Amazon have shown off another sale before we come into this long weekend in Australia showing the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition for just $479. That is a saving of $50 over the old price of $529. That might not seem like a big discrepancy but for a 2014 tablet it is a good sale. The only risk involved is we don’t know what Sammy’s plans are this year, and it is ever increasingly looking like they will release another top-end smartphone making it two for the year. It is obviously a tablet but with the mobile news coming in there’s a chance that more tablets come along with it. Do not talk this offer down though because looking at it today it seems like a great deal that we can’t do anything but recommend to those with enough money to buy it.

This years Note 10.1 was published on the 4th of September and released October 10, 2013. As you can see even though it is given the name 2014 there is nothing 2014 about it because it came out just into Q4 of last year after being announced first back in Q3. It’s more likely to be the reason we are starting to see price drops now and not because additional tablets are coming into the field.

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1

Making this deal even more appealing is it having free subscription to Hulu Plus, BusinessWeek, and it also gives free Google Play credit all thanks to Amazon.

It came with a TouchWiz UI starting on Android 4.3 and has been updated OTA to 4.4.2 Kitkat since that time. It has impressive dimensions of 9.57 x 6.75 x 0.31 inches and weighs 547 grams. The display size is 10.1-inches, the screen resolution is 2560 x 1600 pixels and it has a pixel density of 299 ppi. The technology inside is Super Clear LCD, and it looks spectacular. The display does have a light sensor and proximity sensor on board.

The rear-facing shooter is 8 megapixels; it has LED flash and a load of feature. I’ll name some of the good ones worth a mention: Back-illuminated sensor, smile detection, face detection, burst mode, digital zoom and a self-timer.

For the hardware we have Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 MSM8974 system chip, a Quad core, 2300 MHz, Krait 400 processor, 3072 MB RAM system memory and Adreno 330 graphics processor. Now to the important part for most people: it has 16 GB of built-in internal storage space but remember a few GB’s of that will be used up already for the Android OS so you will only get around 11 or 12 GB user space. That problem can be fixed by adding any one of the additional microSD, microSDHC, microSDXC storage expansions options that range up to 64 GB in size. The excellent advice here is that you can have all of that 64 on one card, but there is nothing hindering you from ordering 5 of those cards and having 320 GB storage all up for example. That means your storage options are essentially limitless.

My favourite feature of this tablet is the 43 hours of talk-time that 8220 mAh battery gives. The only downside if that it is not user replaceable. But again I say: who needs to replace a battery that doesn’t need fixing? Some people view this as an insecurity, but the only devices that give this options tend to be those that are good at making batteries, so there isn’t anything to worry about here.

As always with Amazon, there is no saying how long this new deal will hold out so if you want to make it a sure thing for yourself or somebody you know buy as fast as you can. There’s catch that we can see other than the “2015” coming later in 2014, so it sounds newer than it is.

View the white in 16 or 32 GB storage and the black model in 16 or 32 GB.