Samsung Galaxy Note II Video Preview

TechnologyGuide Chief Editor, Jamison Cush, spent some time with Samsung in New York recently to preview the new Samsung Galaxy Note II phone/tablet. Ryan Bidan, Samsung's Mobile Director of Product Marketing, walks us through the features of this 5.5 inch Super AMOLED device.  Watch the video and read our full on-the-scene report on the Galaxy Note II.

Samsung Galaxy Note II Video Preview

I'm Ryan Bidan from Samsung Mobile [Director of Product Marketing], and this is the new Galaxy Note II. So here's what you need to know about this guy. 5.5 inch Super AMOLED screen, 16 x 9 resolution, bright, beautiful, colorful images. Very thin. It's only 8.9 mm thin. It's actually a little bit narrower and a little bit taller than the original Note, but weighs about the same.

So you've got a bigger screen and a bigger battery. So it's 3100 mAh. It's about 25% larger than the original Note, all in a package that weighs exactly the same and is a little bit smaller.

Additionally under there, you've got a Quad Core 1.6GHz Exynos processor. LTE radio, 2GB of RAM, 16, 32, or 64GB of storage, and it's expandable with a 64GB SD card if you want.

So that's kind of what's going on in the box.

The camera is 1.9MP on the front and 8 MP on the back. So everything you need.

First things first, because it is a Note, it's got an S Pen. The device is now intelligent enough to know that when I pull the S Pen out, I'm probably going to want to do something with it. So it goes to a custom S Pen home page, and I can customize this by adding whatever apps that I want onto this page.

I'm going to go into my email. There's a new feature in the Galaxy Note II called Air View. I kind of hover over the screen, and you can see that icon show up. So once I get within 10 mm, the Note II knows that my S Pen is there, and it allows me to start to do things. For example, if I hover over the subject of an email or the body of an email, it brings up a quick little preview. You can do this not only in your email, but also in the calendar. So, a little bit of a close-up there.

I can actually write directly in my calendar. So I'm going to launch the S Planner here. I can use the Air View on the date. Oh look, I had lunch with Samsung and a Note II meeting on that day. Let's say I want to look at October. Make a little note. Perhaps there's something on the 20th that I don't want to forget, so I can write on this view of my calendar - that's a very important day, lots of arrows - and then have access to it whenever I go back to it to look at the pen view in my notes.

Other cool stuff, let me just go into the gallery here, and you can get a sense of what we can do with the S Pen. Oh, here's one of the new gallery views. It's the spiral view. One of the neat things is if I go to an album, I can actually hover over it with Air View and kind of see a preview of what's in that.

For watching a video, another great feature. For example, if we're watching a video, tap on it here. What I can do is use Air View over the timeline, jump to anywhere in that video, get the preview.

As you would expect, from the Galaxy S III, Pop Up Play is here, and the really cool thing about this is it's now resizable. So put it anywhere on the screen and make it as big as I want.

So all in all, Galaxy Note II, we've got a bunch of great new S Pen functionality that makes the device a lot easier to use and a lot more productive and a lot of great entertainment features that just make it one really cool package.