Could a bigger phone really be better?

I just received my Galaxy Note II loaner from Verizon for review. I have two weeks to play with this behemoth and I’m afraid I may never go back to my iPhone 5 again. I have to tell you I never thought I’d be writing these words but after several hours of playing with this galaxy note II, I think I’m hooked. Bigger, brighter may be even faster than my iPhone and it still fits very nicely in a shirt pocket. My iPhone 5 looks like a little baby next to this phone.

Let’s start with SAMOLED display screen. Naturally everything is easier to read because the screen is bigger but it also appears brighter and dare I say just a sharp as the retina display on the iPhone (at least to my eyes). The phone also includes a stylus, yes take me back to my Treo phone days, but the stylus isn’t necessarily needed unless you want to use it. The stylus is actually referred to as an S Pen, and is used for jotting down notes or hitting keys if your fingers are too fat. But again thanks to the size of the phone the keys are spaced further apart and it’s much easier for my little porkers to hit the keys accurately. By the way that pen stores neatly into the phone through well-designed portal in the back.

I looked into buying a mini iPad when it came out but couldn’t see a reason to fork out $4-$600 for an iPad that still had to be carried around in a briefcase or folder. The size of this Galaxy Note II actually makes sense because it can go everywhere the smaller iPhone goes, but you still have the extra real estate and larger fonts.

I played around with the camera and I have to tell you it’s also impressive. There have been some reviews saying that the camera needs light to create a good picture. Wrong! I took a picture in my home office of a very dark wall and it was spectacular.

Webpages on the Internet are brighter, crisper and again easier to read because of the size of the phone. I haven’t done speed tests but downloading several websites, the Verizon connection definitely appears faster than my AT&T connection on the iPhone.

Overall ratings for this Galaxy Note II have been good, the phone is running the jellybean operating system which will take just a little getting used to if you’re coming from an iPhone. I was anxious to try the voice dictation software that comes included with the phone. There have been reports on some websites that the voice recognition wasn’t up to par. I ran several tests in different environments and I was impressed. Accurate, very quick and very few mistakes. I did find the voice recognition had trouble translating email addresses. It kept spelling out the word “at” and separating words instead of combining them after being told to put a “.com” at the end of an email address. A very small problem compared to the big pluses of this phone.

The app store for android isn’t nearly as robust as its Apple competitor. But do we really need several trillion apps? I’m just not familiar enough with the Android app store to know of everything that the user needs is available.

If you’re looking for iPhone alternative the galaxy note II may be the answer. Don’t take my word for it, stop into a Verizon store and play around with one of these enormous phones. Like me , you may find yourself wondering if it’s worth getting out of your iPhone contract.