custom rom samsung galaxy s3 xda

so here we are with the samsung galaxy note 2. we are going to be taking a look at the hardware and the software and seeing really what samsung areoffering in this rather large but almost perfectly formed package. this is samsung's latest and greatest phone coming in with a 5.5 inch super amoled rgb screen. it really is a monster, this is one big phone compared to something like the galaxy s3

or the iphone 5 you're really going to notice the size of this phone. that's not to say that it's too big but it won't suit certain people. you're going to find it too difficult to hold in your hands i'm afraid, for a long period of time. now, other than the huge 5.5 inch screen they've put a 1.6gighz quad core xenos proccessor backed up with 2gig of system ram and either a choice of 16, 32 or 64 gig of storage.

this is a big beefy phone. a 1.6 ghz processor quad-core it absolutely flies for gaming and for practically anything else you could throw at it as well for that matter. anyway, on the front of the device we have a1.9 mega pixel front facing camera, a couple of sensors

and the grille for your ear piece. on the bottom we have a physical home button. i know a lot of people prefer softbuttons as dictated by google for jellybean, it does make a bit of a difference having a physical home button there though, because you've got double click options, longpress etcetera, it seems to feel a little bit more solid. usingsoft touch buttons on the nexus 7 or the galaxy nexus, sometimes it justdoesn't feel right, having that physical

button there does make a bit of adifference. the side of the phone is very very thin. it's about the same thickness as the galaxy s3 and so feels good in the hand. if you've got big hands you'll be more than comfortable holdingthe galaxy note 2. the tapered edges again really aid the feeling that it's sitting comfortably in your hand,

and actually sitting in the palm of your hand properly, not kind of just raised up on the edges, or anything like that. it makes for a very pleasurable holding experience. on the left hand side of the device are the volume rockers, volume up, volume down. on the other side of the device, is your power button, which for my liking is a little bit on the smallside maybe,

and also just on this edge here you can see the back cover pop get your fingernail or something into the corner there and pop. the back cover is a bit on the stiff side. on the top of the galaxy note 2 you have your 3mm headphone jack and a small noise cancelling microphone, and on the bottom of the device the micro usb and another noise cancelling microphone.

on the back, an eight megapixel shooter which isexactly the same as the galaxy s3 and an led flash which for my opinion is slightly on the blue hue side when using it. it's not the best flashin the world but it gets the job done. at the bottom of the device is your speaker grille which is actually covered over bymore than 50% with a small piece of plastic effectively, the backcover. a little bit of an odd design decision there but this speaker is very, very loud anyway, certainly much louder than the s3

probably around twice the size of the s3 although it is buried in the plastic. and then we have the galaxy note 2 s-pen which is available at the bottom of the device and this provides touch control using a pen stylus device. it's actually a digital stylus meaning that it's actually communicatingwith the phone simultaneously

and we'll get onto those features in another part of the review. inside the back cover of the device we have a very, very large 3100 ma battery. that's going to be driving the device for really a good two days on standbygeneral usage, so if you're just checking your email, playing the odd game and so on two days is very viable out of this battery.

however, if you're really hammering your phone, making lots of phone calls wi-fi turned on, gps, really running that screen at the highest brightness settings then about a day out of the battery is what you are going to get. but for a device of this size, running a 5.5inch screen, that's still pretty spectacular, it has to be said. one interesting thing to note is they've actually moved the nfc chip, from the battery onto its own

back cover so now the nfc is part of the back cover not the battery. if you want to go andbuy aftermarket battery third-party you no longer have to worry about does it have nfc built-in now the nfc connectors are there and that powers the nfc chip. the sim card tray is here, underneath the battery, you will need to take the battery out to get to the sim

but crucially no longer do you have to take your battery out to get to the resource, you can now just pop the memory card in as and when, really quickly. pull the back cover off, pop the card in, pop it back together. and hear you can see the speaker, big chunky speaker. but if you look at this piece of plastic here, you can see effectively they have covered it over.

little bit odd. big speaker tiny hole. bit of a shame. other than that though, this really is a beautifully well made piece of kit. some people complain that the back cover is a bit flexible. i would probably agree with you but bearing in mind that there's plenty of really good quality back covers out there, with various extra features on there, much much simpler. whether we'll now have to also be keeping our eyes out for ones which have the nfc chips

or if someone is going to be enterprising and come up with a way to remove those and attach them to your back covers, i'm not sure. but all in all, a stonking piece of hardware, certainly this is the cutting edge right now of mobile phone design and specs. a truly beautiful piece of kit. so the galaxy note 2 is running the latestand greatest version of google's android operating system code-named jellybean. the main stand out features here are really for jellybean. and for what samsung have done in general

to integrate their touchless operating system samsung features and apps, and then into the jellybean operating systemhas been beautifully done. if you've already got hold of the samsung galaxy s3 update jellybean then not a huge number of surprises here. if you're brand new to jellybean, if you're previously coming from ice cream sandwich or something like that you're in for real treat.

ok, so first off the main changes are the notification area. the notification area has been completelyoverhauled now, to make it much more user friendly. notifications can provide expanded information if the application has been set up for it and samsung have added their own quick look shortcut bar at the top to the galaxy note 2 and the brightness controls work really nicely and you have settings available at the top here if you tap that

straight into your settings. on your button placements, you have a long press button here, which is actually your back button as welland that will bring up the multi window support which allows you to run two applications simultaneously. long pressing on the home button brings up the running tasks list which you can then quickly close if youwant to and that will clear all your running tasks.

this option on the side, on the left hand side takes you into yourapplications, that are installed, your system memory, 1.75gig available, and your storage. if you long press but go into the centre option it will take you into the google now functionality, which is newfrom google for jellybean, and what this provides is contextual based information about what you are doing.

so for instance, what's the weather like today where i am? if i happen to be going out to a meetingit will check to see whether the traffic is bad and it will reroute me if necessary and it will tell me, would you like to be rerouted, there's bad traffic, that's going to add an extra 10 minutes on to your journey? it will provide the latest sports results.

if you happen to be stood at a bus stop or outside a cinema it will provide the latest listings orbus timetables for you so you know exactly how long you are going to be waiting for your movie or when the next bus is going to be coming along. this level of deep integration with thehandset is absolutely fantastic and on quite a few occasions now i've found it really really useful. something certainly to check out. you can access it also, via this google search strip here

which you can also use to trigger the google voice service as well which will then produce a search for you based on whatyou've said. it can search through images and absolutely anything you need but all powered by google services, areally really nice introduction and it completely out siri's siri! one of the pieces of functionality that samsung have included which i'm not a big fan of, is s voice.

it's their version of siri. personally i don't think it works verywell. it's better at some things than siri and worse at others. personally, i've disabled it. i much preferred google now and i really don't think samsung will continue with s voice for too many years. i think google now will effectively take over from it. but good on samsung for at least putting the functionality in there of voice assistance but none of them work very well and i think google kind of got the

one up on that one by not really doing the personalised voice searching as such, but really relying on the data it holds about us to produce better voice responses and provide data alongside that. all in all, the galaxy note 2 jellybean functionality is a massiveimprovement over the previous ice cream sandwich on the same hardware. the responsiveness of the screen,

how quickly menus open, and applications load is absolutely stunning and while this does have a faster processor and more ram we've seen very similar speed gains and performance boosts in any device that gets jellybean installed on to it. everything is much more snappy so if you are coming from an old handset for android apps or an old iphone you will really notice the difference inspeed.

if you're one of those people that has an existing android phone and you're just waiting for jellybean at the moment, don't be too alarmed that there's a new device come out that's faster. wait until you get jellybean, you'll findyour phone will suddenly be like brand new again, very very quick and responsive. a lot of the software is pretty much standard

from an android perspective. some of the new samsung applications that they've added on are really more updates to the existingstuff to take account of things like the s pen so s note and s planner have been updated to make use of the s pen feature. you now have paper artist which is a fun little drawing game.

they've added a reader's hub ... whichis really like a samsung books and subscription service. a lot of the time you kind of think they are duplicating applications they have already provided, like a samsung apps. why have samsung apps if you have google apps which have all the same apps in there. occasionally a little bit cheaper sometimes a bit more expensive doesn't really make a right lot of sense.

they've also bundled dropbox chat on which is sansung's chat app a bit like what's app. the learning hub which for the life of me i don't really know whythat's been included but i think they're aiming this very much at people in academia as well so you have like a periodicals and journalsoption in there as well. and then, really,

the standard google stuff like google maps is there flipboard has also been included by samsung which has all share which is which is their dlna sharing tool and there's also the music hub and game hub as well. most of the time though, you will find that you will be defaulting back to the google ones because they're what you know and love, although i must say, i do actually quite like music hub and music

app that they've installed it does quite a good job and it's quite pleasing to use. i always found that the music app on ios6 or, well on any apple product was always a bit lacklustre really. great sound quality but not really the best app experience.

i think they've got it really, really well done on the galaxy note 2. ok, let's take a look at the samsung galaxy note 2 s pen. on the bottom of the phone you have the s pen drawer. and inside there, is the s pen and as soon as you take out the device the phone will actually detect that it's going into spen mode. so you'll get the s note pop-up so you can very quickly jot a note down.

you can alter all these things through the settings. and then you also get a new home screen which gives you quick access to s notes and s notes functionality. you can then draw on the screen and it will record that information. you've then got various functionality within the s note that allows you to do erasing and so on or you can use the typing tool which will automatically pop you into ocr mode

so it will then try and detect my awful handwriting, the word i'm trying to say, and remarkably got it right. very, very nice feature, now previously whenever anyone's had a go at doing digitisers and so on on phones or any kind of portable device, they've not done a brilliant job of it and you tend to find it's not very responsive or you end up losing the stylus.

now what samsung have done, they have teamed up with wacom this time so what you have is the market leader in tablet design and pen design working with samsung to create a proper stylus which is actually intelligent in the sense that it's talking to the phone. so you have a button on the side here which can enable extra functionality, in this case

i can use it to grab a screenwrite region by pressing down that button there and and as soon as i press that button down it communicates that button press to the phone. and i can then copy that to the clipboard automatically. or share it with a particular application if i want to. another key feature is that when you take the s pen out you get an audible chime and then a vibration setting as well. so you know it's been taken out and putting it back in causes the same thing to happen.

you get a bit of feedback when this is properly secured. another really nice feature because the pen is communicating constantly with the device, if you happen to leave the pen on the table, and walk away, and haven't put it back into the phone you will actually get a message on the screen saying the pen hasn't been attached properly and please go back and get it. a really really useful feature given how often these styluses tend to get lost. the actual s pen functionality is really, really nicely done.

being able to actually draw on the screen rather than kind of stabbing it with your fat fingers etc, you get a lot more control, but likewisebecause of the way the stylus has been created it doesn't have to touch the screen to interact with the options so you can see here, even though the pen is not quite touching the screen, it's about two millimetres away i'm still able to get functionality just hovering over these menu items. and then, when i actually touch, it does it's thing, and likewise

go into there, but not until i actually want that item so i can basically have a peek look and see what these options are before i actually go ahead and make use of them. this also works in other applications as well so if i come intogallery in here, i can hover over an image and have it peek it for me

and so i can see what's actually insidethat image. if i go into the image i can then also add a photo note. it flips the image round, and i can draw on the back of the image, save for later. so if you take a particular image and you want to add a bit of extra context to it, remind yourself later where you took it or anything like that, or just want to add a funny

little note, you can, and then you can just tap on the image to see the message written on the back. really, really nice little fun feature although something that's pretty muchjust lock to the galaxy note 2. you can't then share this image and have the information written on the back of the image. you just end sharing the front of theimage effectively, but it's just a nice bit of functionality to add into the note 2 experience as it were.

this hovering option works at different levels within the gallery as well so you can use it on the top ends as well. really really nice. if you happen to be working in anapplication which has a lot of scroll, for instance you can actually hover your mouse down at the bottom. not actually working on chrome, but you can actually see here

it is working, to actually highlight links the pen isn't actually touching the link but i'm basically peeking on the link there. in certain applications it doesn't seem to be working in the chrome browser, let's just try it in normal browser. or should we say the android built-in-browser. let's see if it's actually working. you can just see the arrow appearing at the bottom here.

let's get into something where we've got a a long list to scroll if we can ever get there doesn't look like it. let's just... so this is the androidizen website, and if you can see there, now as soon as i've gone with the stylus down to the bottom of the page it's starting to scroll but i'm not actually touching the page. makes for a very, very nice experience. it's a shame this hasn't been ported over to chrome yet.

presumably this functionality will be coming over into the chrome browser but for now you can use it within the standard android browser if you want to. it just makes for a quite a nice fluid experience when you're using the pen, you don't have to actuallyphysically touch the screen to move up and down. would have been nice to see this is a date directly into the android operatingsystem at this level by samsung but sadly not so we'll have to wait for apps to physically update for

this particular functionality. bit of a shame, but it's there anyway. it just makes for a much smoother experience when you are using the pen. you don't have to keep flicking between pen and finger, all of the time, or at least in those apps that do support it. those are the key features of the s pen, everything else is pretty much up to yourimagination and what you can do with it.

samsung provided some goodbasic functionality and a quite clever twist on the idea of using the stylus but really from there it's what can you think to do with it? for certain strategy games, and certain games where you have to draw paths and so on, this would be much more accurate than stabbing with your finger basically. there you go, that is the galaxy note 2 s pen. to activate multi window mode, long press on your back button and you get this charm bar appearing.

then all you do is select the first app you want multi window and drag it in, and then grab the next app you want multi window and drag that in. and there you go... so now, we can watch youtube, whilst browsing the web. a very very cool feature.

it doesn't work with every app. samsung are encouraging developers to add the feature. some of the guys over on the xda developer forums have discovered a final manifestwhich seems to suggest it will be fairly easy to add additional apps into this multi window support but out of the box you basically have youtube, chrome, messaging, snote. gmail, video player, the gallery, maps, facebook, and alsotwitter but i don't use the official twitter app.

i prefer slices. each of those apps can then appear in there and if you go to edit you can change that running order as well. multi windows support, really really is the outstanding feature on the galaxy note 2. the increase in usability because you have this larger screen and being able to use two apps simultaneously is just fantastic. if you want to get rid of one app temporarily you can just

scroll it down to the bottom using this bar which kind of sits at different points so you can actually have the window displaying as much or as little as you'd like. and it works in kind of four stages on the screen. you can see there. it just makes the the whole userexperience you know,being able to throw a map there whilst you're also browsing the web and pulling off phone numbers or

the address... it's just genius. why this hasn't found its wayonto tablets before now is beyond me. i would've thought that every samsung device moving forward with a large screen will have this feature. i wouldn't be surprised if this is copied by more manufacturers as well. frankly, google, you need to get this into your next version of the android operating system which i think is dubbed key lime pie.

this is actually brilliant and i thinkwould work on anything over about four inch display. i think this could actually work quite nicely on the galaxy s3. certainly i'm looking forward to seeing what the guys over at xda developers are cracking and hacking this on to the s3 and it's going to be fantastic. \this is an eight megapixel shooter exactly the same one that comes on the galaxy s3 so don't expect a sudden

leap in quality. it's side backlit for low light, but my personal feeling is the low light performance is still very poor however, when you're using the camera outside and have plenty of sunlight, it is one of the best shooters around. not quite at nokia pureview levels but then who wants a 41 meg pixel camera in your phone when it doesn't actually work as a very good phone.

so i'd rather have a good balance between the two. so, what kind of features are we going to have here? let's move this in a little bit more. a lot of the same features as on the previous galaxy s3 you have your options down here at thebottom which allow you to edit the various

shooting modes. you have a host of different shooting modes from burst, best photo, which will take a series of shots and then show you what it thinks is the best one best face, which is the same principle again but using faces, face detection... panorama share shot, the now obligatory galaxy note 2 hdr mode, beauty, smile shot, low light and buddy photoshare.

buddy photoshare if you've set up your friends in your phone and tagged them on a photograph and it then sees one of your friendsin a photograph it will then share the photo with them automatically. quite a cool feature how useful that is for most people i don't know. you've got effects which are sort of instagrammy but not quite as good,

but they're actually operated as a pre process so you actually get thoseinstantly. you also have exposure values, focusing mode which can be metered or spot or centre weighted i think, white balance, those outdoorvisibility which really just appears to be a contrast booster if you ask me. and auto contrast which basically just blows out the contrast on your images,

makes them look a little bit 1970s. clearly, i don't think it works well in low light, it's more of a well lit option. anti-shake which just makes sure that the. image is absolutely stable before it fires the shutter. just allowing you that extra fraction of a second just to get the image perfect. you can take pictures using voice, you can gps tag and obviously you've got your image quality and your storage options as well.

now the real surprise on this device was actually video. you get all the same features again that you normally expect so self-recording turning the flash on as a permanent beam so it illuminates the scene. in recording mode exposure, anti-shake guidelines, all of that kind of stuff but the interesting thing i found

was recording mode. now in here you've got limit for mms which is normal, we've seen that before on the s3 but then we have slow-motion and fast motion. now, what these do, is allow you to record very very fast moving things but slow them right down and you can slow them down by a quarter, a half or one eighth.

what actually happens is the image sensor inside reduces the quality down to about 480p and that allows it to run much much quicker at grabbing the images and then slow down that footage. and what you find is really nice, kind of slow smooth motion without motion blur and works remarkably well actually even though it has dropped the quality

it's still passable. and if you're out and you just need to take a picture of some cars going around a track or kids playing football or something like that , where you've got a lot of fast motion it really makes a difference. you do lose sound quality unfortunatelyas you might expect but even so, a really nice little feature quite surprised to just see it sitting in there, and again,

be nice to see if this gets back portedto some of the other devices in the same vein you also have fast motion as well. this will basically crank the frame rate up to about sixty framesa second i believe uh... maybe. surprisingly, it reckons it can evengo up to eight times which would be nearly 320, 240 frames a second! i'll have to try that later when i'm outside. and i'll pop some video footage up so you can see the different speed settings.

quite surprising little feature to have inside a phone. very, very nice indeed. but that is the main features you'll findfor the camera on the galaxy note 2. let's take a look at the note 2 settings. if you're used to ice cream sandwich or any previous version of android you'll find things have been moved around a fair bit by samsung. partly that's because of jellybean the latest operating system update from google, and partly because of criticism

that some of their stuff was just buriedunder many levels of menu. so, the top area here which is wireless networks is pretty much unchanged. you've got your wifi access to bluetooth. you can check your data usage so how much data you've actually been using. and also set warnings and thresholds onthere to prevent you from going over any bundles you may have

in more settings you have flight mode, access to mobilenetwork changing, tethering important hot spots is in here as is virtual private networks and where you can turn your nfc and communication features on and off. and also dnlas with nearby devices aswell. and if you happen to be using keys via wifi, which is samsung's updating pushing software you can push thatinformation back up between the device and the pc.

home screen mode allows for two different modes really, for using the device. if you're someone who's new to android or you're coming from an iphone where it's a bit more basic you can switch to a basic mode it just cuts down on the number of home screens and the amount of clutter. basic mode is the standard mode and you' have easy mode that puts it into a more slimmed down fashion, so it's much easier to use.

this is really aimed at those people who aren't all that au fait with mobile phones or are coming from adifferent operating system and might becomeoverwhelmed by the pure number of features that samsung provide here. if you come into blocking mode, this allows you to turn off particular types of alerts and alarms between certain times so you can send your incoming calls, and notifications and set up times etcetera,

a really really useful feature and something that in the past was done by third party apps. sound. self-explanatory this is where you canbe setting up your ringtones vibration settings everything related to how the phoneis going to communicate to you by audio, vibration intensity is in there as well. you've also got the screen lock sound which we've got turned off that ripple effect is quite annoying. display

self-explanatory again but in here is where your wallpapers will befound but also led indicator as well. the phone has a little led. when you get notifications that led will flash particular colours depending on the notification you've got. you can go in and tweak all of this here along with the wallpaper. page buddy... this is a really useful feature whichdetects

what you happen to have just done with thephone if you pull the s pen out it will then automatically flip to s pen mode. put your earphones in, it will switch to music mode. docking, it will go into dock mode, etcetera. really really useful and it saves all that fiddling around that i need to go into this mode or where's that music app. if you put the headphones in clearly you want to use music. you also have your brightness controls auto rotation and screen timeout

and two useful features that i found were turned off by default... which is smart rotation and smart stay. smart rotation and smart stay use the camera and sensors to work out whether it needs to leave the screen on or when the screen needs to be rotated intelligently. so if you happen to be lying down whenusing the phone you may notice on some devices that the screen will sometimes start flicking backwards and forwards because it can't quite work out if you're lying down

or standing up. smart rotation helps to alleviate thatproblem and smart stay makes sure that screenstays on if you happen to be looking at your phone. it uses the camera, detects your face, it says you are still looking at the device i'd best not turn the screen off now, he's probably using it! a worthwhile feature and quite welcome actually to see that on a device. little user experience things can make a big difference

about how frustrating using a device can feel. it's really good to see that coming in. you can change the font styles as well ifyou are that way inclined. touch light duration, which is how long these lights stay on at the bottom display battery percentage if you want at the top, personally i always find that rather scary. i'd rather not know! it's about 50%.

auto adjusts screen tone as well. the storage areas this provides a running list of what you are storing on your device and what category that would fall into and you can then go into those areas andsee those individual apps as listed and remove them etcetera as you need to. power saving... really really useful if you happen to be out and about and the battery's going low and you're going to be

away from charge for a while, flip this on, it will drop your power to the cpu and the processor that's running the phone and doing all of the action. power saving will be turned on for thescreen, it will drop the brightness right down background colors will be muted on the internet so if you've got a lot background colorsstrong background colors use more power white doesn't really use an awful lot of power

and turn off haptic feedback, again anything thathappens to be drawing a lot of power off this battery. all of that can then be disabled on the fly. you could check your battery usage and you can see which elements areactually using the most battery power. clearly the screen is always going to bepretty close to the top but it allows you to see if you've got anapplication running in the background maybe drawing a little bit morepower than you wanted you can then close that down. and the application manager provides verysimilar functionality to the storage

area provides everything you've got and allof your running apps as well and you can see the cash processes useful if you need to free up memory or if you are trying to find something that happens to be chewing up a lot of system run times locations... how is it going to find out where you are? use gps, it will drain the battery very quickly

usually wants a wireless network. it's pretty much ok and still reasonablyaccurate, good enough to get your basic fix. your lock screen has loads of informationhere. this controls how your phone is seen when you first turn it on and before you actually enter so this areahere basically. within that lock screen you have various security options, so swipe, motion, face unlock, face and voice,

pattern, pin and password. and each of these options then gives youeven more options depending on what kind of security you are going for. and then you've got the lock screen options as well so the lock screen itself can have more information included on there like a ticker, dual clock, weather, you can turn the ripple effect on and off in there if you want to, quick access to the camera quite useful,with that turned on if you take the phone

out of your pocket like this put your finger on the screen and then rotate it will automatically go into camera mode for you so you don't have tofiddle with the buttons or anything like that and with the camera starting up in a fraction of about one-and-a-half seconds really really quick and nippy way to workwith your camera on the fly. so those are all your lock screen options, worth having a play in there to see what kind of functionality you want toturn on.

one handed operation security next. this handles all of your encryption on the device so if you happen to be working within abusiness network there is a very good chance you will need to have this turned on and enabled it will allow all the data that goes in and out of the phone and the data stored on the phone to be encrypted. very very useful and very important if you're working on a corporate network. one hand operation...

because this is such a big device, 5.5inches the vast majority of people can't actually reach with their thumb from one side to the other of the screen so what they have isone-handed operation. what it does is it puts the keyboard into a floating window which allows it to drift to one side of the screen or the other or for you to drag it and position it exactly where you want on the screen, whatever'scomfortable to then one thumb boarding. literally it's a small size keyboard but if you measure it and compare it to something like a galaxy s3 or something else

you're actually getting the same size screen, keyboard properly positioned for where you want to use it. it actually works pretty well and i've found the accuracy is just as good but you've got that flexibility there, really useful if you're a one-handedoperator like i am. language and input... another self-explanatory one. this is where you are configuring what language your device is going to be

operating in and also what language it will respond to for voice recognition and so on and text to speech input. all of that can be fully controlled in there. cloud services are from samsung. that allows you to back up all of your data on your device such as sms messages, mms messages and logs. it's a bit weak, frankly. i don't know why they include that and dropbox. it's useful i suppose but so limited that there are better options out there,

third party for it. back-up and reset allow you to back up the physical device and also reset and wipe all the data on the device. and this is where accounts are held now. if you are coming from ice cream sandwich accounts used to be a separate option called accounts and you had to go into that and into the account you wanted, then settings and everything like that. now just down at the very bottom of your settings list

and you can then go in and configure each one of these independently or add a new account. add a new account gives you oodles and oodles of different options including mircrosoft active sync and bespoke customer service as well if you want to ldap's in there, everything you could possibly need. as you add new apps to your device if they have an accounts option

it will appear in your account settings. at the very bottom you have the systemsettings. motion controls are from samsung and these are very useful ways that you can use your device by using variousmotions to create actions within the device. so direct call

if you have the phone number up on the screen you don't have to press the call button you you can just lift the phone to your head the phone will detect that you want tomake that call and it will then start the dial for you. smart alert for catching messages everything available in here there's some really,really useful features, hand to move the icons. if you turn over the phone you can then immediately mute or pause whatever it's

doing. some useful stuff in there that's worth takinga look at. s pen controls are in here as wellincluding detachment sounds, dominant hand battery saving popup notice and the alert if you happen to walk out of the room and not put the pen back in. accessories, date and time, accessibility and developer options are all pretty standard stuff really,

i won't go into those in too much detail. but if you go into developer options you can actually make your device just a little bit faster again. where you have window animation scaletransition scale and animated duration scale, put all those on point five by default they are on point one. if you've got a really fast device, the phone won't actually need to wait at all for the animation to redraw on the screen. it's fast enough to just transition really, really quickly.

it works on the s3, it works on the galaxy note 2 beautifully and just makes the phone feel a little bit nippier again by a fraction of a second. hey, we're all about squeezing every last bit of performance out of these devices. so those are the settings and the software of the samsung galaxy note 2. truly a beautiful device, truly a beautiful software implementation as well.

ok, we're going to benchmark the galaxy note 2. let's go for it. so what this is going to do is run through things like the cpu, memory, input output power, 2d graphics and 3d graphics, and it will generate a score. you can see it running through these variousoptions at the moment. obviously, the more powerful the device the higher the score is going to be. there's the 2d test going on. fractals.

very very smooth app, this is a very powerful phone. 2gig of ram and a 1.6 gig quad core processor. certainly you should expect some really high numbers out of this. very smooth. do the double helix test five-five six five that is something else, there you go. so the htc 1x is quite a way behind there and

pretty much everything else is just picking up the rear. so there you go, the galaxy note 2 5,565 the benchmark. beautiful. here we are with gig bench 2's benchmark let's have a quick look and see what score we get. unfortunately there's no nice pretty pictures or anything to look at while it does this you can just watch this nice spinning circle instead

while it does it's thing. i feel like i should play some mood music or something. 1907 which is not bad at all. there you see the spec 1.75gig of memory android 4.1.1. and running at 6gig. 1907, beautiful. i had to bring you this fantastic game.

it came out a couple of days ago. it's called death dome. if you've played an infinity game on the iphone this is a really, really similar principle better graphics though in my opinion it has like a cell shading animation borderland style. you level up your character, you get better weapons, you buy bigger bosses you collect more loot

infinitum, keep levelling up until you conquer the entire map, by the looks of it. so take a look as you can see, the graphics are gorgeous. here you're playing it on the new galaxy note 2 by the way. so at the beginning of each stage you have to collect by doing tapping actions and this gets you more coins etcetera and can get you power ups

and then a boss comes along and we have to beat him up. so you have to dodge his actions and then attack him. as you level up, your weapons do more and more damage, you can block etcetera. if you build up enough special power then you can unleash that to do like a reallyreally big attack

sort of nice scavenging again. played on the galaxy note 2 it is a very fluid game. haven't noticed any major slowdowns oranything like that i think overall this is a stonking release from mobile beat that guy in one go. the basic back story is that a virus has been unleashed on the world and made everyone go crazy and you'reone of the last sane people and

obviously you have a really really bigweapon but that is death dome on galaxy note 2 free to play on the playstore now. go grab it.

Share this post