Samsung launches Galaxy Note 10.1 in New Zealand

While the news lately has been about Samsung's much publicised battle with Apple in the US over patents and copying, New Zealand has, so far, been unaffected by injunctions, bans or lawsuits between the two smartphone giants.

And it definitely hasn't stopped Samsung from releasing new products here: last night in Auckland, Samsung launched the Galaxy Note 10.1 just in time for New Zealand Fashion Week. Samsung is sponsoring this year's Fashion Week and providing six fashion bloggers with Galaxy Note 10.1 devices to use while covering it.

Here at PC World, we're not quite so concerned with how we'll look at Fashion Week, but we did want to take a closer look at the key new features that Samsung has included in the Note 10.1: multitasking of a sort (split-screen), a stylus (S-Pen) and Android 4.0.

We only got a few minutes hands-on with the Note 10.1 at the event last night, and our review model hasn't yet arrived, but here's what we can tell you:

As with the original Galaxy Note, Samsung has designed the Note 10.1 with creative professionals in mind. It comes with Polaris Office preinstalled, and given its 1024 levels of sensitivity for the S-Pen and tablet, it works far more like a Wacom tablet running Android than many Android tablets. This also distinguishes it from it's 10.1-inch sibling, the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1, which comes with more on-board storage, but without the stylus, software additions, sensitivity levels or S-Pen.

When it comes to specifications, the 1.4GHz quad-core Exynos processor that powers the Note 10.1 provides great responsiveness. With the 5-inch Note, we found that writing with a finger had noticeable delay before the letters appeared onscreen - not so with the Note 10.1.

The screen is 1280 x 800-pixel resolution, and there's 16GB of storage, with 2GB RAM and a microSD slot that takes cards up to 64GB.

With the S-Pen come a bunch of S-Pen apps, such as S-Note and S-Planner. These make use of the levels of sensitivity.

The battery is 7,000mAh, which should provide for 10 hours of battery life or more.

Multitasking comes in the form of split screen apps - you can assign half the screen to one app, then open a second app to crop an image, pull content from the internet or similar. In addition, the movie playback is, as with the Galaxy S III, floating - you can view movies no matter what other apps are open, using Samsung's pop up play.

To us, the most obvious thing about the Galaxy Note 10.1 is that it's far more likely to compete with Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 tablets than with existing Android or iOS tablets.

Our review model will arrive later today, and we'll provide images and a review as soon as we've had the chance for extended hands-on time.

The Galaxy Note 10.1 costs $799 for the Wi-Fi-only version and $999 for the Wi-Fi+3G. It's available now.

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