 year contract, anyway. But I will definitely miss the HDMI port. Especially since I bought a multimedia dock for it and that worked out well for me, using that as a charger and clock… I’m really going to miss that. Luckily, there is a system for the note to view HD Video with an HDMI dongle using the microUSB port… but that is not convenient. Still, the Droid Razor Maxx HD would have won me over if they weren’t dumb enough to make the battery unservicable by the customer. I just hate the way some companies nickel and dime you to death by engineering in unservicability.

So when it came right down to it, I had no choice but to get either the Samsung Galaxy S III or the Note II and I am really happy with my choice!