Putting a phablet through its paces

Imagine a world where the phone and tablet combine, and where the laptop is not needed for the general mundane tasks. There is no doubt this is the thinking of many organisations and gadget creators like Samsung.

Take the Galaxy Note 2 - an ingenious phablet, a term describing a class of smartphones with screen sizes ranging between five and seven inches, and designed to combine the functionalities of a smartphone and a tablet.

The Galaxy Note 2 has a decent screen size of 5.5 inches. The sheer size, computing power, memory and high-speed wireless connectivity make this a perfect business phone for reading documents, replying to e-mails, commenting, watching movies, and taking HD video and high-resolution pictures. With the mega 3 100mAh battery, there is a full day of heavy usage too.

But, the question is, could this replace the laptop? There is no better way to test this firsthand than by breaking my MacBook screen and being forced to operate from a tablet or mobile phone for three days, which I did.

While the phone has a really good screen, working off it for a full day is excruciatingly debilitating - the minimum requirements needed to at least make this more "all-day friendly" is an HDTV out cable, Bluetooth keyboard and Bluetooth mouse. Connecting and pairing these items was quick and easy, and immediately turned the phone into a more easily navigable device, with the traditional mouse/keyboard/monitor approach. The downside is that it cost approximately R1 800 for the original Samsung products. There are, however, several generic peripherals out there which will also work.

I had to bear in mind that I was working on a phone, not a laptop.

There are a few issues that are immediately apparent when plugging in and pairing all the peripherals. The orientation of the phone is portrait, which doesn't bode well for a landscape-oriented 1 920 x 1 080 HD screen. Thankfully, on installing a third-party orientation component, I immediately gained access to a landscape view of my homepage.

But, there's another problem that applies to just about every app on this smartphone - there is all this increased real estate on a 24-inch monitor, but the design caters for a phone layout of 5.5 inches. Large icons, large text and some minimal zooming controls limited me from really maximising the real estate of the monitor in front of me. Everything seems oversized, although movies and pictures immediately play well in HD.

When it comes to e-mail, the mail client is phone focused; even at the smallest font size, I felt like I needed to adjust the resolution from what I typically would see in the 800 x 600 days, to a more 1 920 x 1 080 feel, although it is already in 1 920 x 1 080. It is still workable, and with the connected peripherals, I was able to navigate well, type out a decent e-mail and add attachments relatively easily.

The most noticeable and useful applications from a business perspective were definitely the Web browser (Chrome) and KingSoft Office. Both applications have been built to give users the ability to zoom right out, giving the monitor real estate like a normal PC. The ribbon function of KingSoft Office makes working with word documents, PDFs, spreadsheet documents and presentations relatively easy - in fact, after a while, I felt as though I was simply using another version of Office. The mouse is confusing though. The right click is not a right click, the keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V don't work as expected, I couldn't Alt-Tab through screens, and many other things that are expected from a desktop experience are missing. I had to bear in mind that I was working on a phone, not a laptop.

Android version 4.1 (Jelly Bean) also includes an update that allows multi-app screen sharing, which comes in handy. The browser cannot be placed on one side of the screen and the mail on the other. Unfortunately, not all applications support this feature. There is also a pop-up browser and the ability to play music and video simultaneously.

During my three days of usage, I was surprised at just how little RAM was used. At a maximum, I hit around one gig out of the two gigs, and that was with many processes and applications open. The phone was always responsive, quick off the mark and very usable and stable, although it was somewhat frustrating with the small things missing that I had come to expect from a laptop. My conclusion: the era of phabtops is dawning, but it's not quite upon us yet. However, when a smartphone is all you have, it can definitely allow you to work.