When Samsung launched the Galaxy Note, the smartphone-tablet hybrid — a.k.a. “phablet” — didn’t make sense to a lot of people, particularly those in the U.S. The Note was a massive phone that came with a stylus, at a time when styli were definitely not cool.
It turns out, the stylus had a specific purpose. According to the head of Samsung’s Silicon Valley-based design firm, the Note was designed with a particular market in mind: Asia.
Speaking today the GigaOM Mobilize conference, Dennis Miloseski, the studio director of Samsung Design America, said that the Note’s design directly addressed a key need for better text input.
“What we were finding was that Asian-speaking cultures found it much easier to actually write the glyphs or the characters of their language. So it was addressing a specific need around inputing text, which is something we do on a daily basis,” he said.
Now, Samsung owns the phablet market and other companies are rushing to catch up. Apple has been rumored to be working on a larger iPhone, and just this week Microsoft unveiled a Windows Phone update that supports screens as large as six inches.
