Following the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 announcement, Samsung has now unveiled the Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet, which will be released in Q2 of 2012. The Galaxy Note 10.1 houses a 1.4GHz dual-core processor, 10.1-inch WXGA (1280×800) display, 1GB of RAM, 3 megapixel rear camera, 2 megapixel front-facing camera, and 16/32/64GB storage configurations. As you can see, it’s essentially a bigger version of the 5.3-inch Galaxy Note sans a cellular radio, which may or may not be what Samsung fans were expecting.
On the software-side of the equation, the tablet runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich with TouchWiz UX and integrates the use of the S-Pen, or pressure sensitive capacitive stylus. According to Samsung, the Galaxy Note 10.1 also features “multi-screen functionality,” which apparently enables users to truly multitask. For example, you can browse the Web, draw, watch videos and/or open other apps side-by-side in multiple windows, presumably like on a desktop OS. On paper, it sounds a lot like Onskreen’s Cornerstone multi-tasking solution. We’ll have to investigate to clarify if it’s actually windowed multi-tasking or just a half-baked solution.
While S-Pen integration and multi-screen capabilities are features we’d love to see built into all future Samsung Android tablets, we expected the Korean manufacturer to raise the bar in terms of the rest of the hardware specs. Samsung’s 2GHz dual-core Exynos chipset or Nvidia’s quad-core 1.3GHz Tegra 3 processor, along with a 1080p HD display, would have easily made the tablet more appealing.
Are the Galaxy Note 10.1 and Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 Samsung’s only large screened tablets to debut at MWC 2012? We hope not, as tablet manufacturers like Asus aren’t sitting idly by this year, as evident by the current Transformer Prime TF201 and upcoming TF700T model.