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Monday, February 17, 2025

Samsung tablet takes aim at iPad with pen

by

20120821

NEW YORK-The tablet-com­put­er mar­ket is like guer­ril­la war­fare. One huge army-Ap­ple-dom­i­nates the land, while a rag­tag group of in­sur­gents keeps raid­ing and prob­ing, hop­ing to find some open­ing it can ex­ploit. With Sam­sung's new Galaxy Note 10.1, the rebels have scored a small vic­to­ry. It's a tablet that does some­thing that the iPad doesn't do, and it does it well. This vic­to­ry won't win the war, though. Avail­able in the US start­ing Thurs­day, the $499 tablet comes with a pen, or more pre­cise­ly, a sty­lus. It doesn't leave marks on pa­per, but the tablet's screen re­sponds to it. I found it a plea­sure to use: It's pre­cise and re­spon­sive, and it glides eas­i­ly across the screen. There are sty­lus­es avail­able for the iPad, but they're not very good. The iPad's screen can't sense sharp ob­jects, so any sty­lus has to be fair­ly blunt. Many of them have rub­ber tips, which re­sist be­ing dragged across the screen. The Galaxy Note has an ad­di­tion­al lay­er in its screen, tuned to sense spe­cial, sharp-point­ed pens through mag­net­ism. The Note is not the first iPad com­peti­tor to work with a sty­lus.

The HTC Fly­er came out last year with the same abil­i­ty, but sev­er­al mis­steps lim­it­ed its ap­peal. First, it was half the size of the iPad yet cost just as much, and that was with­out the pen. Sec­ond, there was no slot for the pen in the body of the tablet, mak­ing it easy to lose. The pen al­so was ex­pen­sive, cost­ing $80 to re­place. Sam­sung then built pen-sen­si­tiv­i­ty in­to the first Galaxy Note, a smart­phone launched ear­ly this year. Though well-re­ceived, the tablet had an odd size, with a 5-inch screen. That makes it very big for smart­phone but small for a tablet. With the Galaxy Note 10.1, Sam­sung is tak­ing the pen square­ly in­to iPad ter­ri­to­ry. So what can you do with the pen? Well, this is where the Sam­sung of­fen­sive starts fal­ter­ing. There just isn't that much the pen is use­ful for, be­cause sty­lus-equipped tablets are so new. You can jot down notes, or ed­it pho­tos in an in­clud­ed ver­sion of Pho­to­shop. You can scrawl per­son­al notes to peo­ple and email them. In­stead of us­ing the on-screen key­board, you can use hand­writ­ing and let the tablet in­ter­pret it. You can even en­ter Web ad­dress­es this way. Hand­writ­ing is slow­er than typ­ing, and the tablet's in­ter­pre­ta­tion in­tro­duces er­rors, so it's not clear why you'd use it much, though.

The sty­lus sens­es how hard you press in­to the screen. Sam­sung's S Note app re­sponds by mak­ing the line you make thin­ner or thick­er, an es­sen­tial fea­ture for any­one who wants to use a tablet for se­ri­ous draw­ing. The pen al­so comes with a side but­ton that works much like the left mouse but­ton, giv­ing ac­cess to ex­tra fea­tures with lit­tle ef­fort. Very few third-par­ty apps are de­signed with sty­lus­es in mind, but some of them work bet­ter with a sty­lus any­way. "Draw Some­thing," a draw­ing game, is a good ex­am­ple. It's de­signed for use with fin­gers, but the sty­lus makes it much eas­i­er to draw in­tel­li­gi­ble pic­tures, be­cause it's eas­i­er to see what you're draw­ing. By con­trast, a fin­ger is so big and blunt that it ob­scures the pic­ture. The app would work even bet­ter if it sensed the pen pres­sure. At the cur­rent lev­el of soft­ware sup­port, the sty­lus is just slight­ly bet­ter than a gim­mick. But even when there are more apps for it, the sty­lus is go­ing to have lim­it­ed ap­peal. It's a must-have for on­ly a small group of peo­ple, who like to doo­dle or need to do so for their jobs. For the rest of us, it will be a fun thing we use once in a while. It can and should tip a pur­chase de­ci­sion now and then, but not for every­one. You can con­trast that with the sig­na­ture fea­ture of the lat­est iPad: the ul­tra-high res­o­lu­tion screen. That's not a must-have fea­ture for every­one ei­ther, but it's im­me­di­ate­ly use­ful to every­one.

The Galaxy Note does chip at the iPad's de­fens­es with oth­er fea­tures the Ap­ple tablet lacks. One is a slot for mi­croSD mem­o­ry cards, which means you can ex­pand the mem­o­ry of the Galaxy Note in­ex­pen­sive­ly. That's very wel­come. The oth­er fea­ture is an in­fra-red light, which can be used in place of a re­mote at the home en­ter­tain­ment cen­ter. This is a fea­ture Sony pi­o­neered in its An­droid tablets. It's wel­come, too-some peo­ple spend hun­dreds of dol­lars on uni­ver­sal re­motes, which the Galaxy Note ef­fec­tive­ly re­places with this fea­ture. How­ev­er, the in­clud­ed soft­ware didn't work well with my TV and stereo, so this will take some tin­ker­ing to get right. Com­pared with oth­er tablets that run Google's An­droid soft­ware, you're not giv­ing much up by get­ting a Galaxy Note. Sam­sung's quot­ed bat­tery life of nine hours is some­what short­er than equiv­a­lent mod­els, pos­si­bly be­cause of the pen-sens­ing lay­er or the new proces­sor. The Note runs Ice Cream Sand­wich, the next-to-lat­est ver­sion of An­droid, and can be up­grad­ed to Jel­ly Bean, the lat­est. It has a fast proces­sor and a big screen. At $499, it costs $100 more than the pen-less Galaxy Tab 2 10.1, which has the same size screen but a slow­er proces­sor.

The Asus Trans­former se­ries of tablets takes an­oth­er tack: They're built to work with an ac­ces­so­ry key­board, which al­so con­tains an ex­tra bat­tery and more con­nec­tion ports. That's an­oth­er way a com­peti­tor tries to take ad­van­tage of a blind spot for Ap­ple and the iPad, for which phys­i­cal key­boards seem like an af­ter­thought. To­geth­er, Asus and Sam­sung's strate­gies could add up to a very at­trac­tive tablet in­deed. For now, and for most peo­ple, the iPad is still the bet­ter buy. The main rea­son is that there's much more, and bet­ter, third-par­ty soft­ware avail­able for it. But the Galaxy Note shows that the pres­sure is build­ing on the iPad, and Ap­ple will have to work if it wants to main­tain its lead.


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