UK retailer Clove unveiled in a recent blog post that Samsung's Galaxy Note will arrive in the UK in November, and will cost around £500 ($770). The Note is available for pre-order.
Samsung's Galaxy Note is a large Android v2.3 phone/mini-tablet with a 5.3" Super AMOLED display with an HD resolution: 1280x800. Other specs include a dual-core 1.4Ghz processor, 8mp camera, touch display with pen input (it has a stylus). The phone is 9.65mm thick and weights 178 grams.
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Most smart phones are realitively expensive to develop hardware wise. If you look at the hardware expense only inside the phone, and the outright purchase of smart phones free of contractual perks you will see a trend. The newest and greatest technology available is always expensive. Now as the design matures, process improvement, discount from vendors and materials goes down over time...so does the expense of the phone. I remember the first ever RAZR phone, this was the first credit card size phone...flip phone. Prior to this you had huge clunky devices. Well the first RAZR phones with contracts etc where selling $500- $600. Now today they are obsolete and at one point the cost came down so much the phone was offered as a free phone with any contract.
First, putting same or even higher specs in smaller gadgets is more difficult than in bigger gadgets. There must be a greater deal of effort to do that. Second, and ironically being smaller, it happens to have better specs than a tab. The camera for instance is 8mp for still pictures and with 1080p HD @ 30fps video recording and playing, which you cannot find in any tab (normally 3.15 to 5mp only and 720p video recording) in the market. Second, the FULL HD Super Amoled screen, which you can only find at a still coming soon galaxy tab 7.7. Third, and this one i think depends on one's preferrence, is the idea of a cross breed tab-phone gadget, which is quite unique and appealing to most users, including me. I like HI-SPEC gadget that I can bring around like a phone without hassle, but which I can also use like a tab.
If Samsung achieved 10 MM Galaxy SII units sold in 5 months, how it comes it was producing 3MM substrates monthly and now it's producing 24 MM a month. Are they shelving them? If you have data on Samsung production please share it at cristobalsucre@gmail.com.
Can someone explain the reason these 'phones' are more expensive than 7-10 inch tablets? Both the displays and the batteries are smaller which obviously means cheaper. I think the memory and storage is similar? I think they use a similar processor perhaps running at lower power? It seems to me the price of these components should be about the same for both tablets and smartphones so overall the phones should be cheaper? Am i missing something?