Alright so we finally got Samsung’s newest baby, the Galaxy Note in our office today. The Galaxy Note is a bit different from Samsung’s other mobile offerings, as it’s possibly the biggest smartphone they’ve ever made, with a screen size of 5.3-inches. The Note isn’t traversing unusual territory – Dell’s 5-inch streak has already been through the whole is it a tablet/smartphone dilemma with disappointing results, and it’d be interesting to see how the Note navigates the same hybrid waters as Dell’s offering.

If it wasn’t obvious already, the Galaxy Note is huge. With dimensions of 146.9 x 83 x 9.7 mm, people with small hands need not apply. The Note’s screen is a 5.3-inch super AMOLED affair, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. The colors just pop, and it’s perfectly capable of displaying black portions of pictures as, you know…black, unlike typical LED or LCD screens that look grey-ish. And even though the Note is a bit on the large side, it’s still comfortably thin, coming in at only 9.7 mm.

External controls are a bit on the thin side too – you get the volume rocker on the left, power/unlock button on the right and home button near the bottom. Two more capacitive buttons show up on flank the home button when you touch the screen. The omission of a camera button sends a subtle message – the device isn’t primarily for pictures, though it still has a 8-metapixel camera at the back and a front facing camera for video calls.

Staying true to its name, the Note also features a pen near the bottom that you can take out if you want to draw, write notes or whatnot, and we gather that you’ll be able to use it to compose text messages and the like.

Powering the whole show is a dual-core 1.4GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor with a Mali-400MP GPU, which means that you won’t have to worry about the device slowing down once you get down and dirty with games and other apps. The Note is powered by Android 2.3, but we won’t be surprised if it gets ICS once the code is made available to the device.

We’ve also included comparison photos with the relatively smaller 4.3-inch HTC Sensation XE. We’ll be getting our review up as soon as we can. If you can’t wait to get this baby in your hands, you can hit up Samsung’s preorder page here.

[album: https://gadgetsmagazine.com.ph/wp-content/plugins/dm-albums/dm-albums.php?currdir=/wp-content/uploads/dm-albums/[email protected]/Samsung Galaxy Note/]