Subtle, useful Android 4.0 lands on Samsung Galaxy Note July 10

AT&T will start upgrading its Samsung Galaxy Note to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich tomorrow, and CNET got an advance look.

After a week with the updated phone, I can say that existing owners will be pleased with the boost from Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich. The OS won't look very different; in fact, a glance at the home screen is indistinguishable from the view on Gingerbread. However, press down on the home button and your recent tabs appear, press the Galaxy Note against another NFC phone to engage Android Beam, and hop into the Settings menu for a new layout with usage monitoring.

These are all useful features, but since Samsung isn't changing the Galaxy Note's TouchWiz interface, the update would look a little ho-hum. Enter an update to the Note's stylus-friendly productivity tools, which Samsung is calling Premium Suite.

What's new in S Note
To be clear, Premium Suite refers to S Note, S Memo, and a new My Story app, which isn't preinstalled, but which is available from Google Play.

S Note offers the most exciting new features of the three. You're now able to import and annotate PDFs, which is enormously useful for taking quick notes on existing documents. In addition to importing PDFs, you can also import and annotate S Memo files, photos, maps, and other images you cropped and saved with the S Pen.

There are also new templates that help you create more information-rich multimedia notes. These are definitely inspiring, but will still take time, especially if you share my one-two combo of sometimes perfectionism mixed with a lack of artistic skill. Either way, Samsung's two tip sheets are great for orienting new users.

Shape Match is another new feature within. Draw a diagram with the S Pen and the app will render your lines straight, convert your sloppy arrows into straight sticks, and close your circles. However, you can't be too casual with your squares and squiggles or you may find yourself with some unintended trapezoids and with figures that look more like hieroglyphs than you intended.