Samsung's answer to the iPad – the Galaxy Note 10.1 – has a much longer list of features, better specs and more impressive hardware, but in many ways it proves that less really can be more, writes DAVID POGUE

THE HOT news in Silicon Valley legal circles these days is Apple’s titanic lawsuit against Samsung, which is finally approaching an end. Apple maintains that Samsung pilfered some of its iPhone and iPad designs when creating the Samsung Galaxy series of phones and tablets.

It’s a big, big deal; billions of dollars are at stake. And it’s already having an effect: these days Samsung is being careful to avoid unvarnished Apple mimicry.

Take the new Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, an iPad competitor, which goes on sale in Ireland this month. (It would be really nice if Samsung didn’t name every single product “Galaxy”, regardless of the category. If you say, “I’ve just bought the Samsung Galaxy,” nobody knows if you bought a phone, a tablet or a dishwasher.)

Its message to the tablet-buying world is this: “OK, the iPad is great for consuming stuff – reading books, watching videos, surfing the web, but our new Galaxy tablet is also good for creating stuff, for one simple reason: it comes with a pen. See how different we are from Apple?”

Now, introducing a stylus in this day and age may seem a little backward. The PalmPilot had a stylus. The Apple Newton had a stylus. All of those awful, failed Windows tablet computers had styluses. When the iPad came out, requiring only a fingertip for control, styluses looked as quaint as hand-cranked cars.

But Samsung’s original Galaxy Note, a weirdly sized, 5-inch combination tablet and phone, sold very well, at least in Europe – and it had a pen. Samsung hopes lightning will strike twice with the 10-inch Galaxy Note 10.

The wi-fi Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 retails at €479 from Meteor, DID, Powercity, while the 3G version from Vodafone, O2 Three will cost €100 more. The entry model comes with 16 gigabytes of storage (same as the base iPad model) and 2 gigabytes of memory (twice as much as the iPad). It’s absolutely loaded with features. Front and back cameras (1.9 megapixels front, 5 megapixels back, with LED flash). A card slot to expand the storage (the iPad doesn’t have that).

An infrared blaster that can control your TV system and front-facing stereo speakers that sound much better than the iPad’s mono speaker.

Yet despite all of this, the Note is a hair thinner (0.35 inch) and lighter (1.3 pounds) than the iPad. When you hold it, you realise why right away: it feels plasticky and insubstantial. The plastic of the back panel is so thin, it could be vinyl; you can feel it flex against the circuit board within. The plastic stylus, which slips into a socket on the lower-right corner, is even airier; it’s so cheap-feeling, it could have fallen out of a cereal box.

This tablet seems to want to be used horizontally, in landscape mode. The Samsung logo appears upright that way, and the charging cable connects there, in the middle of the long edge. Of course, you can still turn it 90 degrees to use it in portrait orientation.

One of the Note’s chief breakthroughs is side-by-side apps. You can keep a web page and a page of notes next to each other on the screen, and copy and paste (or drag) material between them.

Or you can keep a video playing in one window while you try to get inspired for the document you’re writing in the word processor (part of a low-rent Microsoft Office look-alike called Polaris Office).

That’s a big change. It takes the tablet one step closer to the flexibility – and complexity – of a real PC.

At the moment, Samsung has permitted only six apps to work in side-by-side mode: email, browser, video player, notepad, photo gallery and Polaris Office.

Those are the natural apps you’d want to run this way, but it would be nice if you could multitask with any app at all. (Samsung says that, in time, it will add the calendar and other apps to the list of side-by-side candidates.)

Samsung has also added, to Google’s year-old Android Ice Cream Sandwich software, the option to summon special mini-apps from the bottom of the screen: widgets that display your calendar, music, notepad and so on. If one day you’re feeling particularly understimulated, you can open eight of those and two side-by-side apps, for a total of 10 windows simultaneously.

The pen is sometimes handy for regular finger tasks – tapping the on-screen keys or buttons – but really takes off in S Note, a special program that accompanies the stylus. Here you can scribble freehand notes or make back-of-the-napkin drawings.

In one mode, you can draw freehand and marvel as the software straightens out your squiggles into perfect lines and geometric shapes (Newton flashback!).

In another, you can write words; the Note converts them into typed text. There’s even a math-formula mode for students, which recognises your handwritten formulas and even solves them. These features are impressive, but it’s hard to see how often they would be useful. The handwriting recognition is so half-baked, the oven must not even be warm. You can use it in any app, which is nice. (It’s a choice, alongside Android’s speech recognition, on the on-screen keyboard’s Options button.) But it frequently omits the spaces between words. Worse, there’s no easy way to edit the converted text, even though you’re sitting there with an editor’s pen in your hand. Tapping on the text doesn’t plant the insertion point there – it just makes a dot.

At this point, there are still only flashes of usefulness for the stylus.

Samsung includes a copy of Photoshop Touch (usually an extra purchase), a very confusing photo-editing app.

You can add handwritten (but not text-recognised) notes to mail messages, calendar appointments and Polaris Office documents.

Moreover, Samsung’s software designers must be former Hollywood art directors who fabricated alien spacecraft; Samsung’s apps are festooned with bizarre icons.

None of them have identifying text labels, and their logos are frequently so unhelpful they may as well be random Cyrillic letters. Would you guess, for example, that to turn on handwriting recognition, you tap an icon that shows a circle in front of a mountain?

Some of the icons in S Note actually display a different menu every other time you tap them. I’m not making this up.

The Note carries on many previous Samsung technologies. You can beam photos to the tablet from certain Samsung cameras. You can beam the tablet’s screen image to a TV (much like Apple’s AirPlay technology) if you buy an optional “HDMI dongle” for your TV, coming this autumn.

A feature called Smart Stay uses the front camera for eye tracking; when you’re not actually looking at the tablet, it dims the screen to save battery power. That’s supercool.

But overall, the Note feels like a laundry-list tablet. It has a higher feature count than any other tablet, but those features are stuffed into a machine with less coherence than any other tablet.

Clearly, Samsung had no Steve Jobs on hand to veto anything. Features that don’t work well are mixed in with the winners; features you’ll never use are jammed in with the useful ones. (Why on earth have the all-important, ever-present Android buttons – Back, Home, App Switcher – now been joined by a fourth one that takes screenshots? Does Samsung think people take screenshots as often as they go to the Home screen?)

In general, Samsung is on fire these days. Its Galaxy phones are the iPhone’s chief competitors. It’s willing to make bold design experiments – like adding a stylus. It’s building an ecosystem of accessories and online stores to rival Apple’s.

But the Galaxy Note 10.1 demonstrates that superior specs, more impressive hardware and a much longer list of features don’t necessarily add up to a superior product. Sometimes restraint is just as important as exuberance.

– (New York Times)