Samsung Galaxy Note PRO 12.2 preview

Samsung took a rolling pin to the Galaxy Note 3. The end result? The Galaxy Note Pro 12.2.

It showed off plenty of promise at CES and it’s a hot contender in the 2014 tablet race.

Here’s all you need to know about it ahead of our full review:

‘Leather-clad’ Tab

The Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 is larger than your average tablet (thanks to the extra screen real estate on offer) but we found it to be deceptively light during our hands-on review, though you’ll still struggle if you plan on holding it in one hand. It’s catwalk-thin too, measuring in at just under 8mm.

Its rear is slathered in the same faux leather as its distant Note 3 relative. It might be a little tacky, but it’s a definite improvement over slippery glossy plastic and the extra grip it offers is very welcome indeed.

Being a Note tablet, it also houses a pressure sensitive S Pen stylus in the corner of its chassis – more on that later.

Large screen, sprinkled with pixels

The Note Pro 12.2 packs in a large 12.2in display, placing it above the likes of 11in ultra-portable laptops like the MacBook Air.

Its 2560×1600 resolution means there’s plenty of delicious pixels for your eyes to make friends with and we were impressed with the demo videos we saw on the Note Pro 12.2 at CES.

The screen itself is Samsung’s Super Clear LCD variant, which isn’t actually as fancy as the company’s newer PLS-LCD screens. It’s also rocking our less-favoured PenTile pixel arrangement as opposed to the more traditional RGB stripe arrangement.

In English, that means we might see slightly jagged fonts (which is a gripe we had with the Galaxy S3‘s screen), and with 247 pixels per inch, we’re hoping we’ll be too busy admiring the bright vivid colours to notice.

The power within

The Note Pro 12.2 is rocking Qualcomm’s mighty Snapdragon 800 2.3GHz quad-core processor and 3GB of RAM, matching the Note 3 spec-for-spec. We did manage to come across some lag during our hands-on though, and it fell short of the Note 3’s AnTuTu benchmark results at CES.

We also encountered some lag, especially when opening multiple windows at once. We’ll chalk this down as an optimisation issue for the time being, so stay tuned for our full review for our final impressions.

Android tweaks

The Note Pro 12.2 will arrive with Android 4.4 KitKat, so you can look forward to all the goodies that Google’s latest OS has to offer.

READ MORE: Android 4.4 KitKat review

As usual, Samsung’s heavily skinned over the stock Android experience, and the Note Pro 12.2 is sporting Samsung’s Magazine UX interface to take advantage of all the extra display space on offer.

Big tiles on the home screen flood your eyes with content at a glance without being overwhelming, and you’ve also got a full on-screen keyboard – numbers and all – on offer, again, thanks to the larger screen.

Multi Windows return too, this time with the ability to run four separate screens simultaneously. How’s that for multitasking?

S Pen shenanigans

The Note 3’s S Pen was the best stylus we’ve ever come across, and we’re more than happy to welcome it back here with the Note Pro 12.2.

Its pressure sensitive tip offers enough resistance to let us accurately doodle away and the handwriting recognition is just as good, turning the Note Pro 12.2 into a genuinely useful creativity tool – as opposed to a pure consumption device, which is the category most tablets tend to fall into.

Price and Release date

There’s no UK pricing or release date information for the Note Pro 12.2 at the moment, but we’ll keep you updated as always.

Stay tuned for our full in-depth review.

About

Esat has been a gadget fan ever since his tiny four-year-old brain was captivated by a sound-activated dancing sunflower. From there it was a natural progression to a Sega Mega Drive, a brief obsession with hedgehogs, and a love for all things tech. After 7 years as a writer and deputy editor for Stuff, Esat ventured out into the corporate world, spending three years as Editor of Microsoft's European News Centre. Now a freelance writer, his appetite for shiny gadgets has no bounds. Oh, and like all good human beings, he's very fond of cats.