IF YOU'RE JUST CATCHING UP:

Still, remember that I used the word "comparatively." Plenty of rumors have been flying around, not least about the growing competition in what I regret I must refer to as the "phablet" market. (Seriously, if anyone out there has any ideas for a better term to describe mobile devices that fall between a phone and a tablet in size, I'd be all ears. Email me at .)

The consensus seems to be that Samsung's planning to roll out its much-anticipated Galaxy Note 2 at the end of this month. A suggests that it will have a flexible AMOLED display - and before you ask, no, that doesn't mean you can , while information at indicates a 1.7-GHz Exynos processor and 1.5GB of RAM. (Confusingly, GSM Arena shows an Exynos 5250, but running in a quad-core CPU configuration. Maybe they were talking about the quad-core GPU, instead.)

However, despite earlier rumors that the Galaxy Note 2 would ship with Jelly Bean, several recent stories have suggested that Samsung might actually release the device with instead. Laggard OS updates are nothing new to the Android ecosystem, but I can't help echoing Gotta Be Mobile's contention that device makers are "hobbling" their products by putting less-than-latest versions of Android on slick new hardware. Maybe Samsung's just waiting for BlackBerry 10 to come out so . I'm kidding, of course.

At any rate, HTC is trying desperately to make up ground against Samsung, and the is that the Taiwanese company is planning a direct competitor to the Galaxy Note 2. that the HTC entry could sport a slightly smaller, but higher-resolution display, up to full 1080p, which would be powered by a Tegra 3 quad-core processor. That would mean a higher-res display than the larger Nexus 7, backed by the same processing power, which would be pretty impressive. DigiTimes says the device could be released in September or October.