JoltVib

First impressions first: after getting through the initial setup menu, I was blown away by the fluidity and smoothness of the Galaxy Note II’s home screen animations. Even by the high standards of the HTC One X that I use on a regular basis, the Note II is dazzlingly responsive. This is down to the combination of Samsung’s new Exynos processor and Google’s latest Android 4.1 update. That quad-core chip obliterated our previous benchmark records when it debuted on the Galaxy S III and its processing and graphical capabilities are apparent from the moment you pick up the Galaxy Note II as well. As to Google’s involvement in this improved performance, the Jelly Bean upgrade’s headline feature was something called Project Butter — an effort directed specifically at optimizing and smoothing animations throughout the Android user interface. You may consider the Galaxy Note II a validation of both Google and Samsung’s efforts to improve the basic user experience.

The Note II’s rapid responsiveness extends to everything you do, whether you’re scrolling through endless contact lists or swiping between Gmail messages. It’s really difficult to trip this device up and force it to produce lag of any sort. In spite of this universally snappy experience, I found the Galaxy Note II to have one unexplained delay that has been bothering me since the original Note. When waking it from sleep, you’re consistently having to wait over a second between pressing the power button and seeing the screen come to life. That may sound like a trifling amount of time, but remember that the aforementioned UI improvements can be measured in fractions of a second. Overall, the Galaxy Note II offers the most fluid Android user experience I’ve enjoyed yet, bringing it on a par with the excellent iOS and Windows Phone.

TouchWiz

For a full breakdown of Samsung’s latest TouchWiz customizations to Android, I refer you to my review of the Galaxy S III. That interface has been transplanted to the Galaxy Note II in its entirety, so anything that was true on the earlier device remains true today. In summary, opting for TouchWiz over other skins gets you a great app launcher, handy notification tray shortcuts, and a generally restrained set of visual tweaks that do little to no harm. You may find yourself disturbed by the loud water plops that accompany the dialer (this is, after all, the mighty Nature UX), but literal bells and whistles like that are optional and you can quickly civilize the gimmickry out of this device.

That may be true of the general interface, but in terms of added features, Samsung continues to emphasize quantity over quality. It’s opting to overwhelm users with options instead of making a few intelligent decisions on their behalf. For example, the context menu you can bring up while looking at a photo on the tablet includes no fewer than 16 options. Some of them I like, such as the ability to crop or add a Photo Note, but that list can be trimmed in half without removing core functionality. This deluge-over-discernment approach is repeated in the amount of extra software Samsung preloads on the Galaxy Note II, with a set of Hubs and the pervasive S series of apps prominently displayed on the default home screen. None of them add any real value to the user experience, and worse than that, the S Planner replacing the default Android Calendar app can be counted as a downgrade.

The Note II isn’t completely bereft of good new ideas. The extra number row atop the onscreen keyboard is very convenient and makes good use of the supersized display. I’d have liked to see more of this sort of optimization on the home screen layout, which still suffers from vast swathes of suboptimally used space. The new Photo Note option lets you scribble a handwritten missive on the "back" of your photos, with Samsung neatly emulating a printed image. Yes, it’s cutesy skeuomorphism gone 3D, but I actually like this feature and expect many people will enjoy using it. Samsung also throws in a handy Blocking Mode, which sounds a lot more menacing than it actually is. It simply allows you to determine which notifications you want to disable and when. So you can turn everything off during the night or just block the LED light from distracting you during the day. It can be thought of as Samsung’s answer to Apple’s well-received Do Not Disturb feature, though it’s a little cruder than the iOS implementation.

Being an Android 4.1 tablet, the Galaxy Note II naturally comes with Google Now, though you’ll have to do a bit of work to uncover where it is. Samsung buries the link to Google Now in its multitasking overview, which is accessed by long-pressing the Home button. That’s one long press and a shortcut tap for a feature that Google is pushing so actively that it can be accessed directly from the lock screen on stock Jelly Bean devices. Samsung has a reason not to be promoting Google’s voice search assistant, however, and that reason is S Voice, the Korean company’s in-house solution. You can access S Voice by double-tapping the Home button. Alas, S Voice continues to be hit-and-miss in terms of voice recognition and the range of scenarios where it is genuinely useful remains severely limited. Apple’s iOS 6 upgrade of Siri makes Samsung’s alternative look even more feeble.

The original Galaxy Note shipped with what Samsung itself might admit was unfinished software. I encountered a number of bugs during my testing of that device, and it’s pleasing to see a far more stable OS on the Galaxy Note II. Even better, I received a system update during my review process, so Samsung’s still actively improving everything. There is indeed room for improvement, as I still managed to stumble upon the clock widget confusion in the image above, but on the whole, the Note II has been solid and reliable. A welcome change.

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