Samsung likes to refresh their products every 12 months. Seeing as how the Galaxy Note started shipping in October 2011, that means we should see the successor to the highly successful 5.3 inch phablet in just a few months. According to sources who spoke to UbuntuLife, the Galaxy Note II will have a 5.5 inch screen that pushes 1680 x 1050 pixels. Under the hood there’s allegedly going to be a dual core Exynos 5 chip inside, an 8 megapixel camera, 1.5 GB of RAM, and 4G LTE. If this is real, then it’s set to be one of the first devices on the market to use ARM’s new Cortex A15 processor. What does that mean? Most companies use ARM’s processors when designing their chips. Take the NVIDIA Tegra 3 for instance, it has four ARM Cortex A9 processors. Qualcomm is a bit different. Instead of licensing ARM’s processors, they design their own from the ground up. The “Krait” processor in the Snapdragon S4 chip is faster than the ARM Cortex A9, but slower than the ARM Cortex A15. So again, this Note II might be one of the most insane products we’ll see this year in terms of benchmark numbers.
What we really care about though is how Samsung plans to take advantage of whatever the newest version of Android is called. Google tends to announce a new version of their mobile operating system, and a flagship Nexus device to run said OS, during the last three months of the year. There’s a high probability that the new Nexus will be a modified version of the Galaxy S III. If that’s the case, then what’s going to push people towards the 5.5 inch Note II? We could barely fit the 5.3 inch Note into our pockets, does Samsung really want to add an extra 0.2 inches on top of that?
Anyway, you should take these rumors with a mountain of salt.
[Via: Unwired View]