So Samsung had its little press event in Barcelona on Sunday, right before Mobile World Congress properly kicked off, and unveiled the Galaxy Note 8.0. An 8 inch tablet. With the S Pen. And, this is the part thats been rattling around my head since I read about it Sunday night, you can apparently hold this thing up to your ear and make a phone call on it, at least on the 3G and LTE versions.
I dont know why this delights me as much as it does. Ive been carrying a Note II for a few months now (yes, the giant one, yes people stare, no I dont care anymore) and Ive made my peace with looking a little silly holding a phone the size of a small paperback to my face. But an 8 inch tablet? Thats not a phone call anymore, thats a hostage negotiation prop.
Specs-wise its nothing shocking if youve been paying attention to the Android world the last year: 1280x800 display, quad core Exynos chip on the WiFi model (different silicon on the LTE version from what I gather), Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean out of the box, S Pen support carried over from the Note line. Samsung is saying March for European availability with other markets trailing after, which is basically Samsungs usual playbook: announce everywhere, ship in waves, confuse everyone about when their specific country actually gets the thing.
What I keep coming back to isnt the hardware, its the positioning. Samsung has decided that instead of picking a lane, phone, tablet, laptop, theyre just going to fill every centimeter of the size spectrum and let the market sort it out. A 5.3 inch Note, an 8 inch Note, 10.1 inch tablets, the regular Galaxy S line under 5 inches. Its kind of insane when you list it out like that, and it also seems to be working, which tells you something about how much of the "what screen size is correct" debate from 2011 and 2012 was just tech blogger opinion dressed up as consumer wisdom. Turns out a decent chunk of people just want the biggest screen that still fits their bag.
I will say the S Pen stuff is the one part of this ecosystem I actually use for real, not as a gimmick. I take meeting notes with it on my Note II more than I type them now, which I wouldnt have predicted a year ago when I assumed stylus input on phones was a dead idea Samsung was stubbornly reviving. Handwriting recognition still isnt great and I mostly just keep the notes as scribbles rather than converting them to text, but the low friction of pull out pen, write thing, put pen back beats unlocking, opening an app, and typing for the kind of fast capture I actually need most days.
Anyway. Mobile World Congress proper opens Monday and theres apparently a wall of Firefox OS and Ubuntu phone demos coming out of it, plus whatever Nokia and Sony have queued up, so Ill probably have more to say once the actual show floor stuff starts landing instead of just the Sunday-before-the-show press conferences every manufacturer does now to get a jump on coverage.
One more thing before I go, only tangentially related, but its been sitting with me all week: the Yahoo memo about ending work from home. I dont work at Yahoo and never will, but I do about half my work from a coffee shop or my kitchen table, and the whole debate happening across every tech blog right now over whether remote workers are slacking off has put me in a weirdly defensive mood for a fight that isnt even mine. I get why a company mid-turnaround wants everyone in a building together. I also think if your best idea for fixing collaboration is "make everyone commute," youve diagnosed the symptom and not the disease. Not my company, not my call, just an opinion I apparently needed to type out somewhere.
Back to phones and giant styluses next time, probably.