Performance

Over the past two years tablets have become used in our household regularly. My first tablet I hardly used it at all beyond the novelty of it all. Slowly they have grown on us and now my wife and I both use ours daily for various reasons. Once we get beyond our Wi-Fi the usage drops off considerably. Frankly we use them a lot to settle disputes while watching TV, play games while sitting on the porch or in bed, and even for reading in the bathroom or tub. With the Galaxy Note 10.1 sporting high speed internet I was excited to put it to use but unlike my wife’s Nexus 7 I found it a little harder to carry around with me. Oddly enough I love the larger form factor in the house simply because it is much easier to read my magazines on it as well as gaming.

Even with the form factor being a little large for taking with me at times I could see this being a perfect device to keep your kids busy on a long trip or even a way for you or your wife to catch up on a little internet while the other drives on a trip as well. Verizon’s 4g internet was amazing for me, even out in our rural area. Multiple times at places I found the 4g to be faster than their internet even. The best part of course is that you can take that internet with you on the go.

We put the Note 10.1 through our test suite to check out its performance including a new benchmark from 3DMark called Ice Storm. A few of you might remember seeing that on the PC version of 3DMark, you can actually put your mobile device up against your PC if you want to see how they compare. In most of our tests the performance of the Note 10.1 was in line with the Nexus 7. The newer Note 2 did out perform in a few cases and the Nexus 4 just blew everything else away in our 3D testing. Battery testing wasn’t too bad at all considering the screen size. We ended up with 252.25 minutes, less than what we saw on the smaller Note 2 but still impressive none the less.

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What really set the Note 10.1 apart for me was all of the Samsung specific features, just like our experience with the Note 2. Obviously we have the S Pen, with that any time you need to type and you have the pen out it will actually pop up a nice paper for you to write rather than type. This took a little getting used to for me but even with my chicken scratches it didn’t have any trouble reading my writing. The only issue I had here was with the timing of my writing, if I stopped at all it would send it into my document even if I wasn’t ready. I would almost need a button to send if I were going to use this feature day to day. I was also very happy with the multiple window ability on the Note 10.1. While watching a basketball game I was also able to jump on reddit and read around as well. Being someone who uses multiple monitors every day, this feature helped me adjust to working on a smaller area. I should also point out with this that you can do more than one or two tabs if needed as well, even in the split window mode (they hide behind other windows).

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