Spent part of Wednesday afternoon refreshing liveblogs out of Berlin instead of doing actual work, which is exactly the kind of thing this blog exists to confess. IFA officially opens Friday, but Samsung got out ahead of the show floor with its own event this week to unveil the Galaxy Note II, and I have some things to say about it.
First, the numbers, because I know some of you skip straight to that part: 5.5-inch Super AMOLED display at 1280x720, a quad-core Exynos chip clocked at 1.6GHz, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean out of the box, and the S Pen is back, now shaped slightly differently so you can actually tell which end is up without looking. Apparently that was a real complaint about the original Note. I did not know that until this week and now cannot stop thinking about it.
Here's my opinion, and I'll just say it plainly: 5.5 inches is a stupid size for a phone. I borrowed an original Note for about six weeks last winter from a friend who'd upgraded, and I never made peace with pulling it out of my jacket pocket on a crowded train without clipping someone in the shoulder. It's not really a phone. It's a phone-shaped tablet that also makes calls, worn like a slab of granite in your coat.
And yet. The first Note reportedly moved something like ten million units, which isn't a number you hit by accident, and Samsung clearly thinks the market agrees with them more than it agrees with me. Maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe I'm exactly the target buyer and too stubborn to admit it. Either way, they're doubling down instead of walking it back, and that tells you something about how the first one actually sold, spec-sheet jokes aside.
The other IFA item that actually caught me was Sony's Xperia T, mostly for the movie tie-in, since it's supposedly the phone Bond carries in the next film, which doesn't come out until November, so who knows if that detail survives the final edit. 4.6-inch display, dual-core chip, and it ships running Ice Cream Sandwich even though Jelly Bean has already been out for a couple months. That's the pattern with these European launch phones every single time: announce in late summer, actually go on sale six or eight weeks later, and by then the software's already a generation behind. I griped about the exact same thing when the Xperia S showed up back in February, and nothing about it has changed.
It's a strange week to be writing about phone specs at all, with the Apple/Samsung verdict from last Friday still settling and every tech writer I follow trying to work out what a billion-dollar judgment actually means going forward. I have to assume patent lawyers on both sides are reading this week's press releases a little more carefully than they used to. That's a whole separate post I don't feel like writing today, and plenty of people have already spent the better part of a week on it, so I'll leave it there.
What I actually want is something in between what I've got now and a Note — bigger screen, still a phone. The rumor mill keeps saying that's roughly what Apple's cooking up too, a taller screen rather than a wider one, which if true is a far more sensible way to solve "I want to see more on my phone" than "here, hold a small clipboard to your face." Nothing's confirmed, there's apparently an event coming later this month, and I'm not going to pretend I know more than the rumor sites do.
For now my pocket stays Note-free. Ask me again in a year and I'm sure I'll have caved, the way I cave on basically everything eventually — see also the Kindle I swore I'd never buy, which has been sitting on my nightstand since March.