Smartphone-tablet hybrids made it big with the Galaxy Note, the first device with a display greater than five inches in diagonal length that sold well in markets. It featured a capacitive stylus called the S Pen, the product’s USP, allowing users to write, draw, and take notes across a variety of applications.
Other manufacturers, such as LG with the Optimus Vu, and Asus with the Padfone, are also trying their hand in the market. Even Micromax has launched the 5-inch Canvas A100 smartphone-tablet hybrid. Of course, most top-end smartphones nowadays (such as the Samsung Galaxy S III, LG Optimus 4X HD, and HTC One X) all feature large displays as well, larger than 4.7-inches.
The Galaxy Note’s successor, the Galaxy Note II boasts of a 5.5-inch display and is powered by a 1.6GHz quad-core processor. The device runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and boasts of a whopping 2GB of RAM. The Note II also has an 8MP rear facing camera and a 1.9MP front facing camera. The device comes with three storage options – 16 / 32 / 64GB. HTC is also supposedly working on rival of the Galaxy Note II.
Now, with the India launch of the Galaxy Note II imminent (we expect an announcement tomorrow), we decided to ask our readers what they felt about the usability of smartphone-tablet hybrids, or phablets, as they are also known.
The responses were surprisingly, split right along the middle, with 262 readers saying smartphone-tablet hybrids featured the best of both worlds, while 264 readers said they felt the form factor was too inconvenient.
It seems Indian consumers, unlike those elsewhere in the world, are willing to have a few tradeoffs to get the best of both worlds, converging smartphones and tablets into one, all-purpose device, with a large display perfect for media and app consumption, and web-browsing, apart from regular smartphone functions, like managing emails and making phone calls.
Check out the poll results in graphical form below. If you’d like to see our previous ThinkDigit Weekly Poll results, click here. Do also share your views on this week’s poll, where we ask you “Will Apple’s Maps catch with Google Maps by year-end?”