The Galaxy Note 10.1 has two okay-but-not-great cameras: a 5-megapixel shooter on the back and a 1.9-megapixel camera on the front. With most tablets, I don't worry too much about camera quality -- honestly, how often do you hold up a giant slate to capture important photos? -- but given Samsung's emphasis on artwork and content creation with the Note, its less-than-stellar specs could be worth, well, noting.

The Note 10.1 has a power button and volume rocker on its top, as well as a microSD slot, an infrared blaster to control your TV via a prepackaged app called Peel and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The tablet's bottom has a slot for the S Pen stylus and a proprietary charging port. If you want to connect any USB devices to the Note or plug it into a TV via HDMI, you'll need special adapters; Samsung sells them for $30 and $40, respectively. (Though the Samsung site lists the adapters as being for the Galaxy Tab, company reps assure me they're compatible with the Galaxy Note as well.)

The new Galaxy Note has two front-facing speakers flanking its screen. I found the sound quality to be quite good, relatively speaking; the fact that the speakers face frontward makes a noticeable difference compared to the side or rear placement many tablets use.

Under the hood

Samsung's Galaxy Note 10.1 has some impressive-sounding hardware under its hood: The tablet runs on a quad-core 1.4GHz Exynos processor along with a full 2GB RAM.