Galaxy Note LTE or Motorola Razr?

Will Samsung's Smartphone Beat The Motorola's Best Bet? The Samsung Galaxy Note LTE was released in January and comes with the trademark large screen that allows users to view more with less scrolling and transitions. It also features the S Pen stylus, which integrates with the device's native apps to offer a richer and more interactive experience.

The Motorola Droid Razr Maxx is a feature-packed smartphone that offers a powerful battery as well as high-speed 4G LTE compatibility. Check out how the Galaxy Note LTE's specs do against the Droid Razr Maxx:

Display
Samsung's Galaxy Note LTE features a gigantic 5.3in Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 1280x800 pixels at 285 pixel per inch (ppi). It includes the TouchWiz User Interface. The Droid Razr Maxx comes with a 4.3in Super AMOLED Advanced capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 960x540 pixels at 256 pixels per inch (ppi). It includes Corning Gorilla Glass which protects the screen from damages, as does the Galaxy Note LTE.

Processor
The Galaxy Note LTE is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8660 Snapdragon chipset with a dual-core 1.5 GHz Scorpion processor. Motorola's Droid Razr Maxx is powered by a 1.2GHz Cortex-A9 dual-core CPU and TI OMAP 4430 chipset. Both the Galaxy Note LTE and the Droid Razr Maxx sport 1GB of RAM.

Camera
Both the Galaxy Note LTE and the Droid Razr Maxx boast an eight megapixel rear-facing camera with auto-focus and LED flash. The sporting features are geo-tagging, touch focus, face detection and image stabilisation. Both smartphones allow users to record video of 1080p. The Galaxy Note LTE features a two megapixel front-facing camera, whereas the Droid Razr Maxx includes a front-facing camera of 1.3 megapixels.

Operating System
Both smartphones run Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), which is upgradable to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).

Storage
Both the Galaxy Note LTE and the Droid Razr Maxx have 16GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot with additional memory space of 32GB. Connectivity
The Galaxy Note LTE features Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct and Wi-Fi hotspot. It offers support to Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP and EDR. The Droid Razr Maxx comes with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA and Wi-Fi hotspot. It supports Bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP, LE + EDR technology.

Battery
The Samsung smartphone packs a Li-Ion 2500mAh standard battery that allows for talk time of up to 10 hours and stand by time of up to 252 hours. In comparison, the Droid Razr Maxx comes with Li-Ion 3300mAh standard battery that provides for talk time of up to 21 hours 30 minutes. It allows for stand by time of up to 380 hours.

A look at Samsung's Series 5 550 Chromebook

Indeed, the name "Chromebook" comes from the fact that the laptop is running the so-called Chrome OS - basically an embedded version of Google's Chrome Web browser. If you've used the Chrome browser on Windows or Mac, you know that it asks you to log in, and then it syncs your bookmarks, Google identity, Google Docs, and Google Drive files. The Chromebook works the same way, except there's no way out of that browser. Apps can run on a Chromebook, but they're Web apps; they load through the browser.

That's not to say the Chromebook can't do anything offline: it can read files and play movies and music anytime. And Chrome OS has gotten better at file compatibility PowerPoint, Word docs, Excel files, ZIP files, and PDFs all load well and look great. You can't edit documents without first uploading to Google Docs, though. Photos can be viewed and even lightly edited with brightness and contrast adjustments, rotation, and cropping. The files can be resaved or uploaded to Picasa.

Our experience with the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook last year left us underwhelmed: it had smoothly running hardware and a clean operating system, but with such a limited set of uses compared with Windows, a high sticker price of over $400, and the requirement of being online to use most apps like Google Docs, the Chromebook didn't add up to a logical choice for anyone other than a Google cloud devotee. A year later, the new Samsung Chromebook Series 5 550 has slightly improved hardware and improved Chrome OS software, but its price - a whopping $449, or $549 with a Verizon 3G wireless antenna - is flat-out crazy.

Here's the biggest problem with the Chromebook: the hardware's fine, and the simplified Web-based OS is clever, and even versatile if you don't mind its limitations. Still, it's a radically reduced subset of what you can get on a Windows or Mac laptop...or even an iPad or Android tablet, for that matter. Yet, it costs more than a new iPad 2, a thinner, keyboard-enabled Android tablet like the Asus Transformer Pad, or a fully featured 11-inch ultraportable laptop like the AMD-powered HP dm1z. If the Chromebook were $99, this could have been a revolutionary product. As it currently stands, it's merely an invitation to pay a lot of money to be part of a Google experiment.