The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 does resemble the S3 – huge screen, rounded corners and a thin bezel. You’ll also notice the home button in the middle and touch buttons down the sides for the menu and for home. Colour choices – marble white or titanium grey. People didn’t rate the first Note as a day-to-day phone because it was massive, but it did actually sell really well. The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 is 5.5”, which isn’t much bigger than the first Note, and the 16:9 ratio makes watching films brilliant.

Anyone with big hands will be OK with the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, but it’s a good idea to get a Bluetooth headset for frequent long calls, as it can get uncomfortable on the fingers to hold it to your ear.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 hardware is ahead of the Samsung Galaxy 3 – a 1.6GHz quad-core Exynos chip and 2GB of RAM. If you consider that the US S3 is dual-core with 2GB of RAM and the international S3 is quad-core with 1GB, you’ll see that the Note 2 has the best of both worlds.

You can increase the 16GB of storage in the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 up to 80GB with an SD card, and the phone runs on Jelly Bean. Its four cores and Project Butter make this a very speedy phone indeed – much faster than an ICS-run Samsung Galaxy S3 when it comes to screen transitions and app launches.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 battery is also a big step-up – 3,100mAh from 2,500mAh. This means 12 hours of talk, as well as a big screen and LTE. It has an 8MP rear and a 1.9MP front camera. Battery tests have shown that the S3 is only a shade better than the Note 2, with both phones clunking out after around seven hours of looped video. More size, it seems, doesn’t mean more frequent charging.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 S-Pen has been restyled to make it more ergonomic. It also gives some friction, so you feel as if you’re writing on paper. You just take the stylus from the dock and you’re ready. You’ll love Quick Command, Air View and Easy Clip. You can preview content like emails and videos with Air View by hovering the S-Pen over them. Easy Clip means you can crop images and then transfer or share them.

S-Pen is brilliant, but it’s the multi-tasking windows that really make this phone. You can run two apps at the same time with a split screen, and you can adjust the size of each window independently of the other.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 has redesigned the look of the phablet, and it’ll sell very well indeed, with more than three million units shifting in the last four weeks. Some will still go for the Samsung Galaxy S3 because it’s smaller, but they’ll be missing out on some great features….just because they’re worried about size. Don’t eschew the Note 2 because it’s a bit heftier than you might ideally like. Try out the S-Pen, brilliant hardware and all the other features. You might not be able to resist.