Galaxy Note 2

This post was handwritten (not typed) on a Galaxy Note 2 screen.

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The first laptop that I bought after coming to the US was an apple iBook. It was made out of white plastic, had 512MB of RAM, 40GB of hard-disk space, and a 12 inch screen. In a world infested with gargantuan and sad looking black laptops, it screamed coolness as I took it everywhere from the library to the beach and to the coffee shops. It wasn't very useful though and it became apparent very quickly. Its lack of serious computational capability meant that very soon it became outdated in terms of the software that it could run. This, in addition to the already limited ability that the OSX suffered from when it came to useful scientific software. While Apple has since produced great and fast hardware, I cannot imagine its OS being very useful in a scientific setting. In fact, as has been said time and again, Apple produces beautiful products with a very high degree of craftsmanship, but which are only mildly useful when it comes to productivity.

This meant that the next laptop that I got was a screamer of a Windows machine. 8GB RAM, quad core i7 processor, a TB of storage. It didn't look nearly as good as an Apple machine looks but it runs pretty much anything that you can throw at it. And in addition to its computational brawn, since it runs Windows it is also capable of running the simulation softwares that I end up using sometimes.

The reason I am mentioning all this is that a similar transformation has occurred in the area of smartphones. I began with the beautiful iPhone but soon realized that it was too constricting as an OS. This prompted a switch to Google's Android operating system in the form of the awesome Nexus S. The phone had better and more powerful specs than my first laptop and the operating system seemed to provide additional capabilities which the iPhone never did. But such is the pace of technology that a phone with a 1GHz processor and 1GB of RAM soon started stuttering when faced with prospects of all that was expected of it. This made me finally decide to get the last word in mobile technology, something that I do not think would get outdated in the next few years. And what a phone it is!

Samsung Galaxy Note 2 is a behemoth of a phone with a positively monstrous 5.5 inch screen, a speedy quad-core processor, 2GB RAM, a battery which lasts 2 days on a charge, and the most important addition of them all - a stylus coupled with software that Samsung must be proud of. For instance, I am so incredibly impressed by the handwriting recognition capabilities of the phone that I decided to 'write' this whole post on the phone's screen, and I did it with minimum corrections. The recognition is so good on this phone that it is now a legitimate form of input and one which may even be faster than typing on the keyboard. Google's voice input is pretty amazing but it is still much less consistent than this brilliant handwriting recognition system. I must confess that I am a technophile and I am simply amazed by the march of technology. Obviously there are both pros and cons to it but it has provided us with options which never existed before. Seeing what the mobile computation devices of today can accomplish is both stunning and a little disconcerting. Samsung Galaxy Note 2 is just such a gadget which makes you wonder if the future has arrived prematurely!