Samsung Electronics revealed during the announcement of the Galaxy Note 10.1" tablet that shipments of Galaxy Note hybrid smartphone with large 5.3" screen have hit 10 million units in less than a year. Samsung believes that the milestone shows the importance of advantages provided by both large screen as well as stylus, an exclusive feature of Galaxy Note-series devices.

Samsung started to sell Galaxy Note in late October '11 in Germany and currently the smartphone/tablet hybrid is available virtually all around the world. It took Samsung around five months to sell the first five million Galaxy Note smartphones and it took the company about four and half months to sell another five million units, which shows that the popularity of the device that some call "phablet" is stable among the end-users.

With a huge screen and a stylus, Samsung Galaxy Note in some ways resembles a small tablet and can be used for applications that cannot be served by today's smartphones, but which do not require slates with 7" or 10" screens. Moreover, there are people, who would like to have tablet functionality in their pockets or who do not want to carry both smartphone and tablets and who are satisfied with 5.3" screen with decent resolution and pixel density.

The idea of a smartphone with an ultra large screen turns to be popular. Samsung's own flagship Galaxy S III phone features 4.8" display, Google's Galaxy Nexus sports 4.65" screen and there are also handsets from HTC, LG Electronics that have ultra-large displays.

Global smartphone unit shipments will soar to around a billion units in 2015, more than double from around 500 million in 2011, according to some market observers. Based on prediction from ABI, 20% of smartphones will have screens larger than 4.6".

The Galaxy Note is based on dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 SoC with 1.5GHz clock-speed (Exynos 4210 or Snapdragon 8255T), is equipped with 5.3” multi-touch LCD screen with 1280*800 resolution; 16GB or 32GB of flash storage; Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 and GSM/HSPA+/GPRS/HSUPA/LTE connectivity. The smartphone features a 8MP rear camera and a 2MP front camera. The device sports 2500mAh battery. The Galaxy Note is based on Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" operating system.

Tags: Samsung, Galaxy, Galaxy Note, Android, Google