Hands-on with Samsung’s NotePro and TabPro: New screen sizes and “Magazine UI”

We recently got to spend some time with Samsung's newest line of tablets, the Galaxy NotePro and the Galaxy TabPro. The NotePro is an S-Pen-enabled, 12.2-inch tablet, and the Galaxy TabPro comes in 12.2, 10.1, and 8.4-inch sizes.

The hardware is typical Samsung, with almost no surprises. The materials and design for the new tablets are identical to those of the Note 3 or Note 10.1: a faux stitched-leather back, faux-Chrome sides, and a glass front. Specs are what you would expect from a high-end device, a Snapragon 800 with 2 or 3 GB of RAM depending on the size of the device.

The software is the real star of the show here, with Samsung tossing the standard Android home screen in favor of a new interface called "Magazine UI," which the company says is better suited for larger displays. A 10-inch Android homescreen can fit somewhere around 50 app icons, which almost no one needs on their home screen, so Samsung may have a point that app icons on a tablet are a little too small.

The new home screen is clearly inspired by Windows 8, with big rectangular tiles instead of app icons. The tiles do a better job of filling the bigger screen on a tablet, though the 8.4-inch and 12.2-inch models seem to display the same amount of data with Samsung's new UI. The tiles are filled with either a decorative picture or with additional information, like your inbox on the e-mail tile or weather or calendar information in those respective tiles. The tiles take on the shape of Windows 8, but not the simple, low-density aesthetic, and they are more useful for it. Even the "small" version of the e-mail tile will show your first three e-mails, and the calendar tile will show several upcoming events. Still, Samsung may have swung a little too far from those 50+ app icons, as it seems you can only have six tiles on the screen at once. A "popular apps" tile, which shows several app icons in a tile, helps alleviate things a bit, but we still get the feeling that living with only six tiles, especially on the 12.2-inch model, would be a little too restrictive.

Samsung's custom home screen was built atop the Android widget framework, and the widgets are movable and resizable. When dragging a tile around, the other tiles intelligently resize and move out of the way. One new wrinkle is that widgets and app icons now live on separate homescreen pages. On the demo unit, after five or so widget pages, a regular app shortcut page appears. It looks like the special "widget" pages are reserved for Samsung's special widgets, as the usual Google Apps widgets like Gmail were not listed. Like all home screens, if you prefer the old-style home screen interface, you can just download something more traditional from the Play Store.

The one big surprise in the hardware department is that Samsung is dumping the menu button and replacing it with a "Recent Apps" button, finally following the recommended button layout Google introduced three years ago. The removal of the menu button means the top-right action bar overflow menus will now properly appear in all apps, no longer hiding important options from users. Samsung loves to have unity across its devices, so we expect this to be the new button layout going forward.

The 12.2-inch NotePro sports a micro-USB 3.0 connector. The Note 3 was Samsung's first device to have the faster connection, but Samsung's implementation was very clunky. USB 3.0 speeds had to be toggled on and would turn off after being idle for a period. And while USB 3.0 was on, a warning would pop up stating that cellular data and phone calls may not work while transfers were happening. Hopefully Samsung's second shot at the new connector is a little more robust. The good news is that micro-USB 3.0 is backward compatible with micro-USB 2.0, so if Samsung still hasn't worked all the bugs out, just don't use it.

So is 12 inches a good size for a tablet? It's about the size of a laptop and really no more portable, and it's not something you could ever dream of using one-handed. If your tablet lives on the coffee table at home, the larger screen is nice, and you might be able to find a place for it. For something this large, though, it would probably be nicer to have a convertible laptop. Samsung's tablets can't stand up on their own, which we kind of expect something this large to do, especially given how heavy it is. Some kind of slick Asus-Transformer-esque keyboard dock would go a long way in helping something this large find some utility.

We only had a brief moment to check out Samsung's new tablets. Like most things at CES, there's no word on launch dates, prices, or review units yet. You'll know more as soon as we do.