Difference Between Samsung Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note

Samsung Galaxy S3 vs Galaxy Note | Speed, Performance and Features Reviewed | Full Specs Compared
 

The Korean manufacturer Samsung is known for its touch on the quality of products and after service among every nation across borders. There doesn’t seem to be any country which doesn’t use Samsung products. Among its diverse range of products, Samsung is well known for its handsets, which made the firm world leaders of the market. In a fast moving market like the mobile phone market, it’s a tedious task to keep in line with all the new technologies that come in to the arena, but it’s even more tedious to deliver products that integrate reliability with the new technological advances and remain to be the market leader. Without doubt, Samsung has been holding that crown for around two consecutive years now.

The main competition Samsung had was Apple, and with the help of the advancements in Android operating system, Samsung is overcoming the gap in usability at a fast pace. The reviewers used to praise Apple endless in terms of usability, but now it has become a very tight competition, and even the most biased reviewers avoid pointing out a clear cut difference between the usability aspects of iOS and Android. At such a time, Samsung came up with the event ‘Mobile Unpacked’ where their flagship product, Samsung Galaxy S III was uncovered. As indicated, Samsung Galaxy III has a very attractive set of features that would succeed Galaxy S II. If the predictions are correct, Galaxy S III will be sold at a faster rate than Galaxy S II was sold. In any case, we’ll be comparing the Galaxy S III with Galaxy Note, which lies somewhere between a smartphone and a tablet. We’d be able to see whether the large screen gives Note an edge over the Galaxy S III or whether it’s the other way around.

Samsung Galaxy S3 (Galaxy S III)

After a long wait, initial impressions of Galaxy S III haven’t disappointed us at all. The much anticipated smartphone comes in two color combinations, Pebble Blue and Marble White. The cover is made with a glossy plastic that Samsung called as Hyperglaze, and I have to tell you, it feels so good in your hands. It retains a striking similarity to Galaxy Nexus rather than Galaxy S II having curvier edges and no hump at the back. It is 136.6 x 70.6mm in dimensions and has a thickness of 8.6mm with a weight of 133g. As you can see, Samsung has managed to produce this monster of a smartphone with a very reasonable size and weight. It comes with a 4.8 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen that features a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels at a pixel density of 306ppi. There’s apparently, no surprise here, but Samsung has incorporated PenTile matrix instead of using RGB matrix for their touchscreen. The image reproduction quality of the screen is beyond expectation, and the reflex of the screen is also rather low.

The power of any smartphone lies in its processor and Samsung Galaxy S III comes with a 32nm 1.4GHz Quad Core Cortex A9 processor on top of Samsung Exynos chipset as predicted. It also accompanies this with 1GB of RAM and Android OS v4.0.4 IceCreamSandwich. Needless to say, this is a very solid combination of specs. The initial benchmarks of this device suggest that it’s going to top the market in every aspect possible. A significant performance boost in the Graphics Processing Unit is also ensured by the Mali 400MP GPU. It comes with 16 / 32 and 64GB storage variations with the option of using a microSD card to expand the storage up to 64GB. This versatility has landed Samsung Galaxy S III with a huge advantage because that was one of the prominent disadvantages in Galaxy Nexus. As predicted, the network connectivity is reinforced with 4G LTE connectivity that varies regionally. Galaxy S III also has Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n for continuous connectivity and the built in DLNA ensure that you can share your multimedia contents in your big screen easily. S III can also act as a Wi-Fi hotspot enabling you to share the monster 4G connection with your less fortunate friends. The camera seems to be the same available in Galaxy S II, which is 8MP camera with autofocus and LED flash. Samsung has incorporated simultaneous HD video and image recording to this beast along with geo tagging, touch focus, face detection and image & video stabilization. The video recording is at 1080p @ 30 frames per second while having the ability to video conference using the front facing camera of 1.9MP. Besides these conventional features, there are a whole lot of usability features that we can eagerly await.

Samsung is boasting a direct competitor of iOS Siri, the popular Personal Assistant that accepts voice commands named S Voice. The model exhibited didn’t have a sound model of this new addition, but Samsung guaranteed that it would be there when the smartphone is released. The strength of S Voice is the ability to recognize languages other than English, like Italian, German, French and Korean. There are a lot of gestures that can land you in different applications, as well. For instance, if you tap and hold the screen while you rotate the phone, you can go directly in to the camera mode. S III will also call whoever the contact you were browsing when you raise the handset to your ear, which is a good usability aspect. Samsung Smart Stay is designed to identify whether you’re using the phone and switch the screen off if you’re not. It uses the front camera with facial detection in order to achieve this task. Similarly, Smart Alert feature will make your smartphone vibrate when you pick it up if you have any missed calls of other notifications. Finally, Pop Up Play is a feature that would best explain the performance boost S III has. Now you can work with any application you like and have a video playing on top of that application on its own window. The window size can be adjusted while the feature worked flawlessly with the tests we ran.

A smartphone of this caliber needs a lot of juice, and that is provided by the 2100mAh batter resting at the back of this handset. It also has a barometer and a TV out while you have to be careful about the SIM because S III only supports the use of micro SIM cards.

Samsung Galaxy Note

Samsung Galaxy Note is the biggest ever Android smart phone introduced by Samsung. The device was officially announced on September 2011 at the IFA 2011. At the first glance, you may wonder whether it’s even a smartphone, for it looks big and bulky, perhaps a little larger due to the screen size. The specialty of the Galaxy Note starts with the 5.3 inches Super AMOLED Capacitive touchscreen that comes in either Black or White flavored cover. It has a super resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels and a pixel density of 285ppi. Now you have the true HD resolution in a 5.3 inches screen and with the high pixel density it has, the screen guarantees to reproduce crystal clear images and crisp text that you can read even in the broad daylight. Not only that, but it also comes with the Corning Gorilla Glass reinforcement making the screen scratch resistant. Galaxy Note also introduces S Pen Stylus which is simply a great addition if you have to take notes or even use your digital signature from your device.

Screen is not the only aspect for greatness in Galaxy Note. It comes with 1.5GHz ARM Cortex A9 dual core processor on top of Qualcomm MSM8660 Snapdragon chipset. It is backed up by a 1GB RAM and the whole set up runs on Android v2.3.5 Gingerbread. Even at a glance, this can be seen as a state of the art device with cutting edge specifications. In depth benchmarks have proved that heuristic assumption even better than we had anticipated. There is one shortcoming which is the OS. We’d rather prefer if it was Android v4.0 IceCreamSandwich, but then, Samsung will be graceful enough to grant this magnificent mobile with an OS upgrade. It comes in either 16GB or 32GB storages while giving the option to expand up to 32 GB using a micro SD card. A micro SD card worth 2 GB is available with the device.

Samsung hasn’t forgot the camera either for Galaxy Note comes with 8MP camera with LED flash and autofocus along with some additional features like touch focus, image stabilization and Geo-tagging with A-GPS. The camera can also capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second. It also has a 2MP front facing camera bundled with Bluetooth v3.0 for the delight of video callers. The Galaxy Note is ultra-fast in every context. It even features HSPA+21Mbps / LTE 700 network connectivity for high speed internet along with Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n for continuous connectivity. It also facilitates to act as a wi-fi hotspot and the built-in DLNA enables you to stream rich media content to your big screen wirelessly. In terms of music, Samsung Galaxy Note has stereo FM radio with RDS allowing users to listen to their favorite music stations on the go. A 3.5 mm audio jack is also available. An MP3/MP4 player and a built in speaker is also on board. Users will be able record quality audio and video with good quality sound with the active noise cancellation with dedicated microphone. The device is also complete with a HDMI out.

Applications for Samsung Galaxy Note can be downloaded from Google Play. The device has a good collection of custom applications pre-loaded in the device. As mentioned before, video editing and photo editing applications will be a hit among users. NFC connectivity and NFC support is available optionally. NFC capability will enable the device to be used as a mode for electronic payments via E wallet applications. The document editor on board will allows serious work using this powerful device. Productivity applications such as organizer are also available. Other useful applications and features include YouTube client, Email, Push Email, Voice commands, predictive text input, Samsung ChatOn and Flash support.

The powerful processor and RAM combination enable the handset to multi task seamlessly, like we’ve mentioned in Nitro HD, you can browse, email and stream a YouTube video while talking with your friend on the phone. It also comes with a new set of sensors like Barometer sensor beside the normal accelerometer, proximity and Gyro sensors.

Conclusion

We are among a set of luckiest people to witness so much competition in the mobile arena because competition leads to excellence in the respective products and services. Normally the competition between two companies can be a big riot, but nowadays, even inside the company there are riots. The battle among Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note is one such riot. Although both thrive to give out the best performance, Galaxy S III has clearly outwitted the Galaxy Note in terms of performance. The usability aspects of Galaxy S III have also been significantly improved giving it an edge over all the other members of the family. Regardless of these facts, Galaxy S III will not push aside Galaxy Note at all because these two handsets are addressed into two different niche markets. The Note primarily appeals to the one who want a big screen to play with and use the S-Pen stylus provided with it. We have come to the deduction that Samsung uses Note series to introduce any product that accompanies with a stylus and, according to that convention, Note may be a better choice for the business professionals out there who wants to scribble down stuff in to their screen. Other than that usage scenario, we can clearly say that Samsung Galaxy S III would address any scenario Galaxy Note used to address.