Samsung Announces 5.7-inch Galaxy Note 3 Smartphone

Samsung's Galaxy Note line has been known for its bigness and, true to form, the just-announced Galaxy Note 3 smartphone is big.

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Samsung’s Galaxy Note line has been known for its bigness and, true to form, the just-announced Galaxy Note 3 smartphone is big.

The screen sizes have been creeping up slightly from Note to Note. The first version from 2011 measured in at 5.3 inches, followed by the Note II at just over 5.5 inches, followed by the Note 3 at just shy of 5.7 inches.

While the first Galaxy Note’s 5.3-inch screen may have seemed laughable in 2011 (back then I said, “As a phone, it’s so big it’s almost comical”), today we’re awash in large-screen Android smartphones where a 5-inch screen is nothing shocking.

An almost comically large screen nowadays? That would be Samsung’s 6.3-inch Galaxy Mega, a phone I’m guessing I’ll look back upon in late 2015 before writing, “Today we’re awash in large-screen Android smartphones where a 6-inch screen is nothing shocking.” Who knows if they’ll even still be Android phones by then.

While Samsung has managed to increase the screen size in the latest iteration of the Galaxy Note, the company has kept the bezel on either side of the phone the same width as the Note II. This is the first of the Galaxy Note handsets to sport a 1080p display, too. The first two models sported 720p screens.

Under the hood, reports CNET, there’s a 2.3GHz quad-core processor, three gigabytes of RAM, a big 3,200mAh battery and a 13-megapixel camera.

Samsung has again included the Note’s venerable S-Pen stylus as well, promising that “significant improvements” have been made this time around. An “Action Memo” feature lets you handwrite a person’s phone number and title on a virtual post-it note-style pad, which is then saved to your contacts, for instance. There’s also a digital scrapbooking feature that lets you circle parts of webpages for later viewing, complete with links back to the original sites.

Running two applications side-by-side was introduced with the Galaxy Note II; that feature is back, but now you can run the same app in two windows. The Samsung rep demonstrating the feature pulled up two instances of Samsung’s chat software to drag and drop chat entries between chats with two different people. There’s also a “box” feature wherein you can use the S-Pen to draw your own custom-sized window within which to run a second app.

The Galaxy Note 3 will be available starting in October. Prices haven’t yet been set by U.S. carriers.