Congratulations are in order for Samsung: The world's most prolific smartphone manufacturer has managed to add yet another gargantuan device to its ever-increasing Galaxy lineup. The Note 3 phone-tablet hybrid naturally follows the Note II, adding a faster quad-core processor, bigger, battery, higher-res display, and 4K video recording capabilities.
The improvements are minor, but send an important message: the Note phablet line is a success, and won't be going away any time soon. We're now looking at only iterative, generational improvements as these behemoth devices settle into place in the Samsung line-up.
The Note 3, which was announced early Wednesday during Samsung's IFA Berlin keynote, features a 5.7-inch 1080p Super AMOLED display—just a bit bigger than its predecessor's display, but less than an inch smaller than the display of the recently released Galaxy Mega.
Samsung's Air Commands can be brought up with the S Pen.
The Note 3 comes with a dockable S-Pen stylus, as the Notes before it did, but Samsung has added "Air Command" features to the it. Air Command brings up a circular menu when you press against the screen with the stylus, giving you quick access to Samsung's own proprietary pen apps: Screenwrite, Action Memo, Scrapbook, S Finder, and Pen Window, an app that essentially allows you to draw a window on the screen to bring up an app you'd like to use. Most of the apps included with Air Command could be replaced with a more functional, likely cross-platform application from the Google Play store, though they wouldn't be fully compatible with the S Pen. Samsung has made it obvious that it intends to woo consumers with an all-inclusive package of custom apps, luring users away from the Google Play store toward the proprietary Samsung ecosystem.
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