Samsung Galaxy NotePro 12.2 review

The NotePro 12.2 is a giant tablet designed specifically for business. It uses a heavily customised version of Android that’s ideally suited to multitasking, it comes with a Samsung S-Pen stylus and it has a gorgeous high-resolution screen.

The NotePro’s giant 12.2in display dominates the front of the tablet. It produces very sharp images, thanks to the 2,560×1,600-resolution panel. Colours are vibrant, viewing angles are superb and the screen’s incredibly bright. Indeed, we measured peak brightness at 380cd/m2, which is easily bright enough to see clearly outside in bright sunlight.

Sadly, Samsung’s Touchwiz user interface doesn’t really take advantage of the large screen. There’s a lot of wasted screen space and the same amount of room for widgets as on a 10.1in tablet.

The tablet itself is typical of Samsung’s recent output. The faux leather effect seen on the Galaxy Note 3 is present, as are the physical Home, Back and Multitasking buttons. There are few connection ports, just a Mini USB3 port for charging and data transfer, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. There are no display outputs, and the NotePro is crying out for a full-size USB port, as there’s no way to share files on USB flash drives without buying a USB On-The-Go (OTG) cable. Thankfully, there’s a microSD card, which means you can add extra storage capacity. The 32GB model reviewed here only has around 26GB of usable space out of the box.

The 8-megapixel rear-mounted camera is paired with an LED flash, but we weren’t blown away by its image quality. Images were noisy, even at ISO 100 with the flash forced on.

To coincide with the move to Android 4.4 KitKat, Samsung has modified its familiar TouchWiz user interface for the NotePro 12.2. Icons are now much flatter to match Google’s own apps, but otherwise its mostly the same as in previous iterations. MyMagazine, Samsung’s Flipboard-powered, magazine-style feed reader, is only ever a few swipes away, as is a work-focused planner, complete with email, calendar, diary appointments and office shortcuts.

Many of the preinstalled apps are business-oriented, including Cisco WebEx online meetings. Hancom Office is a decent office productivity suite that’s compatible with MS Word and Excel documents, and the Bloomberg BusinessWeek app is a great digest of the magazine.

Other apps will be familiar to anyone who has used a Galaxy smartphone or tablet. There’s S Note, which is used to make written notes with the S-Pen, and Scrapbook, which lets you collect clippings from web pages and other apps. Most of these apps can’t be uninstalled, but you can hide them from view in the app drawer.

The NotePro 12.2’s big screen lends itself to doing more than one thing at once, and the NotePro can run up to four apps simultaneously, but only those supported by Samsung. That’s a fairly small number, but it includes important work and entertainment apps such as S Note, Scrapbook, Chrome, Email, Facebook and Twitter. Other apps, such as YouTube, will work but don’t like the onscreen keyboard sitting in front of them, which means you can’t see what you’re typing.

You can also use the S-Pen stylus to draw a rectangle onscreen and open an app in its own little window, but you only have access to the same limited selection of apps. Multiple apps can be positioned anywhere in different ratios, and you can resize them by dragging an edge.

Unfortunately, the NotePro 12.2’s virtual keyboard is a real let-down. Onscreen keys can’t replicate the feel of physical keys, and we made so many typing errors when writing emails that we longed for a Bluetooth keyboard.

PERFORMANCE AND BENCHMARKS

Thanks to an incredibly powerful Exynos 5 Octa eight-core processor and 3GB of RAM, the NotePro can multitask without a noticeable reduction in performance, although there is a slight delay when resizing simultaneously running apps.

The NotePro 12.2 completed the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in a rapid 997.9ms. That’s a great score, but tablets powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 4 chipset have produced higher scores. Android animations were smooth and apps loaded quickly, with only an occasional stutter when opening and closing several demanding apps in quick succession. The NotePro 12.2 is primarily a business tool, but it’s adept at gaming. The tablet scored 13,679 in the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited test, which puts it on par with the most powerful Android tablets, and the NotePro 12.2 played demanding games such as Real Racing 3 smoothly.

The Exynos 5 Octa eight-core processor has four high-performance cores that run at 1.9GHz and four low-power cores that run at 1.3GHz. The low-power cores are used for less demanding tasks. We expected the NotePro 12.2’s massive screen to have a detrimental effect on battery life, but the NotePro 12.2 lasted an impressive 12 hours and 34 minutes on a single charge. That’s more than enough battery power for a full day’s use at the office.

CONCLUSION

We like the NotePro 12.2’s large screen, and its business-focused nature, but we think many people would be better off spending much less on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014. The NotePro 12.2 can’t replace your laptop if you rely on MS Office or specific software, though, and the lack of a physical keyboard is another disadvantage when you can buy an Ultrabook for around the same price. We think the NotePro is too expensive at £700, especially when tablets are still an uncommon sight in the workplace.