Pajamas, bed hair (if at all), Galaxy Note. The usual. Oh, and there is the Galaxy Tab recharging in the corner.

Today I tested a new url specifically for tablets at itavisen.no, a Norwegian website. It did not work too well with either my Samsung Galaxy Tab (original) or my Samsung Galaxy Note (the world’s smallest Android tablet – all smaller tablets are to be swallowed).

I have had a problem with the Note since I bought it right before Christmas. (Is it really only a quarter of a year ago?? It feels so much longer.) On my way home, I could not use the browser. I could use it with a wireless network, but not when on 3G. Opera Mini worked fine, but the built-in browser did not, and not Opera Mobile. (Opera Mini is different in that it receives the web pages as pure graphics in compressed form rather than decode the pages on the fly.) Since I had not seen anything about this in the reviews, I assumed it was a Monday machine, as we call them here in Norway. One that had slipped through quality control.

I went back to the shop asking to get another – it was only one day later. But they did not have any more in stock. I would have to send it for repair and wait for it to return. Since Opera Mini does the job in 99.9% of cases, I decided to just keep it.

Today I switched to wireless again to test the tablet website. But something else happened: It told me that there was a firmware upgrade. So I let it download that while I tested, and later install. (It stood a really long time without making visible progress so don’t restart yours if it happen to you.) It did not lose any of my installed apps or any of my settings, and it looks just the same. But the browsers now work on 3G. So that is good.

I had half hoped, when I saw there was a download waiting, that it might be the promised Ice Cream Sandwich – version 4 of Android, which is supposed to run equally well on tablets and phones. Since the Note is both, that seems like a good thing. But the truth is, it works quite excellently as is, and I am not really sure what could be better. The only problem I have with it is that it is small, and that is why I have it in the first place. It goes in my shirt pocket like a big but flat mobile phone, yet it has a screen resolution equal to the desktop PC where I play Sims 2.  Oh, and I have to charge it every day, more or less, but that may have to do with using it a lot.

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Samsung’s Galaxy Note got mixed reviews when it first came to Norway (for some reason months ahead of the USA). Reviewers raved about the specs, whined about the price, and worried that its awkward size (5.3″) would make it embarrassingly big for a phone and too small for a tablet. All this was true, but it has become a cult hit among Norwegian geeks, who want to have a tablet on their person at all times except in the shower. And except when making love, I assume, if they do that. I don’t. But then the Galaxy Note doesn’t really have a body that invites to it. ^_^