Samsung to launch Galaxy Note 2 this month

It’s not easy to predict which devices will be a success in the tech world, but I don’t think anyone held out much hope for the Galaxy Note.

It is a device that’s too small and not powerful enough to be a leading tablet, but is too big to appeal to the mass smartphone market.

At least, that’s what we all thought upon seeing the Note for the first time. Yet here we are, eight months and seven million sales down the line, and Samsung is preparing the follow-up.

Maybe I’m being a little harsh – the Galaxy Note may be large for a smartphone, but with such a high-quality, vibrant display, after a couple of days you wonder how you ever managed on anything less than five inches.

Samsung has proved its critics wrong, and for its next trick it’s giving us something better, more powerful and unbelievable, bigger.

The Galaxy Note 2 has been sitting firmly on the tech world rumour mill for some time now, but Samsung has now quashed the whispers by giving us a launch date for the device.

We’ll get a first look at the Note 2 on 29 August, at the Samsung Mobile Unpacked event in Berlin. But apart from this date, confirmed details are rather thin on the ground.

That’s never stopped the world of technology before though, and there is plenty of speculation to keep us going until the end of the month.

I’d have thought 5.3-inches would be enough for anyone (at least that’s what I keep telling myself), but it seems that Samsung is not satisfied.

Reports have suggested that the Note 2’s display will be a mammoth 5.5-inches, with a boosted resolution of 1680x1050. We can also expect a powerful quad-core 1.6GHz processor, with some reports even suggesting we’ll see the latest Android OS, Jelly Bean, make an appearance.

With the Ice Cream Sandwich operating system-toting S3 doing so well, I’m not sure Samsung will want to introduce an upgrade just yet. But if the specs rumours prove to be true, we’re going to have a very good (albeit rather large) smartphone on our hands.