The Samsung Galaxy Note is the device that started it all – it is the first phablet in history, possibly the first model in thousands to be released over the years. When the original Samsung Galaxy Note was released in October 2011, many said that a smartphone with a 5.3 inch screen was simply too big to be really taken into consideration. As things turned out, the sceptics were proven wrong. How wrong they were!
Samsung sold five million Galaxy Notes by March 2012 and by August 2012, another five million Notes were sold. The Galaxy Note II, a 5.5 inch screen phablet, did better than that: the Note II was released in September 2012 and in just over one month; over three million Note IIs were sold. By the end of November 2012, Samsung had sold over five million of these units.
Now it seems that Samsung is ready to launch the third version of the Note series and the specifications have already started to leak. If the information obtained is correct, the Note III will have a 5.9 inch 1080p full-HD LCD screen. However rumours also say that Samsung is looking at the possibility of releasing the Note III with a flexible OLED display. One of the benefits of OLED technology is that it enables smartphone makes to produce thinner displays with bigger batteries. Apparently OLED technology does not require the production of a backlighting system that is common in LCD technology.
According to the information available, Samsung is currently testing three different designs for the new phablet: one using the flexible OLED technology mentioned above, one using a design which is similar to that of the Galaxy S4 but with a metal shell and another using some new design of which no further details are currently available. Thanks to the flexible OLED display, the Note III is expected be just 0.31 inches thick, which is 0.06 inches thinner than the Note II.
The Note III will run on Android version 4.2.2 and will have 2 GB RAM and a 13MP camera, but the impressive thing is that it will use an eight-core Exynos 5 Octa processor. One should note that one version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 also ships with an Exynos Octa processor (the other vesion ships with two quad core processors). However the S4 only uses four cores at any one time. Therefore, it still remains to be seen whether the Note II will utilize all eight cores at the same time or not.
It is worth noting that these specs are not official and according to another source, the Note III will have two quad core processors and 3 GB RAM. No release date is available at the time of writing. One report states that the device may be available in June; however the general consensus is that the Note III will be unveiled at the IFA Expo which will be held in in Berlin in September.
