You can see the size of it when looking at these two devices side by side in the photo above – the Note on the left and the SII on the right.

When I first looked at the Note on unpacking the box, my immediate thought was – this is like the 5-inch Dell Streak in terms of size. In fact, I have a Dell Streak so a comparison is easy to see at first hand as this photo below shows: Galaxy Note on the left, Dell Streak on the right.

Pretty close in overall size dimensions. Pretty close, too, in screen size – the Note has a 5.3-inch display and the Streak has 5.0 inches. Not really much in it. Compare that to the SII at 4.3 inches – an inch less in overall dimensions – or the iPhone 4: at 3.5 inches, its screen is nearly 2 inches smaller overall than the Note’s (and almost 1 inch smaller than the SII’s).

You may be wondering why I seem to be fixated on size. Does size matter? Well, it does if you’re thinking of a smartphone and how you’d use that with emphasis on the ‘phone’ part of the word. I don’t know about you, but I really wouldn’t want to have to use a device the size of a Note or a Streak as my primary phone. Imagine something that big stuck to your ear!

Although the Galaxy Note does have a slot for a SIM card so you can make and receive phone calls and text messages, I wouldn’t call it a smartphone as what you’re far more likely to want to do with it is run apps and connect to the net. So a cellular connection as well as wifi is handy, letting you be online just about anywhere. And if push comes to shove, you can always make a phone call if you really want to.

This device is a mini tablet – a hybrid, in fact, in between a smartphone and a tablet. It’s the space Dell first entered in 2009 with the 5-inch Streak. But it’s a space they’ve now vacated entirely in the major markets of Europe and North America, leaving it to Samsung in particular to make the most of it.

The Galaxy Note I have is unlocked, not tied to any particular network or mobile operator. It works just fine on wifi without a SIM card, although I did notice something interesting – when I first turned it on and configured a wifi connection, it notified me of a new firmware update.

But it wouldn’t let me get it without a SIM card installed.

That was easy to sort out by using the SIM card from my SII. It enabled the firmware to be downloaded and installed, which updated the version of the Android operating system from 2.3.5 to 2.3.6. Bang up to date!

(As an aside comment on that, searching for a firmware update on the SII – which, like the Note did, has Android version 2.3.5 installed – produces no result. Yet 2.3.6 is available. Maybe the fix that 2.3.6 brings – for a voice search bug – isn’t relevant to the SII. Or, as that device is tied to a mobile operator – Three UK – perhaps it’s waiting for Three to release the update)

As I opened the box only yesterday, I haven’t yet kicked the Note’s tyres in a meaningful way. Not run any apps nor explored some interesting aspects such as the S Pen – a hi-tech stylus that may seem conceptually familiar to you if you remember devices like the Compaq IPAQ from a decade ago – and some of the neat ways you can use it.

The short time I have spent so far with the Note shows me a mobile device that’s powerful, fast, familiar, light in the hand, feature-laden and a pleasure to use. One other thing I noted in particular was the battery – 2500mAh capacity. ( Wikipedia explains mAh if you’re interested.) What that means to you and me is that a device this size with a screen this big needs all the juice it can get. Depending on use, I’d expect battery life to be on a par with what I get from my Galaxy SII with a smaller capacity battery (1650mAh) for a smaller-size and smaller-screen device – about a day’s charge with my typical use.

Would the Note be good as a primary mobile device, eg, as your phone? No, I wouldn’t recommend that. But if you want a tool that lets you do much of what you can with a full-size Android tablet (or iPad, for that matter) but in a pocket-size form factor – the best of both worlds, perhaps – then the Note may appeal to you.

Here are the top-level specs:

• 1.4GHz ARM9 dual-core processor
• 1Gb RAM
• 16Gb internal storage (32Gb version also available but not in the UK)
• MicroSD card external storage support for cards up to 32Gb capacity
• Bluetooth
• 802.11a/b/g/n wifi
• 5.3-inch Super AMOLED HD display with 800×1280 resolution
• 8 megapixel rear-facing camera with LED flash plus 2 megapixel front-facing camera
• Android 2.3 Gingerbread with upgrade to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich coming
• Screen capture capability (making screenshots)

More thoughts to come as I get to know the Samsung Galaxy Note.

(All the pics above were shot with an HTC Desire 5-megapixel camera and tweaked a bit in Paint Shop Pro X2. Not a bad camera compared to the Note’s and SII’s 8-megapixel ones.)

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The outstanding Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Honeycomb tablet is lighter and a hair thinner than the Apple iPad 2, and has a smaller footprint than either the Motorola Xoom or the Acer Iconia Tab A500, which are heavier and bulkier than most tablets. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a major contender.

If you check out the specs, you will be even more impressed.

That 10″ wide screen just invites you to get involved. The iPad has already prepared the market place for devices like this and the Galaxy Tab may well be the major beneficiary.

The only impediment on the road may be the patent conflicts that are already ongoing between Apple and Android / Samsung. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 has again been delayed in Australia by the courts. However this is only temporary. Note also that the full Federal Court of Australia seemed to have found Apple’s objections to the tablet sales somewhat lacking.

The full court found that Justice Annabelle Bennett did not adequately assess the strength of Apple’s patent claims when she allowed a ban to go into effect last month.
“In our view, her decision was clearly wrong and should be set aside,” the full court wrote.

Now in the US, the headlines are that Judge rejects Apple bid to halt Galaxy sales.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California stated that Apple would likely prove Samsung infringed one of its tablet patents. However, Apple had not shown that it was likely to overcome Samsung’s challenges to the patent’s validity. Apple must demonstrate both infringement and validity to succeed in its lawsuit.

Global tablet sales are expected to explode to more than 50 million in 2011. Apple, which has sold more than 30 million iPads so far, is expected to continue to dominate the market in the near term. With the entry of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, we may be about to see a shift.

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Dave’s Answer:

Though you may not have realized it when you bought it, that little Nintendo 3DS is quite a sophisticated piece of technology with a lot behind the screens. Indeed, once you get it online, there’s quite a bit your daughter can do with it, so it’s probably a good idea to learn a bit more about how to use the device before you’re surprised by what she’s finding on that little screen.

By the way, we look at a tiny screen say that it’s too small to watch or to use for reading or surfing the net, but I’ll bet your daughter is perfectly fine with its size. Something to think about, for sure.

The Nintendo 3DS does have a built-in wifi system and a fairly straightforward method of hooking up to a wireless network, but there are a lot of steps involved and I would strongly encourage you to have the stylus available if you’re going to need to enter a network password to get connected.

To start, tap on the HOME button, then move right until you get to System Settings:

Select System Settings and you’ll have a number of options from which to choose:

Notice the Parental Controls. If you’re worried about your daughter going onto the Internet and finding stuff you’d prefer she didn’t, this is somewhere you’ll want to investigate further once you have the 3DS all configured properly.

For now, however, tap on “Internet Settings”.

What the heck? Turns out that there’s a small switch on the right side of the Nintendo device that turns wifi on/off:

Simply slide the switch towards the hinge and the little indicator above the wifi graphic will illuminate. Now you’re ready to proceed…

On the upper screen, you’ll see this if it’s the first wifi Internet connection you’ve ever made on the 3DS:

On the lower screen, however, you’ll see the little smiley guy and - behind him - some buttons, the most important of which is “Connection Settings”.

Tap on “Next” to proceed, and on the upper screen, more helpful info:

Finally, on the lower screen, you can tap on “Connection Settings”…

The cheery little dude offers two options at this point:

This stuff’s easy, though, so select “Manual Setup” and you’ll be able to jump in and set things up quite a bit faster. First step: search for an access point:

Tap on “Search for Access Point” and it should find your wireless network, along with any others that are within range:

You can see by the orange padlocks that all of the wifi networks in this area are secured. That’s good. I’m going to connect to “MariposaNet” so I’ll tap on its name. Now I’ll need to enter the network’s security password:

This is where I strongly recommend using the stylus. It’s a very small screen!

Enter the password for your network, then tap on “OK” on the lower right. It won’t test it yet, however, because it needs to know what network connection slot you want to use:

Yeah, tap on “OK”. Now it’s ready to test…

No, really, we’re ready to test. Tap on “OK” again…

Gosh that little guy is cute. (twiddling thumbs, waiting for the network test to proceed)

Eventually, look at the upper screen and hopefully you’ll see this:

While on the lower screen we get an explanation of what’s transpired:

Tap on “OK” one last time and your Nintendo 3DS is now on the Internet and you’re good to go:

If the 3DS failed the network connectivity test, the most likely reason is that either you have the wrong network password or you’ve entered it incorrectly. It’s critical that you enter it exactly — and I mean exactly — as written or otherwise specified.

If that still doesn’t solve the problem, try taking the 3DS somewhere that has a public, open network without a password and see if that works. If it doesn’t, there might be something wrong with the 3DS…

Good luck, and good luck with your daughter!

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Pricing and Availability

Phone 4S comes in either black or white and is available in the US for a suggested retail price of $199 (US) for the 16GB model, $299 (US) for the 32GB model and $399 (US) for the new 64GB model.* iPhone 4S is available from the Apple Online Store, Apple’s retail stores and through AT&T, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, and select Best Buy, Target and Walmart stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers. iPhone 4 is available for just $99 (US) and iPhone 3GS is available for free with a two year contract.

iPhone 4S will be available on October 28 in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

*Qualified customers only. Requires a new two year rate plan, sold separately.

Source: Apple Press Info

And so, here’s a few more numbers of interest that I’ve picked up on from today’s event:

• Pre-orders on October 7th and iPhone now on Sprint
• iPhone 4 will now be available in Black and white for just $99. The phone 3GS in 8GB free
• iPhone 4S Black and white, 16GB for $199, 32GB for $299, and 64GB for $399
• 1080p, real-time video image stabilization
• Faster camera – Other phones take 2-3x longer to shoot photos
• CMOS backside illuminated sensor — gets 73% more light than the iPhone 4 sensor
• Data can now download up to 2x as fast to almost 14.4Mbps down
• Increased to 8 hours talk time
• Dual-core CPU, 2x as fast at CPU tasks Up to 7x faster in the previous iPhone
• iPod touch with iOS 5 and iCloud  comes in black and new white version $199
• iPod nano is 8GB for $129, and 16GB for $149
• 200 new user features in iOS 5
• Apple phot card cost – $2.99 in the US, $4.99 anywhere else
• Apple has paid developers more than $3b
• 500k apps in the app store
• 92% of Fortune 500 are testing or deploying iPad
• Pilots are replacing 40 pound flight bags with iPads
• over 16b song downloads
• it took Sony 30 years to sell 230k Walkman cassette players
• Every single quarter for 5 years the Mac has outgrown the PC market
• It took Windows 7 20 weeks to reach what it took Lion 2 weeks to get to in terms of install base

Check out the official PR announcement HERE for more details of the iPhone 4S launch event and iCloud

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To help you out, Google has provided some useful insights into consumer behavior and their last moment purchase trends. This information can be invaluable in helping you plan your marketing strategy to make the most out of the holiday season.

Google has studied the shopping patterns from the past 2 years which shows increased usage of mobile devices for shopping related searches and Google has concluded that the biggest source of shopping related search comes from people who do their holiday shopping at the last minute on their mobile devices. Google expects the volume of gift-related searches from mobile devices to surge this year as well.

Here are the main take away’s from the study:

• While 15% of all “Black Friday” searches will be from mobile phones, Google predicts that 44% of total searches for gifts at the last minute will be from mobile phones and Smartphone’s.
• A “double peak” in search volumes for retail brands around Black Friday and then the week before Christmas over the past two holiday season indicates that shoppers locate stores for last minute shopping through mobile searches. These are shoppers who miss the free shipping deadlines and are motivated to locate and shop at the nearest possible stores.
• In AdMob network’s holiday retail survey, 65% of mobile device users have used their device to find a business, and then made a purchase at that business in person.
• More than 33% of smartphone and tablet users plan to start their shopping before Thanksgiving, so be smart and start your campaigns early this year to reach these consumers.

How can you use this data to your benefit?
Whether your target is the general market or a specific consumer group, Google suggests looking at implementing their Mobile Ads into your holiday marketing plan this year. More details can be found here.

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We are now living in a work everywhere world. I have noticed that even most small vacation inns have free wifi as a standard offering. Forrester notes that your most productive employees m now use four devices to get work done. This means that “client/server solutions with on-premises servers are inadequate, simply not responsive or agile enough for escalating user requirements and expectations.”

They note that mobile apps need to be designed to run well on any mobile device because of the proliferation of devices. With so many different mobile platforms and form factors to target, app developers will have to organize differently, code differently, and execute differently. In this new environment design skills grow ever-more important (and scarce). There will be new abstraction layers that separate presentation from interaction from back-end services. Teams now must design for mobile first.

Mobile apps must be delivered as a cloud service. Forrester notes that latency is already a problem for distributed organizations and even waiting for email to upload or download to a remote site can be painful. I see this with my iPhone. For me this wait time is mitigated by the fact that I mostly use the iPhone to check for messages when I am killing time. It would be very frustrating in normal use. In addition, access to team sites and even the file system from a hotel room over a virtual private network (VPN) can be excruciatingly slow. Fortunately this is no longer an issue for me but I remember it well. Forrester states that the problem is the lack of capacity, bandwidth, and data close to the device. The solution is cloud suppliers with data centers around the world and points of presence in every major city. The cloud is simply better for delivering good mobile app experiences. I would agree.

Here is another perspective on mobile app creation from the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. This session discussed three components that any mobile strategy should have, which includes deciding what goes mobile, understanding how to mobilize applications and services, and designing a framework for managing mobility. On a related note here are some thoughts from the 2011 mLearn Mobile Learning Conference.

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We recently explained how companies including Microsoft and Apple are banding together in anti-competitive patent attacks on Android. The U.S. Department of Justice had to intervene in the results of one recent patent auction to “protect competition and innovation in the open source software community” and it is currently looking into the results of the Nortel auction. Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.

But Motorola is obviously much more than just a patent collection. They are a mobile hardware manufacturer. In particular, they make mobile phones that use Android. There is a quote that infers some future changes to how Android is released and what phone is the “Google phone”:

The combination of Google and Motorola will not only supercharge Android, but will also enhance competition and offer consumers accelerating innovation, greater choice, and wonderful user experiences.

Basically, if Google can use the hardware team from Motorola, there is no need to try and work with a third party to create the “reference implementation” phone. There could be a Motorola device, maybe even in the Droid brand, that becomes the next official Google phone. Google has wanted to get into hardware in the consumer space, so having a mobile phone division makes a lot of sense.

Not only did they buy phone hardware, but they furthered their push into the consumer’s home:

Motorola is also a market leader in the home devices and video solutions business. With the transition to Internet Protocol, we are excited to work together with Motorola and the industry to support our partners and cooperate with them to accelerate innovation in this space.

So, they get a proven provider of consumer devices and they get to sneak into your living room, possibly with more commitment than before. Don’t forget, Motorola has already released a tablet device, and the Atrix which can be docked and become an Android laptop. One question that arises is what happens to the current partners? HTC developed the first Google Phone, the Nexus One and Samsung developed the Nexus S. Do these partnerships disappear because of the Motorola purchase? Google will need to tread lightly here, otherwise those partners could decide that a different platform is in their best interests.

Overall, this acquisition gives Google some things that they have desired for some time. The mobile patent collection definitely gives them some help in the coming battles with Microsoft and Apple. The mobile phones give them a family of devices to test and develop Android on. They also get tablets to play with and any other home consumer devices that Motorola has developed over the years. I would expect that GoogleTV should see a significant boost in attention given that Motorola develops consumer devices as well as cable boxes for many providers.

This may have sounded like a patent defense acquisition, but Google also gets a nice collection of mobile consumer devices. Things just got a little more interesting.

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“The bottom line is that if businesses are to smartly plan for and provision a mobile workforce, they need to have a firm grasp of what the issues are related to these workers, TJ Keitt, wrote in his post on the report, “Anywhere, Anytime” Work Means IT Must Provide The Right Technology, To The Right Person, At The Right Time.

The report provides data to support the five types of information workers and to demonstrate their technology preferences. The five types include: Back-Office Employees comprising 34% of the workforce: Hyper-Mobile Professionals constituting 33% of the workforce, Connected Consultants covering 16% of the workforce, Part-Time Telecommuters comprising 11% of the workforce, and Remote-Based Technicians. Who represent 5% of the workforce.  The report provides a matrix of communication use by each of these five types with some differences.

Each of the five types of users requires a somewhat different approach. The report suggests that we start by mapping use cases to workers’ responsibilities. Then assess the business process changes needed to encourage adoption as well as tap power users to help drive mobile adoption. You also need to provide training to workers who have not been fast adopters.  It also encourages organizations to streamline the number of devices workers use and, at the same time, extend mobile support to a broader set of workers.

There are a lot of useful suggestions in this report for what is a relatively new field. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston there was a mobile track for the first time.  Here is on example session: My 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: Got Strategy? How to Capitalize on the Mobile Revolution.

If you are in the process of developing a mobile strategy I recommend this report.

Check out Portals and KM for more articles by Bill Ives

After 8 long months of waiting for the full release of the service, Surojit Chatterjee,AdWords Product Manager, finally announced yesterday that, “Call Metrics, a simple way to get more phone calls and detailed call reports with AdWords, is now available to all advertisers in the US and Canada.”

How this works:
Google will show a phone number which is toll-free, to your customers on a full ad that features in the search result on Google.com. If you choose to opt for this Google generated forwarding number along with your advertisements, Google will provide you with an in-depth report of the calls you receive as part of your AdWords campaign itself. In other words, the main aim of these Call Metrics is to enable you advertisers to trace the roots of how the customer who called in found your business in the first place. So, if a prospective customer were to call your business up using the forwarded number, Google will firstly make a note of it followed by forwarding the call to you.

This detailed report will incorporate the number of calls that are received by your business. In addition to that, also included in the report is information such as the location, mainly in form of the post code and the how long the call lasted. An additional option available is, the ability to note the entire or group level summary of your campaign. Or if you wish to get a full update on each and every calls, the metrics will also allow you to download this call to call break down. This means that, as an campaign head this will present you with an opportunity to evaluate your Calls extension’s budget and optimization appropriately.

Payment matters:
Are you wondering how will you be charged? Well, if your customer were to call you up directly using their mobile when they spot the number besides your ad, you will only get charged by the click. However if they spot the number in any other way, be it on their computer, laptop, MAC or Tablet etc. you will get billed $1 plus the cost of the click.

Metrics Future:
The prospects of the Call Metrics look quite bright as there are reports which depict that these Click to Call features can in many cases lead to an increase in your businesses CTR or click through rate by 5-30%. Whereby, CTC refers to “The model allows mobile consumers searching Google to click on the phone number in an ad to auto-dial the advertiser. In turn, the advertiser is charged the price of an AdWords click.” An important point to consider here is, most individuals are likely to spot your number via one of the other sources mentioned above. Whilst this will benefit your business regardless, it only means chances are you will end up paying more with each call. So, is it really worth paying so much more with each call?
Check out Page Traffic Buzz for more articles by Navneet Kaushal