You may think Samsung is crazy for bringing back the stylus in the touchscreen smartphone age, but the surprisingly strong sales of its Galaxy Note smartphone line don’t lie.

Now Samsung is committing itself even more to the stylus market by purchasing 5 percent of Wacom for $58.2 million, the company announced this morning. Wacom is famous for its pressure-sensitive stylus technology, and it’s also provided the stylus tech in Samsung’s Galaxy Note phones and tablets.

While it’s not a huge investment for Samsung, it’s a clear sign the company doesn’t plan to back away from the stylus market anytime soon. Wacom says the investment will be used for product development, manufacturing, and supply chain enhancements for Samsung-supplied products by March 2013. Expect even more Samsung devices to sports styluses over the next few years (it seems only inevitable that the Galaxy S line will eventually get some sort of stylus support).

Samsung made a good effort with the stylus in the first Galaxy Note, though it wasn’t as accurate as I would have liked. With the Galaxy Note 2, Samsung vastly improved the stylus accuracy and pressure sensitivity. The company also added a nifty “hover” feature, that lets you manipulate objects on the phone’s screen without actually touching it.

Via Android Authority; Photo by Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Samsung appears to be close to releasing a hybrid laptop-tablet running Windows 8, according to a recently released video teaser from the South Korean tech giant.

The cryptic video shows a laptop with what appears to be a stylus, indicating that it probably features a touchscreen as well. This device could be similar to Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga, another laptop-tablet hybrid.

“The time is near for the big reveal,” Samsung wrote in the description for the video. “Take a look at this video for a glimpse into our newest Windows 8-ready innovation.”

We believe Windows 8 is better suited for tablets than desktops and laptops, so it’s not surprising to see new form factors that include touchscreens. Windows 8′s apps, which are already looking pretty slick, also are better suited for touch at the moment. On top of this, an analyst we spoke to believe hybrid devices will be one factor for Windows 8′s success.

Check out the video teaser below:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Samsung’s latest tablet, the Galaxy Note 10.1, has just about everything you’d want, as well as many things you’d never even think to ask for. But while its theoretically an impressive device, the Note 10.1 is a good example of why cramming in too much hardware and features without a cohesive direction can lead to disaster.

If you couldn’t tell by the name alone, the Note 10.1 is what happens when you marry Samsung’s Galaxy Note smartphone (which has sold surprisingly well despite its bulky 5.3-inch size) with its Galaxy Tab slates. The Note 10.1′s key feature is the S Pen stylus, a radically improved version of the one found with the Galaxy Note, which lets you treat the tablet like a piece of digital paper for scribbling notes and drawings.

With the S Pen and clever multitasking capabilities, Samsung is hoping to elevate the Note 10.1 beyond its tablet trappings and position it as a true productivity device. That’s smart: A common complaint with tablets is that they’re great for consuming media, but without a keyboard, they’re not that useful for doing actual work. But for all of its effort, Samsung has ended up crafting a tablet that could actually make it more difficult for you to get things done.

The Good: It dares to be different

The best thing about the Galaxy Note 10.1 is more conceptual than an actual feature. After being assaulted by dozens of similar Android tablets over the past few years (the Nexus 7 is the only one I’d ever recommend, unless I don’t like you very much), it’s nice to see Samsung actually trying to do something different with this one. Samsung’s vision may not have been entirely successful, but like Ridley Scott’s pretty-but-dumb movie Prometheus this summer, you can at least appreciate the effort.

Even though the Galaxy Note 10.1 was officially unveiled in the U.S. last week, we first saw it back at Mobile World Congress in February. Samsung representatives told VentureBeat that it almost released the Note 10.1 several times this year, but constant retooling held the tablet back. Since February, Samsung has added a slot to hold the S Pen stylus at the bottom of the device (a useful feature, but one that really should have been there since the beginning), and the capability to multitask apps by running them side-by-side.

Samsung was clearly desperate to get this tablet right. Ultimately, we see more desperation than success from the Galaxy Note 10.1, but I’m hoping that Samsung will eventually refine some of the interesting features in this tablet. For one, running apps side-by-side is actually useful on a tablet: You could, for example, browse the web and jot down notes at the same time. But Samsung only offers the feature with a few apps on the Note 10.1, and occasional slowdowns make it a chore. I’m impatient for the day when we can multitask on a tablet as easily as PCs (or at least some PCs), but it looks like I’ll have to wait a bit longer.

I found the S Pen to be an interesting curiosity in the original Galaxy Note, a phone that’s so dorky I couldn’t help but dig it. The stylus is even more useful on the larger tablet screen, since your hand can rest more naturally and you have more room on which to scribble. With 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity and Wacom technology (beloved by digital artists), the S Pen is by far the most powerful tablet stylus we’ve seen. Handwriting feels more accurate than that of the original Galaxy Note, and I have a feeling that artists will love the S Pen’s flexibility when it comes to drawing and manipulating images with the bundled Photoshop Touch app.

Samsung also added some additional functionality to its S Note software: Now you can draw shapes and write mathematical equations within the app, and they’ll be translated into cleaner versions that look like they were created on a computer.

With all of those improvements, it’s just too bad that Samsung’s Android tweaks hold the S Pen back.

The bad: Just about everything else

The Galaxy Note 10.1 sports a gorgeous 10-inch screen and some blazing fast hardware, including a quad-core 1.4 gigahertz Exynos processor and 2GBs of RAM, and yet the tablet inexplicably feels slow when performing simple tasks. It’s sometimes sluggish when moving between home screens or switching between apps, and it’s particularly problematic when you try to run two apps side-by side.

You can blame Samsung’s TouchWiz software for those issues, which rests atop the Note 10.1’s Android 4.0 operating system. TouchWiz was one of the few glaring issues with the Galaxy S III smartphone, but Samsung is clearly too eager to put its stamp on Android instead of slimming down its software. Not only does TouchWiz make the Note 10.1 occasionally slow, it sometimes gets in the way of the S Pen, which is supposed to be the tablet’s core feature.

Samsung could potentially offer some software updates that makes TouchWiz perform better, and it might improve the Note 10.1’s speed when it upgrades the tablet to Android 4.1, but that’s a long shot. From what we’ve seen in the past, Samsung doesn’t move very quickly with Android updates, and I haven’t seen TouchWiz performance get better over time on any other Samsung devices.

While Samsung touts the tablet as a productivity machine, the speed issues actually make it more difficult to get work done than on Apple’s iPad, which has no stylus and lacks side-by-side app multitasking. It’s particularly disappointing given that the Note 10.1 has more than enough hardware to be speedy. Instead, it’s betrayed by sloppy software.

The Galaxy Note 10.1’s speed issues are even more troubling after the release of the $200 Nexus 7, which offers the fastest Android tablet experience we’ve ever seen. Given that the Note 10.1 is priced the same as the iPad, starting at $499 for the 16GB version, and sports some of the most impressive hardware in a mobile device, there’s just no excuse for not being as fast as a tablet less than half its price.

For $499, the Note 10.1 also feels surprisingly cheap, thanks to Samsung’s love of glossy plastic cases. The rear of the device feels shockingly flexible, and the glossy material is also a terrible fingerprint magnet. Again, the Nexus 7 beats the Note 10.1 on this. The Nexus 7 just feels like a more expensive and luxurious device, which is simply inexcusable for Samsung.

The verdict: The biggest tablet disappointment of the year

Ultimately, the Galaxy Note 10.1 feels like a hodgepodge of great ideas mixed in with plenty of bad ones. It’s almost as if there was no one at Samsung who could simply say “no” to the pile-on of features. In its attempt to create a powerful multitasking tablet, Samsung has created a monster.

I’m notoriously cynical about tablets, especially those of the Android variety. At this point, I’ve grown numb to the “me too” Android tablets, which generally offer nothing unique to differentiate themselves from the competition. But the Galaxy Note 10.1 is an even bigger disappointment to me because Samsung actually tried to be innovative — it just missed the mark by a mile.

There was plenty of promise in bringing the S Pen to a tablet, but the Galaxy Note 10.1 unfortunately fails to live up to that because it’s ultimately not a very good tablet. No amount of extra accessories, however useful, will fix that.

I’m hoping this isn’t the end of the S Pen. Samsung should keep refining the technology and continue to feature it in upcoming devices (the Galaxy Note II is expected to debut next month). The company has hit on an interesting concept, it just needs to get the execution down.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Before you ask, yes, Samsung did make a pretty big deal about the Galaxy Note 10.1 way back in February at Mobile World Congress. But the stylus-equipped Android tablet we’re actually getting is another beast entirely.

Samsung officially unveiled the U.S. version of the Galaxy Note 10.1 at a crowded press event in New York City this morning (after spilling most of the beans a few weeks ago). The device sports a more powerful version of Samsung’s S Pen stylus, which first appeared in the gigantic Galaxy Note smartphone, as well as a bevy of features that aim to differentiate from the crowded (and mostly sad) Android tablet market.

The Galaxy Note 10.1 will be available in stores tomorrow, August 16, starting at $499 for the 16-gigabyte version and $599 for the 32GB variant. The tablet runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and Samsung also confirmed that it will get upgraded to Jelly Bean”sometime this year.”

Samsung almost released the Galaxy Note 10.1 several times this year, but it kept finding new features and tweaks it wanted to implement before it hit the market, company representatives told a small gathering of journalists last week. The Galaxy Note 10.1 is being referred to as Samsung’s “hero product” for 2012, and it’s evident from the constant retooling that the company was desperate to get this tablet right.

On the surface, the Galaxy Note 10.1 doesn’t look much different than the tablet we saw back in February. It still sports a plastic case with metallic accents, and of course, it has a gorgeous 10.1-inch display. But thanks to all of the retooling, the tablet now features a slot for storing the S Pen (just like the Palm Pilots of yore), a 1.4 gigahertz quad-core processor, and 2 gigabytes of RAM.

The tablet will also support an additional 32GB of storage via SD card. Taken as a whole, the Note 10.1′s specs make it seem more like a traditional PC than a mere tablet.

Samsung also implemented some unique new software features, including the ability to run multiple apps on the same screen, which brings a nifty dash of multitasking to the sometimes stale world of single-screen tablet apps, and an intriguing hover mechanic with the stylus, which lets you mimic a desktop computer’s ability to hover the mouse pointer over certain links. Currently only a few apps support Samsung’s Multiscreen technology, but already there’s plenty of productivity potential with it. For example, you can view the Android web browser on one half of the screen, while taking notes in S Note on the other.

Apple has been arguing fiercely in court for the past week that Samsung is nothing but a copycat, but the unique features of the Galaxy Note 10.1 prove Samsung can also put its nose to the grindstone and innovate as well.

To prove just how useful the Galaxy Note 10.1 is, Samsung brought film director Baz Luhrmann on stage. Luhrmann seemed really excited about the tablet (or maybe he was just excited about the paycheck in his wallet) and how it’s changed his workflow. He mentioned that he had to literally cut and paste paper to make storyboards for his hit film Romeo & Juliet, but the Note allows him to do much of that work digitally for his next project, The Great Gatsby.

Samsung showed off the Galaxy Note 10.1′s GroupCast feature in a demo with the press, which lets you collaborate on a presentation in real-time with other Galaxy Note tablets. (Much like the group sharing features on the Galaxy S III, GroupCast is really only useful if you’re surrounded by identical Samsung devices, fat chance of that.)

We also saw how Adobe’s PhotoShop Touch app can take advantage of the S Pen’s 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity. Photoshop Touch will be pre-loaded on the Galaxy Note 10.1, and it’ll work together with your existing Photoshop files on Adobe’s Creative Cloud service.

I had a brief amount of hands-on time with the Galaxy Note 10.1, and I still echo my sentiment from back in February: this is what the S Pen was made for. The larger screen makes handwriting much more intuitive than on the Galaxy Note phone, and there’s a noticeably better level of response too with the new stylus. And thanks to the Note 10.1′s speedy processor and RAM, nothing seems to slow the tablet down, something that will be particularly important for app multitasking.

While Samsung’s tablets in the past have been among the best Android had to offer, they still felt restricted by Google’s seeming inability to comprehend the tablet market. There still aren’t many great Android tablet apps out there, but the custom tweaks that Samsung has made with the Galaxy Note 10.1 more than make up for Android’s other tablet deficiencies.

While it hasn’t displaced the Nexus 7 as my favorite Android tablet (and the only one mainstream consumers should consider buying), the Galaxy Note 10.1 could be a dream device for consumers who can take advantage of the S Pen.

Look for my full review of the Galaxy Note 10.1 soon.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Samsung didn’t do a good job of hiding the fact that it was going to show off a larger Galaxy Note here at Mobile World Congress (there were giant posters everywhere before the show started), but that doesn’t mean the device is any less impressive.

As the video below shows, the Galaxy Note 10.1 looks a lot like the company’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet. What’s different is that the Note 10.1 includes support for the company’s S Pen stylus, which is powered by Wacom technology. I found the S Pen to be a nice addition to the original Galaxy Note, but that device was too small to work well for handwriting, and too large to work well as a phone.

The Galaxy Note 10.1, however, seems perfectly suited to handwriting and drawing with the S Pen.

I only had a few minutes to play with the device, but from the get-go I found it easier to write on the Galaxy 10.1 than I could with the 5.3-inch Galaxy Note. And given that Samsung’s Android tablets so far haven’t exactly sold like hotcakes, the company could use a significant feature to differentiate its tablets from the iPad.