Galaxy Note II -Tips & Tricks:

Application Integration

S Pen Integration: 
The Galaxy Note II lets you personalize your mobile world with the S Pen. You can write handwritten messages in emails or decorate special occasions on your calendars. Handwritten items are only viewable on your mobile calendar and are not synced with Outlook® or online calendars.

S Note on Lock Screen: 
Hold the S Pen button while double-tapping the screen to activate S Note™. This gesture can also be used on the Lock Screen to activate S Note. You can also use your S Pen to draw a line down to the Home key to unlock your screen instead of swiping your screen with your finger.

Contextual Home Screens: 
Much like the S Pen contextual home screen, there are additional contextual home screens displayed when you plug in the earphones and when you dock the phone.

Accessories

Smart Dock:
The optional Smart Dock accessory offers multiple connection points, with three USB ports, an audio-out port, and an HDMI port. Plus, the Galaxy Note II fits perfectly in the dock even when encased in a Samsung Flip Cover.
Gallery

Gallery Views: 

The Gallery offers a variety of ways to view your photos. You can choose between a Grid view (organized folders), Timeline view (a 3-D flipbook in chronological order), or a Spiral view (a spinning 3D spiral of photos) by touching the view icons in the top right corner of the Gallery.

One-Touch Cropping: 
S Pen makes it easy to crop a photo, or even just a small element of a photo, right in the Gallery. While viewing the photo you want to crop, click and hold the S Pen button, and draw around the desired cropping area. Your original photo will remain intact, but the cropped portion will be copied to your clipboard. You’ll also be given the option to send the cropped image to a variety of other applications, including email, S Note and Paper Artist.

Personalization

One-Handed Use:
You can enable one-handed use for the Samsung keyboard, calculator, phone dialer and unlock pattern. When you turn on the one-handed option, the enabled apps shrink and move toward one side of the screen so you can easily touch the keys with your thumb. Touch Settings and under Personal, choose One-handed operation. Place a checkmark in the box next to the desired options.


Smart Gestures

Enabling Smart Stay:
You can get key info—such as number of missed phone calls and messages, number of emails received, remaining battery percentage, and more—simply by waving your hand over the top of a sleeping device. To enable or disable this feature, go to Settings > Motion and check or uncheck the box next to Quick Glance.

Smart Gestures:
Smart Stay keeps the screen on as long as you’re looking at it. To enable the Smart Stay feature, touch Settings > Display. Place a checkmark in the box next to Smart Stay.

Notifications Panel:
Double-tap the top of the phone to instantly open the Notifications Panel.

Direct Call: 
When a contact’s phone number is shown on-screen, Direct Call lets you lift the phone to your ear to automatically dial. When reading a text message, you can call back the sender by simply lifting the phone to your ear.

Social Sharing

S Beam:
Use S Beam™ to share links to maps, web pages, apps and YouTube™ videos with any Android™ device that is NFC enabled. You can also exchange contacts and calendar events. S Beam allows for the transfer of files up to 1GB in size with any S Beam–capable device. To get started, touch Settings > Share and transfer > More settings. Move sliders next to NFC and S Beam from off to on (gray to green) to enable the feature.

Sharing an S Note with S Beam: 
In addition to photos, videos and documents, you can share an S Note via S Beam with other S Beam and S Note capable devices.

Sharing an S Note with Social Networks: 
Collaborate with ease by posting native S Note files, with layers, to your social networks like Facebook® and Google+™ for other Galaxy Note II users to download and edit.

S Pen

Contextual Home Screen:
Contextual awareness means quick access: When the S Pen is removed from its integrated slot, a menu of S Pen–related apps will automatically pop up for selection. The Contextual S Pen home screen and menu are customizable, so you can select which S Pen applications you want handy. Available apps range from productivity to graphic and include the preloaded S Note. Various third-party apps that use S Pen are also available.

S Pen Shortcuts: 
Use the S Pen to scroll down the Notifications Panel to select a number of S Pen shortcuts—Quick Command, S Note and more.

Voice Commands

S Voice: 
Whether you want trivia answers or directions to the closest dry cleaner, S Voice™ is your personal assistant, responding to every voice command with accurate, helpful information pulled from the respected Wolfram Alpha® database. S Voice handles your on-phone tasks too, like dialing calls, sending messages, launching the camera, and even opening and controlling applications. For example, you can use S Voice to open the Facebook® app and update your status.


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Music Hub: All The Music You Want, All In One Place

Samsung Music Hub™ makes enjoying music easier than ever. Upload your music collection to the cloud, stream and purchase songs from an extensive catalog, and listen to personal radio—all in one app. Use these tips and tricks to learn more about how to use Music Hub’s features.

With Music Hub, you can access millions of songs from our catalog whenever and wherever you are. Simply tap Catalog and either browse by music genre or search using the magnifying glass icon. When you find a song or album you like, either tap the title to play or tap the icon to the right to add to My Music or to a specific playlist.

Listen Offline

Music Hub allows you to store your favorite music on your device for offline listening. There is nothing worse than remembering to store music offline minutes before the flight, and spend the entire flight listening to only two or three songs. Music Hub offers the simplest way to make music available offline in just two easy steps:

Step 1: Go to My Music and select the icon to the right of the song or playlist you like.

Step 2: Tap “Download Now.” This will default to Wi-Fi® only, but you can simply adjust the settings to enable this feature over your cellular network. Once you listen to a song, it is temporarily stored on your device and displayed in a bold font to indicate offline availability.

Share a Playlist

Music Hub allows you to beam songs and playlists with another Music Hub subscriber on a Samsung Galaxy NFC-enabled device. Follow these steps to share your playlist:
Step 1: Access the playlist you’d like to share from My Music.

Step 2: Open the playlist to view the tracks.

Step 3: Hold your phone against another Music Hub subscriber’s Galaxy device (remember to turn on NFC). The playlist image will shrink.

Step 4: Tap the center of the image to beam. The playlist will instantly appear in the other subscriber’s My Music.

Upload Your Music to the Cloud Locker & PC Listening

We understand that over the years you’ve accumulated a lot of digital music that you most likely manage in iTunes® and Windows® Media Player. With the Music Hub Uploader, it is easy to move your entire music library to the cloud. Music Hub subscribers are given 100 GB of cloud storage, and employs Scan & Match functionality to transfer your music, cutting down on upload time and offering you higher quality files where available.

Follow these steps to upload your music from your PC to the cloud:

Step 1: From your PC, go to Music Hub.

Step 2: Run the Uploader, and select your music folder—iTunes or Windows Media Player. A notification will appear when the upload process is complete. The next time you visit Music Hub on your mobile device, your music will instantly be available in My Music.

You can also listen to your music and music from our catalog on your PC from musichub.com. Simply sign in with your Samsung Account, and enjoy hours of music listening.

Enjoy Personal Radio

Sometimes it’s nice to sit back and enjoy music programmed for you. With personal radio, you can enjoy personalized radio stations based on your favorite artists or songs. Follow these two easy steps and start enjoying personal radio:

Step 1: From the home screen, select the radio icon and then select Personal.

Step 2: Type an artist or song, select from one of the generated stations, and enjoy ad-free listening. Feel free to skip ahead as often as you like.

At any point, tap the circled “i” icon and view all the songs you’ve just enjoyed. You can add any of them to your own collection by clicking the “tag” icon. These songs can be found in the Tagged section later and mixed into any of your playlists.


Get Intelligent Recommendations

One of the best elements of Music Hub is that it actually gets smarter the more you listen. There are two ways to take advantage of this great feature:

1. Simply double tap the album art on the player page to see options. Select the Lightbulb icon to find similar music to what you are listening to. A list of recommended songs, albums, artists and radio stations will be generated for you.

2. From the home screen, tap the Lightbulb icon for Recommended songs. A list of songs will be generated based on the songs you’ve been listening to.

Content such as DRM content or encrypted files may not transfer to your Samsung device.

Samsung, Galaxy S and Media Hub are trademarks of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Other company names, product names and marks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners and may be trademarks or registered trademarks. Screen images simulated. Appearance of device may vary.

The above content is provided for information purposes only. All information included herein is subject to change without notice. Samsung is not responsible for any direct or indirect damages, arising from or related to use or reliance of the above content.


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iPhone 6 (Release Date, Review, Price, Specs)

Many of you weren’t sold on the iPhone 5′s design. For some of you the taller screen was odd – it “looks strange at best,” said nebulaoperator – and for others it simply wasn’t big enough. Lions87a reckons even 4.5 inches would be too little: “popular phones like the Galaxy S2 and S3 have shown that people are pretty happy nowadays to accept bigger than what the iPhone 5 is currently offering.” Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, influential tech journalist Andy Ihnatko suggests that taller isn’t necessarily better. “The benefit of bigger screens is almost entirely in their increased width, not their length,” he writes. “A wider keyboard is easier to type on. Books, web pages, and emails will have wider margins and they’ll be more comfortable to read.”

John Gruber of Daring Fireball agrees that bigger isn’t always better, but he’s not a fan of wider, either: while he says that “navigating the full screen while holding the iPhone in one hand is worse,” rivals’ wider screens mean it “really is far more difficult to do anything on them one-handed, including typing.” A new set of patents filed by Apple, that we outlined on 15 October 2012, suggest that the iPhone 6 design might hide external-facing components such as the camera and flash from view using a polymer-dispersed liquid crystal window which can change opacity on demand.

The iPhone 6 will boost its processor not with the number of cores but with it’s software use. Even though the iPhone 6 will be using the A10 processor which is the fastest processor for any mobile device it will make the phone faster by updating it’s operating system to decrease the speed needed to run the current apps. Apple might also exploit the new technology IBM claims to have which can boost the processor speed without increasing the number of cores.

Operating System

iOS has been around for a while, and for many it’s getting stale. “I don’t think anyone can deny that the UI needs a refresh when you see widgets and live tiles on competitors’ phones,” says Vincennes, while Tubemonkey2000 says that “the current [UI] is so tired and old it makes it seem really basic, sort of like a kids’ toy.” Some say that “there are so many tweaks Apple could make to its OS to turn it into more of a powerhouse – icons that update with information, or extending the widgets in the notification bar beyond weather and stocks… Apple is taking things very slowly on this front.”

Price

iPhones have never been cheap, but in a world of credible – and cheaper – competition they look pricier than ever. Or maybe it’s because the iPhone’s price has gone up. Saltire is “surprised no-one has mentioned the price increase for the 16GB model”, while Gareth Beavis says that “we simply cannot see how a 16GB model can cost £529 / $199, but to double the memory will cost an extra £70/ $100 with no other changes to the design.” There’s no doubt that you pay more for the materials, fit and finish of an iPhone than you do for, say, a plasticky Android handset, and not everyone thinks that’s worth it. “£529 for a phone that is no better than my six month old Android shows the arrogance of Apple,” Alastairmack says, while Beavis points out that when you consider contracts, “it’s far and away the most expensive in the shop, and most of the time you don’t even get unlimited data.”

Features

NFC has, possibly unfairly, been dubbed “Not For Commerce” (or more saltily, “No Effing Customers”), but for many it’s the most obvious omission from the iPhone 5 – “not because of the technology itself,” says Fmartins, “but to really give the critical mass contactless payments need. Plus, I would love to use the phone as my Oyster card.” Apple is looking at Australian fingerprint technology for NFC mobile payments, so it seems that NFC could arrive with the iPhone 6.

Release Date

The exact date is unknown because Apple doesn’t want consumers to be ready and push off buying iPhone 5 until the 6 comes out. But the approximate date is in the middle of June.



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Apple iPhone 4S personal assistant Siri tells stories

The Apple iPhone 4S exclusive voice prompted personal assistant Siri continues to spring surprises with latest reports revealing the system is capable of telling stories, albeit with some reluctance

Siri, the voice activated personal assistant on Apple’s latest smartphone offering, the iPhone 4S is capably of telling stories following continued nagging.

Despite being the subject of a series of security flaws Siri has made a number of headlines for its pre-programmed witty answers to a number of anticipated questions. The latest addition to this growing list is the systems ability to tell a story upon continued prompting.

The latest quirky Siri feature reportedly sees the iPhone 4S’ party piece try back out of telling a story stating it is “not much of a storyteller” before reeling off a comical fairytale.

“Once upon a time, in a virtual galaxy far far away, there was a young, quite intelligent agent by the name of Siri,” the system’s response reads. “One beautiful day, when the air was pink and all the trees were red, her friend Eliza said, “Siri, you’re so intelligent, and so helpful – you should go work for Apple as a personal assistant.””

Siri’s story ends in true fairytale fashion stating “So she did. And they all live happily ever after.”

Apple iPhone 4S Features

Exclusive to the Apple iPhone 4S, Siri has become the lead talking point of Apple’s latest pocket blower with the handset’s other notable inclusions inclusion the same ARM dual-core processor found within the Apple iPad 2 and a new, fully optimized 8-megapixel rear-mounted camera with 1080p full HD video recording capabilities.

Have you snapped up an Apple iPhone 4S already, what is the funniest response you have had from Siri? Let us know via the comments box below.

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Windows Phone 7.8 update dated for Q1 2013

The first hint as to Microsoft's plan for owners of last-generation Windows Phone 7.5 handsets has been provided by the company's Brazilian arm, suggesting that an upgrade is due early next year.

Windows Phone 7.5 dates back to 2011 and introduced numerous new features to Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform ahead of the launch of Windows Phone 8. Those who had upgraded were hopeful for an eventual transition to the newer Windows Phone 8 OS, but those hopes were dashed by Microsoft's announcement that Windows Phone 8 would be exclusive to new handsets. Instead, Windows Phone 7.5 users are to be provided with a 'stop-gap' upgrade, Windows Phone 7.8, which back-ports some of the new features of Windows Phone 8 to older handsets.

Originally, Microsoft had planned to launch the Windows Phone 7.8 update alongside Windows Phone 8 in October, but that date has been and gone with no sign of the software for existing Windows Phone users. Microsoft has been silent on the reasons for the delay, and had yet to publicly comment on a revised launch schedule for the software until the company's Brazilian arm broke cover with a promise that the update would be launched by early next year.

Answering a customer's query as to the status of the update via microblogging site Twitter, the company explained that Windows Phone 7.8 will be launching in Brazil in the first quarter of 2013. With Microsoft originally planning a US launch for the software and then an international roll-out over the weeks following, it seems likely that Windows Phone 7.5 users should be offered the update by March next year at the latest.

Still to be announced, however, are the features from Windows Phone 8 that will be coming to older handsets as part of Windows Phone 7.8. Although a new start screen with customisable tiles is known to be part of the update, the remainder of the features are being kept under close wraps by Microsoft until closer to launch.


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Android 4.2 "Daydream" mode

One of the new features of Android 4.2 that hasn't gotten much mention recently is the new "Daydream" mode. It hasn't gotten much play because unlike the other major updates like the gesture keyboard, Daydream mode is a flashy extra, but it is quite a nice one. If you've gotten the Android 4.2 update, you'll find Daydream kind of hidden in Settings>Display>Daydream.

It is essentially a screensaver, although it will only turn on under certain conditions. You can set your Android device to start Daydreaming either when the device is docked, when it is charging, or both. As the Daydream mode, users can choose between having the device display the clock, shifting colors, Google Currents headlines, or photos.

The clock and colors are fairly basic (although the clock has a nice feature to set the display to a "very dim mode", which is great for a bedside table), but this may be the first interesting use of Google Currents that we've seen. Currents has always been somewhat overshadowed by other apps that do the same sort of thing like Flipboard, Pulse News, or Feedly. Unfortunately, we say it is an interesting use of Currents because it isn't exactly useful. While it is nice to see the headline scroll of Currents in Daydream, it isn't interactive at all, so you can't tap an interesting headline to jump into the story. So, the whole thing ends up feeling a bit pointless.

Photos can be displayed in two different modes, either a slideshow, or as a "photo table" (basically a collage). For either option, users can choose to show photos that are on the device, or select any or all of your Google+/Picasa photo albums to cycle through. That is a great option for anyone who uses Google+/Picasa, or keeps all of their photos on their Android device at all times. But, if you use Flickr, Facebook, or Instagram, and don't keep copies on your device, this feature won't really do much for you.

Overall, Daydream mode is a nice new feature, and we can see some pretty interesting potential there for offering more options, but it definitely feels like a first attempt, and there is a reason why the feature is a bit buried. We'd love to see more services be able to hook into it, and we'd love to see the displays be more interactive, especially with headlines.



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