Samsung Galaxy Note II (GT-N7100) Review

Excellent media playback

The video player supports MP4, MKV and everything in between. Samsung has beefed up its video player with every codec under the sun and anything and everything just plays flawlessly. 1080p video just works and the new Pop up play feature works as advertised. We’re not too sure how useful it will actually be in everyday use, but it’s a good option to have. You also have the option to share the video, edit it, view it by chapters or stream the audio via Bluetooth.

Connectivity
The Note II is a quad-band GSM handset with quad-band 3G support and LTE. You also get dual-band Wi-Fi with hotspot capabilities and Wi-Fi Direct, GPS with A-GPS support and GLONASS, USB OTG, DLNA, external storage up to 64GB, Bluetooth 4.0, TV out via MHL and NFC, which covers all your connectivity options. Call reception has been handled pretty well and in our test call, the recipient could hear our voice well even in noisy areas like in shops or on the street. The speaker is not as loud as we would have liked. Alerts are loud but when it comes to using the speakerphone, it’s not very loud. The stock keyboard is good enough to get the job done, but for some reason we couldn’t find the option for auto complete. The word prediction works well but when you hit space, you want the rightly spelled word to appear not have to select it from the carousel everytime. This gets a little annoying. Another new feature is ‘One-handed operation’. Due to wide nature of the screen, it’s not always possible to type out a text message when using it with one hand because your thumb simply cannot stretch that far. Enabling this shrinks the keyboard, dial pad or calculator to one side of the screen so you can use it with one hand. You can position on either side depending on which hand you’re using. This only works with the stock Samsung keyboard.

Web browsing experience is pretty good

Browsing through image heavy websites didn’t pose problems of any kinds, as panning and zooming was smooth and lag free. Social networking integration has been handled extremely well and Samsung’s social tagging feature did recognise and instantly tag our subject. The lag-free experience can actually be attributed to Project Butter in Jelly Bean more than the hardware in the Note II itself.

Misc. Apps
Other features include 50GB of Dropbox storage, AllShare Play for DLNA streaming, Learning Hub, Game Hub, Readers Hub for ebooks and My Files file manager.