Samsung Galaxy Note 2 Review (T-Mobile) - The Phablet Returns
by Brian Klug on October 24, 2012 9:00 AM ESTWhen it comes to video, surprise, the Galaxy Note 2 performs like a Galaxy S 3. Samsung has always had good video encode compared to the competition and the Note 2 is obviously no exception. I’m starting to suspect that M5MO is doing the video encode and thus how Samsung is able to keep 17 Mbps H.264 high profile looking so consistent across devices and different SoCs and time. This has been a feature they’ve touted for some time now and continues here on the Note 2.
Unfortunately I shot my video on the same day I took my bench photos and it was a bit overcast, which doesn’t quite match the sunny to very sunny views we’ve had in previous videos at the test location. Nevertheless despite the lighting changes the rear facing video quality looks pretty sharp to me. Front facing seems soft or undersampled for some reason compared to the 720p video I’m seeing out of some of the other high end smartphones I’ve recently reviewed.
Users coming from the original Note will also find that they have a much wider field of view on the Note 2 while shooting 1080p video thanks to the fact that the different CMOS and possibly different ISP firmware reads out. It doesn’t appear to be a center crop anymore like the original Note took, instead you get the wider but still not totally full field of view behavior of the Galaxy S 3 era camera.
As usual I’ve uploaded the videos from the front and rear video to YouTube for easy viewing and also provided the original untouched output from the camera in a zip file (167 MB) for your enjoyment if you don’t want to view samples through YouTube’s x264 transcode blockiness.
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HanakoIkezawa - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
I haven't had this problem with my note or with my sister's iphone4s with the Kia soul. have you tried going to the store to see i it defective or tried to see if it fails to work with other cars?I do agree that some kind of Bluetooth testing would be nice to see with future reviews
abhi.12 - Friday, November 9, 2012 - link
what is the response of galaxy note 2 with other languages like hindi. I am searching for a device in which i can take notes in hindi. Is it responsive enough to write.Random Guy99 - Thursday, December 13, 2012 - link
That the iPhone 5 is more powerful and has better battery life than the note 2 despite it having a battery 3 times larger and a quad core chip. The A6 must have far superior architecture and you can see how far optimisation goes and googles lack of it. I guess that's the problem that is bound to happen when one company doesn't make both hardware and software.MichaelEvans - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
Just got a new Samsung Galaxy Note 2! Am thrilled!! I have a graphics design salon in New York and use it to doodle ideas while on the go. Then because I'm on AT&T's 4GLTE I send the doodles to myself at home and it’s very cool.anhminh1232002 - Tuesday, January 1, 2013 - link
Hello everyoneThe G-sensor doesn't seem to work when the screen is off.
I am using Note 2 Galaxy Samsung.
I tried Justflip to flip to turn on the screen. The screen wasn't on at all.
Please tell me if the is a fix for this bug.
Thank you.
mgrant - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
S-Note is pretty nice looking, and as you say OneNote is feature rich and you've got lots of content in it which you can get at if you install the OneNote Mobile app on your phone.But what about creating notes using the pen in S-Note? Is there some way to say store those notes in a Dropbox and get at them on the laptop? What would you edit them in? So far, about the only thing I've found is that you can export an image (pdf or jpeg) of the S-note note into dropbox and view the static image on your desktop. That's not so useful.
Is there anything out there that lets one have notes across platforms, that can use the pen, and preferably stores stuff in my existing dropbox account rather than making me pay yet another cloud storage service?
There's Evernote, but it doesn't work directly with S-Note. You can export a static image into Evernote as a sort of final resting place for the note, but this is unfulfilling at best.
Hanna - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
How much does it cost?Hanna - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
I mean the Galaxy note 2 or 3Hanna - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
My mum does not want to buy 700 euros. So ...What should I do? How can I persuade my mum to it? HELP??!! PLEASE REPLY
SamJack - Monday, May 13, 2013 - link
this is awesome but i think NOte 3 will be the best ever !! as i read in this site : http://crackerpie.com/2013/03/22/samsung-galaxy-no...