Thfire.com Everyday news that matters As Samsung and Apple are fighting in and out of court, Samsung continues to push in products in the US to gain market over Apple.
Samsung has managed to successfully launch and start the sales of Galaxy Note 10.1 in the US. Galaxy Note 10.1 is virtually a 10.1-inch tablet PC. But for some reason Samsung doesn’t call it a tablet PC. To Samsung it is called a Note.
The Wi-Fi only version of the Galaxy Note 10.1 will go on sale in the U.S. on Thursday. The price starts at $499 for the basic model with 16 gigabytes of storage and $549 for the 32-gigabyte model, expandable with an external memory card.
Apple’s latest iPad starts at the same price but the Note 10.1 offers some features that the iPad doesn’t have, while its screen resolution is lower than the iPad’s. It is Samsung’s first Android tablet equipped with a digital pen and can run two applications side-by-side on a screen divided in half.
The split screen, made possible by the quad-core processor and 2 gigabytes of RAM, can be useful when taking notes while watching a video or surfing the Internet.
Analysts said this capability of the Note tablet is intended to attract business and education customers, a strategy that could be more effective than going all out against the iPad, which already dominates nearly 70 percent of the worldwide tablet market.
Samsung released about a half dozen Android tablets in the last two years under the Galaxy Tab series but none of them has been as popular as the iPad. Analysts say Android tablets are less successful because of a dearth of applications and higher prices.
Other features indicate that Samsung developed the products with the education and corporate markets in sight. The updated S Note app can recognize handwritten math formula, geometric shapes, English alphabets and Chinese characters, allowing the digital pen to function as an input device in the absence of a physical keyboard.
“The S Pen offers both active content creation as well as passive content consumption,” President of Samsung Electronics America Tim Baxter said in a statement.
In South Korea, Samsung has already started going after enterprise clients and schools with the Galaxy Note 10.1 and the company has not released the product for consumers.
Samsung Life Insurance and its affiliated insurance company Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance began handing out the Note 10.1 for sales people who are ditching large stacks of paper for the tablet.
Samsung also said it will donate nearly 600 Note tablets to eight South Korean schools for educational use. South Korea is rolling out a $2 billion project to replace paper books with digital texts.
Hmm, Donate seems like a inappropriate word, more like making sure the future generation doesn’t get caught in iOS magic.
