NEW YORK (AP) — With Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 10.1, the rebels have scored a small victory in the tablet-computer war in which a huge army — Apple — dominates the land. It’s a tablet that does something the iPad doesn’t do, and it does it well. This victory won’t win the war, though.
Now available in the U.S., 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.
The styluses available for the iPad are 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.
LOST TRIAL
Last year the HTC Flyer, another iPad competitor, was half the size of the iPad yet cost just as much, and that was without the pen. 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.
WHAT’S THE USE?
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 onscreen 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.
iPAD SCREEN WINS
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.
Photos Courtesy of httpinsider.com
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