The Samsung Galaxy Note smartphone and S Pen stylus.
BLEEDING Edge is not an extrovert by nature, but during the past few weeks we've been even more shy and retiring than usual.
This state of ultra-introversion began very innocently, when a friend pulled a Samsung Galaxy Note smartphone out of his pocket and began checking his SMS messages.
Something in his expression betrayed the depth of his feelings for this gadget. For several years, he'd been resolutely opposed to mobile phones. Now he was clearly in love.
The Galaxy Note seemed such an unlikely candidate for his affections. It is a hybrid - a cross between a smartphone and a tablet, dubbed a ''phablet''. It is more than a smartphone and, with its 13.5-centimetre screen, considerably less than a tablet.
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It turned out that the platform was precisely what our friend had been waiting for.
We were intrigued enough to give one a try.
We've written recently about our switch from the iPhone to the Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone, so the Note's Android operating system was familiar.
Both ship with Ice Cream Sandwich, although the Note has an earlier version of Samsung's TouchWiz interface.
The Note has the Exynos dual-core chip, which is less powerful than the S III's quad-core version and, while each has an 8MP camera, the Note's shutter lag is much more noticeable.
If you're used to the iPhone, the S III's 12.1-centimetre screen seems initially to be on the outer limits of mobile handset usability.
There's a momentary suspicion that perhaps it's just a touch unfashionable to hold something that large against your ear. In fact, S III users seem to adjust quickly, largely because it still fits inside the average hand.
Those doubts loom just that little bit larger with the Note, although, again, it's still contained - albeit only just - within our hand. There are so many compensations for that additional real estate.
The most obvious is the viewing area, which means less scrolling around documents and web pages.
The onscreen keyboard also provides that little bit more room for finger movement, although we found character selection improved when using the tip of the fingernail, rather than the finger.
Another bonus is the fact Samsung has been able to fit a larger battery in the Note, so overnight charging is no longer a necessity for all but the most extreme users.
We were delighted by the stylus, the so-called ''S Pen'', which slips unobtrusively into a slot at the base.
Designed by drawing tablet manufacturer Wacom, we suspect the S Pen's attraction mostly will lie in the ability it offers for onscreen sketching or note-jotting.
The Note comes with applications that allow both.
For Bleeding Edge, the S Pen provided a welcome return to one of the features we loved about the Palm - the ability to enter text quickly by writing on the screen.
The Note doesn't ship with the Palm's amazingly precise Graffiti shorthand handwriting recognition system, with its dedicated zones for letters and numbers, but you can download either Graffiti or Graffiti Pro from the Play Store.
We haven't yet done that, but even without Graffiti, we found it very easy from the text-entry screen to choose between the keyboard and handwriting, and once we got the hang of the S Pen, we could write messages more quickly than with the keyboard.
This is one of the reasons for Bleeding Edge's hyper-shyness. It became clear that acceptance or rejection of the Note is very much a matter of personal taste.
We like it a lot. But in the same way that our friend's affection for it attracted our interest, we've discovered a surprising number of people have wanted to try it and, after playing with the stylus and a couple of applications, have expressed interest in buying one.
For some reason, we've felt a pressing sense of personal responsibility.
What if, we've been asking ourselves, people buy it and find the attraction wears off all too quickly? We've been suggesting that they might like to try it out more rigorously before making a decision.
We've also pointed out that the Note 2, which is expected to ship in the near future with the S III's processor, and possibly at an even faster clock speed, means they should wait before committing themselves.
We're keen on seeing the new version as well. Our experience suggests it might be the ideal variation on the smartphone-tablet theme - at least for introverted types.
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