While the first ads featured the Galaxy S II phone, a direct competitor of the iPhone 4S, this one is for the Galaxy Note. With its huge screen and pen, it’s both an anti-iPhone and one of the most distinctive phones on the market. So the gag feels a little muffled, and the Note doesn’t get enough explanation.

I’m still curious how the Galaxy Note will do–it strikes me as neat, but a niche. But the fact that Samsung plowed money into a Super Bowl spot presumably means that it thinks the phone can be a mainstream hit.

My Samsung Galaxy S II had been great to me. It’s a thin, light phone with a gorgeous Super AMOLED Plus display and a dual-core processor that handles Android with ease. When people asked me if I’d ever return to an iPhone–my previous handset was an iPhone 3GS–my answer was a cheery “nope!”

That was until last week, when AT&T delivered an Android 2.3.6 update to the Galaxy S II that destroyed its battery life. Before the update, the phone could easily last through a day of moderate use. After the update, the phone would lose about 8 percent of its battery per hour in standby. Even if I rarely touched the phone during the day, it was dead by bedtime.

I’m telling this story not just to rant–although I’m grateful for that opportunity–but to point out a risk that Android users face: An update that’s supposed to deliver nothing but good things could carry unforeseen consequences. Another example of this popped up this week, with users of Asus’ Transformer Prime reporting lock-ups and graphical glitches after updating to Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

I wasn’t alone in my battery drain problem. Similar complaints have appeared in forums on AT&T’s website, XDA-Developers forums and Android Central (where some T-Mobile users are reporting the same issue), but other users said they weren’t having any issues. This is both the best and worst kind of Android bug, because it’s less likely to merit immediate attention from the phone maker and wireless carriers when it doesn’t affect everyone.

When I asked Samsung Support over Twitter what was going on, the support team said it had passed my info on “for further evaluation.” After following up today, I was told to factory reset my phone (more on that shortly).

The Galaxy S II battery drain issue has even stumped the hackers at XDA-Developers, who haven’t been able to come up with a reliable fix. Some people are rooting their phones and rolling back to an earlier version of Android, but that can apparently introduce other problems, such as buggy Wi-Fi. Besides, rooting your phone voids the warranty, which is exactly what you don’t want to do when something goes wrong.

So today, I took Samsung’s advice and went nuclear, backing up all my data and resetting the phone to its factory defaults. Google’s built-in backup only restores apps, system settings, contacts, calendar info and e-mail, so before resetting, I coughed up $5 for MyBackup Pro so I could easily restore my home screen layout, text messages, phone calls, and photos as well. Neither process went smoothly, so I still have to spend a bunch of time tweaking my phone to get it back to its old state.

For now, I’m not quite sure whether the factory reset completely solved the problem. After about two hours of idle time, my phone’s battery is down about 10 percent, which isn’t stellar but seems better than it was before the update. Either way, I shouldn’t have to start from scratch whenever a system update comes around.

In fairness, buggy updates can happen on any smartphone platform. Windows Phone users and iPhone users have been victims too. But Android’s presence on many phones, with many slight variations in software, across several wireless carriers–yes, I’m talking about the dreaded “F” word–makes problems trickier to identify and fix.

If you’re really unlucky, like me, the companies who made your phone won’t be in any rush to help. The best you’ll get is some generic advice that may or may not solve the problem. If it doesn’t, and you don’t want to attempt hacking a fix on your own, getting a new phone under warranty is your only option.

Are my battery woes enough to make me swear off Android when it’s time for a new phone? No, because a lot can happen between now and then. But this is the first issue I’ve had that’s given me second thoughts.

[This post republished from Techland.]

When Intel started talking about the concept of Ultrabooks last year, I thought the definition was pretty simple: Ultrabooks were MacBook Air knockoffs that had Intel processors and ran Windows 7.

It turned out to be more complicated than that. Ultrabooks do use Intel CPUs–they’re Intel’s idea, after all–and they do run Windows. But not all of them bear much resemblance at all to the Air. Really, as long as PC makers design Ultrabooks to be fairly thin, they have lots of latitude to build different sorts of portable computers at different price points.

Case in point: Samsung’s Series 5 Ultra systems, the company’s first official Ultrabooks, which it’s announcing here at CES. There’s a Series 5 Ultra with a 14″ display. (Most Ultrabooks to date have been 13-inchers.) There are ones with 500GB hard disks. (Most Ultrabooks use pricey flash storage and max out at 256GB.) There’s even an optical drive option. (I’d assumed that every Ultrabook would ditch the drive in order to achieve the maximum possible razor-thinness.) And while there’s certainly a dash of Air-like look-and-feel to the industrial design, they’re not clones.

The Ultra comes in two sizes: The aforementioned 14″ one (starting at $949.99) and a 13.3″ version (starting at $899.99). Both have Intel Core i7 CPUs, and lots of ports, including USB 3.0 and 2.0, Ethernet. HDMI, and SD slots. The 14″ model is 3.94 pounds; the 13.3″ one is 3.24 pounds. Samsung claims up to seven hours of battery life for both versions.

Both models bear a familial resemblance to Samsung’s Series 9 from last year–a higher-end machine that was much more of an Air archrival. Samsung is also announcing new versions of the Series 9 here in Vegas; it’s still not calling them Ultrabooks, but they come off as a high-end take on the same notion–Super-Duper-Ultrabooks, if you will. The 13.3″ model ($1399) is 2.5 pounds and a half-inch thick. There’s also a new 15″ model–that’s an unusually big screen for a notebook that emphasizes thin, light design–that weighs 3.5 pounds and is also a half-inch thick.

Both of the new Series 9 models have black aluminum cases, 128GB solid-state drives, and 1600-by-900 displays. Samsung says that 15″ one has up to ten hours of battery life and the 13.3″ one gets up to seven hours. While the Series 5 Ultra systems look pretty slick, the Series 9 ones look really slick.

The Series 5 Ultra models will be available starting on January 30th; the Series 9 ones are due on February 27th,

The company’s argument is that they lack sufficient RAM and ROM to run the new OS alongside TouchWiz and other “experience-enhancing” software. This will come as a massive blow to the great many users of the Galaxy S, who would have rightly expected the 1GHz Hummingbird processor and accompanying memory to be able to handle ICS — it’s the same hardware as you’ll find inside the Nexus S, and that phone is receiving Android 4.0 over the air right now.

I’d gladly give up TouchWiz for Ice Cream Sandwich. In a heartbeat. Would you?

Nestled within the list of features is a section on the Galaxy Player’s Google capabilities. The screenshot is not of the Android OS Google app, though: instead, it is a shot of the Maps app in iOS. Yes, really.

Some enterprising investigative reporting has tracked down the image to female-centric technology blog BlogHer, in a 2008 post about “game changing” iOS apps. How the PR department didn’t notice this when lifting the image is beyond me. Doesn’t Google Image Search tell you where it comes from?

The errant screenshot sat on Samsung’s own website for an unknown amount of time here, but has since been removed. See the image after the jump, you have to see this to believe it!

Turns out that I was lucky. Samsung later removed all the Tab 7.7s from the show, presumably for reasons relating to Apple’s ongoing patent case over the Galaxy Tab. Here’s FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller with some details. (In Germany, Apple has an injunction against Samsung that prevents it from selling the Tab 10.1 here.)

Samsung apparently doesn’t plan to sell the 7.7 in the U.S., a move that Mueller speculates could be spurred by the Galaxy Tab line’s legal woes. I’m not a patent lawyer and am not taking a stance on the case, but I’ll be sorry if the 7.7 can’t make it into the market. From a hardware standpoint, at least, it’s the nicest 7″ (or thereabouts) tablet I’ve seen. I’d like to see consumers get the chance to embrace it or reject it as they see fit.

[Full disclosure: I spoke on a panel at IFA, and the conference organizers covered my travel costs.]

“If you see a stylus,” Steve Jobs famously said at the original iPhone launch, “they blew it.” Here at the IFA show in Berlin, Samsung just announced the Galaxy Note, a new device that’s got a stylus–and which revels in that fact. Samsung is calling it “a new category of device,” but to me, it feels like a 2011 take on an old idea: the PalmPilot-style Personal Digital Assistant.

Like the late Dell Streak, the Note is about as huge as a phone can gget and still fit in a shirt pocket. It’s got a 5.3″ Super AMOLED screen with 1280 by 800 resolution and 285ppi–more pixels in much less space than the iPad. It’s spacious enough that the Note feels as much like an undersized tablet as it does an oversized phone. And Samsung squeezed that nice big screen into a good-looking, surprisingly sleek case that feels like an upsized version of the more petite Galaxy S handset.

The Note has a 1.4-GHz dual-core processor, an 8MP camera on the back and a 2MP one on the front, and HSPA+ data capability. It runs Android Gingerbread.

Oh, and there’s that stylus. It slides into a holder on the back, is magnetic and pressure sensitive, and works with some special apps that Samsung has developed, including a planner that’s designed to make good use of that giant screen. Samsung envisions it being used for note-taking and sketching, and says it’s going to help third-party developers create programs that take advantage of it.

The Galaxy Note certainly doesn’t require the stylus to work–I’ll bet that some people will buy the device and will pull the pen out only rarely, if ever. But for those two special-use cases–taking handwritten notes and drawing–it makes sense. I suspect that most gadget fans who here about it will either be immediately intrigued or totally disinterested–and both reactions are fine.

I got some hands-on time with the Note yesterday and…kind of liked it. It’s still not clear whether there’s a big market for a phone this humongous. (Let’s face it: If you hold it up to your ear to make a call, you’re going to look silly.) Judging from what I saw, though, Samsung has done a nice job engineering this device–it’s certainly slicker and less ungainly than the Streak, and the display is superb. If I were in the market for an Android phone, I’d consider buying one myself–especially once Samsung updates it to Ice Cream Sandwich–and I’ll be curious to see if it turns out to have a mainstream audience.

The Note’s a phone, so it’ll be sold through wireless carriers–AT&T and/or T-Mobile in the U.S.–and there are no details yet on pricing or availability in the U.S.

Here’s Samsung’s own video on the Galaxy Note:

Samsung also announced yet another Galaxy product: the Galaxy Tab 7.7, a modern update to the original 7″ Galaxy Tab which the company unleashed a year ago at IFA. It’s the first tablet with a Super AMOLED Plus screen, and is only 7.89mm thick–thinner than the iPad 2, the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and every other tablet I can think of right now. (The original 7″ Galaxy Tab was a relatively hefty 11.9mm–hey, in tablet time, September 2010 was a century or two ago.)

The Tab 7.7 runs Android 3.2 Honeycomb, and I haven’t seen it in person yet–so I’m not sure if it’s the definitive 7″ tablet that I’ve been looking for.

The recent rumors that Samsung Electronics will be taking over Hewlett-Packard Co.’s personal computer business are not true.

We hope this clarifies any confusion that may have occurred.