Apple makes a statement each year by NOT attending Mobile World Congress, but its presence is felt in the product announcements made by its competitors. Samsung is of course Apple’s top competitor in the device space, and although the Korean giant sells more smartphones than Apple does, Apple still rules the tablet market. So it makes sense that Samsung’s new tablet offering at Mobile World Congress looked a whole lot like the iPad mini.
Samsung’s Note 8.0 features a 1200 × 800 touchscreen and weighs in at 338 grams, a bit more than the iPad mini. It measures 210.8mm by 135.9mm, again a shade bigger than the iPad mini, which is 200mm by 134.7mm. The Note takes its name from its 8-inch screen, 0.3 inches bigger than the mini’s display. Powered by Samsung’s quad-core 1.6GHz Exynos processor, the Note 8.0 has 2GB of RAM, up to 32GB of storage, a 5 megapixel rear camera and a 1.2 megapixel camera in the front. Of course the Note 8.0 also includes Samsung’s S Pen stylus, and now Samsung says that some popular third party apps will work with the stylus. The S Pen is clearly a key feature that Samsung wants to promote to differentiate its tablets from Apple’s.
One model of the Note 8.0 includes another feature you won’t find on an iPad — it can make a calls on HSPA+ networks. The ability to make voice calls also showed up this week on the Asus FonePad, a 7-inch Android offering powered by an Intel Atom processor. But HP, which has in the past made GSM-capable tablets, passed on that feature this year with its newest offering, the $170 HP Slate 7. (The new HP offering plays to the company’s strengths, touting the company’s ePrint software which lets users connect to HP printers over Wi-Fi in order to print from the tablet.)
Time will tell whether consumers want to use the miniature tablets with voice capability as smartphone substitutes. For carriers, the voice capability is clearly a bonus. So far, most tablet buyers have preferred to connect exclusively over Wi-Fi, even on tablets that have 3G capability. Consumers in the market for a tablet are more likely to visit Best Buy or OfficeMax than to head to their carrier’s retail store. But the newest voice-capable tablets could change that if they catch on.
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