Design

A first look at the Galaxy Note 10.1 shows that the design is rather similar to the Galaxy Note 3 smartphone/phablet. Overall, it could even be the bigger brother of Samsung's latest and greatest Android phones, at least when the screen is facing upwards. The same story goes when you flip the tablet around, you will notice that the back cover has been made from textured leather like the Note 3 and it is a completly new design, at least when it comes to tablets. This gives the tablet a high-end finish and a quality feel which you simply do not get with other tablets, but lets talk about this in the summer when we have +25 degrees and sweaty hands. When it comes to the display, Samsung is using Super Clear LCD capactive touchscreen with 16M colors which covers the 10.1-inch panel. Next to the Samsung logo, there is a front-facing camera. The usual buttons can be found on the right edge. In this case, there is the SIM-card and SD-Card slots, S-pen stylus as well as one of the speakers. In the left part we have a 3.5 millimeter jack and the second stereo speaker. On the back you will find the main rear camera with LED flash and in the top we see volume control, power button and IR receiver. Regarding build quality Samsung really did a good job. When you are holing this device in your hands it feels very sturdy and it also feels like it has been milled from one piece although that is not the case. In fact, the main chassis is made from plastic and there is a big additional aluminum plate providing the tablet with additional stiffness and causing a higher quality feel.

Display

Display size is set at 10.1-inch and thanks to a WQXGA 2560 x 1600 resolution, which adds up to 299 ppi pixel density, everything is very sharp. Reading text is especially a pleasure. Apart from that, Samsung has been using an 10-inch Super Clear multitouch sharp LCD with 10-point touch, which offers a very wide viewing angle compared to other panels and life-like colors. They are strong and the saturation is extremely good. On another note, we had a closer look at brightness and it turns out that this appears to be the Achilles heel of this tablet. The maximum value we measured was at 411 candela per square meter and average brightness was no more than 235 candela per square meter. At least black level was good with 0.47 candela per square meter. This level of brightness makes it hard for read text, when there is sunlight shining directly on the display. This is really a pity, since contrast is well above 1000:1 and therefore by far above average.

Camera

Despite the fact that tablets are usually not the most sophisticated devices to take pictures, Samsung showed a nice camera performance on this tablet. Samsung decided to equip the Galaxy Note 10.1 with two cameras. On the back there is an 8-megapixel one with AF and LED flash which can capture pictures at 3264x2448 pixels and record video at 1080p 60ps (LTE mode) and there is a 2-megapixel camera in the front which is also able to record videos with 1080p at 30ps. It is definitely the first time that the tablet camera surprised us. Sharpness could definitely be better but the camera is more than sufficient for snapshots. When shooting a video we were actually quite surprised to see that colors are actually richer. At 1920 x 1080 resolution and 60 fps the quality was actually decent. Still, the quality could be improved but the camera in the Galaxy Note 10.1 can definitely be a match for most smartphones on the market.

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Page 1 - Introduction

Page 2 - Specifications

Page 3 - Design / Display / Camera

Page 4 - Performance / User Interface

Page 5 - Benchmarks

Page 6 - Conclusion