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.