We know many of you are skeptical about using styli on a capacitive screen, but there’s a reason why this one deserved a name. The S Pen is probably the most dramatic change to the user interface that the Galaxy Note brings. To be fair though, we only found the turn to mute really helpful and rarely used any of the others. You can also turn it sideways to move widgets around the homescreen or icons around the app drawer. Those include the usual stuff like turn-to-mute or snoozing the alarm, as well as tilting your phone to zoom in and out in the gallery or the web browser. Just like its smaller Galaxy S II sibling, the Galaxy Note supports gesture controls across the interface. The Galaxy Note preinstalled task manager Now, with 1GB or RAM and with the new Gingerbread policy of keeping resource-hungry background processes in check, we are not sure you will need to enter the task manager all that often, but it doesn’t hurt having it on board. The RAM screen has been modified and there is only one clear memory button now, instead of the two in the previous version. On the other hand, the task manager, which Samsung has preinstalled, has seen some functional updates. The notification area hasn’t changed much The notification area has been slightly redesigned in TouchWiz 4, but there aren’t any major changes to functionality there. The WXGA resolution lets more icons fit on each screen The docked icons at the bottom are also five now – both possible thanks to the larger higher-res screen. The added bonus here is that each app drawer pane holds five rows of five icons each instead of the 4x4 grid of the Galaxy S II. Needless to say, the app launcher panes can be rearranged exactly like you would the homescreen – pinch zoom and some swiping around does the trick quickly and intuitively. You can create new menu pages in much the same way – browsing your existing ones and picking the icons that you want to have placed on the new page. Then you drag the folder to the screen on which you want it to be placed and pick a name for it. Still, creating folders on the shortcut toolbar is pretty easy stuff – in edit mode you drag the icons you want over to a blank folder icon at the bottom of the screen. For one, you can now create folders inside it (though given you can have folders on the homescreen, we don’t see much use for that here). There was some work done on the app toolbar at the bottom. You can scroll quickly by using the numbers near the bottom A press and hold on the dots lets you scroll sideways through the resized images of the available homescreen panes in one short go rather than with several swipes. The numbered dots that identify the homescreen panes serve as a scroll bar too. Two of the live wallpapers change according to the weather in your areaĮditing the homescreen panes is business as usual – you pinch zoom-out to display an aggregate view of all panes, which you can then easily rearrange, delete or add. The two different wallpapers in fact only differ by the background – one has a few wind-power propellers, while the other uses a beach. Think Sense UI weather widget, but on a larger scale. Just like the Galaxy S II, the Galaxy Note comes with two cool live wallpapers, developed in cooperation with Accuweather, which display the current weather conditions on the whole screen. There are some Galaxy Note exclusive widgets, which let you launch the S Pen applications. The process of adding widgets to the homescreen has some pretty nice transition effects too, so there's nothing missing. If you start your unlocking gesture there you are taken straight to the respective app (call log, messaging center, etc). Missed events get their own notifications on the lockscreen with dedicated icons. Your swipe has to get out of the outer circle for the screen to unlock. The lock symbol appears under your finger, placed within two circles. The Galaxy Note comes with a somewhat different design for the lockscreen, but it works in just the same way - you can go past it by placing your finger anywhere and swiping in any direction. The changed look is down to the fact that the WXGA resolution can accommodate more stuff on some screens but, for the most part, it's identical to what you get on the Galaxy S II. The Samsung Galaxy Note comes with the phone version of Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread and the home-baked TouchWiz 4.0 launcher out of the box.
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