The rest of the software

The Galaxy Note 10.1 utilizes a custom Samsung operating system based on 's Android 4.0 release. The software, known as TouchWiz, is similar to what was used on .

I've never been a huge fan of TouchWiz; in its misguided efforts at making Android its own, Samsung trades the sleek simplicity of for a far more busy and cluttered alternative. As I've written before, many of Samsung's UI changes seem to have been made merely for the sake of change and at the expense of user experience. The result is a visually inconsistent interface that loses out on the strides Google has made with Android over the past year.

The changes also result in a struggle to keep up with current software: Even at launch, the Note's OS is based on a dated version of Android. Samsung has promised it'll upgrade the Note to the more current Android 4.1 Jelly Bean release sometime "later this year," but with the company's -- including its for the Note earlier this year -- it's hard to take its pledges at face value. Put simply, if timely and reliable software upgrades are important to you, buying a Samsung TouchWiz device is a risky gamble to take.

In terms of actual features, Samsung has made a few interesting additions to the Note's OS. One example is a feature called Multiview that allows you to view two apps simultaneously, side-by-side on-screen, in adjacent windows. This is an innovative idea that opens up a lot of possibilities for a tablet, like being able to view and copy text or images from a Web page while working on a document.