Samsung showed off the Galaxy Note II in Berlin this week, right before IFA officially kicked off, and I have to admit I sat there reading the liveblogs with a weird mix of vindication and dread. Vindication because I bought the original Note back in February and spent a solid month getting made fun of for it. Dread because the thing just got bigger and I know myself well enough to know I'm going to want it.
For anyone who missed it: 5.5-inch HD Super AMOLED screen, 720x1280, quad-core Exynos chip at 1.6GHz, 2 gigs of RAM, Jelly Bean out of the box, a 3100mAh battery that's actually removable (remember when that was just how phones worked). The S Pen is the bigger deal here honestly - Samsung bumped it up to 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity, which sounds like a spec sheet flex until you've actually used the stylus on the first Note to sign a form or scribble a diagram in a meeting. It's genuinely useful in a way that surprised me, and I was skeptical going in.
No US carrier date yet, no price, Samsung's saying Europe gets it in October and everywhere else "by the end of the year," which at this point is basically Samsung-speak for whenever they feel like it. The first Note took its sweet time getting to AT&T too.
Here's my actual complaint though, and it's not really about the phone. It's about how fast the narrative flipped. When the original Note showed up at IFA last year, the tech press spent a solid two weeks calling it absurd. Ridiculous. A phone that big is a phone nobody asked for, cant fit in a normal pocket, who is this even for. I remember a review that used the phrase "comically large" un-ironically. Fair enough, it was a big phone. But now, a year later, everyone's quietly speccing out their own giant-screen answer and nobody wants to say the word phablet out loud because it still sounds stupid, but that's what we're all doing. I don't need anyone to admit they were wrong. I'd just like the discourse to catch up to the fact that Samsung called this one correctly, is all.
And look, the pocket thing is real - I'm not going to pretend the Note doesn't look ridiculous next to a normal Android phone, let alone next to whatever a future smaller iPhone ends up looking like. Mine sits weird in front pockets, works fine in a jacket, and I've had exactly one person on the train ask me if it's a phone or a tablet, which, fair question honestly. But I take notes at conferences with the pen instead of hauling a laptop, I read on it on the train without squinting, and the battery genuinely gets me through a full day of actual use, not the fantasy "full day" phone reviewers always seem to have in mind. I'll take a slightly absurd pocket bulge for that trade every time.
Sony also had a phone at the same event worth a mention, the Xperia T, which is getting attention mostly because it's the phone in the new Bond movie coming out this fall. 4.6-inch screen, 13-megapixel camera, dual-core at 1.5GHz. Perfectly fine mid-tier flagship, nothing that's going to make anyone forget the Note conversation, but it's a decent-looking phone and I'll be curious whether the movie tie-in actually moves units the way these things are supposed to.
The elephant in the room this week is obviously still the Apple-Samsung verdict from last week and what it means for products like this one going forward, but that's a much bigger post than I want to write on a Labor Day evening, and plenty of other people are already writing it. I'll just say this: if you're the kind of person who thought the original Galaxy Note was a weird evolutionary dead end, you should probably prepare yourself, because dead ends don't usually get sequels with better specs and a longer battery. This one's not going away. Might as well get used to bigger phones now, because in a year everyone's "normal" phone is probably going to look a lot like what I've been carrying around getting laughed at for since February.