Samsung Galaxy Note 3

Samsung Galaxy Note 3

The Galaxy Note 3, unveiled Wednesday, has a soft, leather-like back. It feels like you're holding a fancy leather-bound journal. Grooves on the side of the big-screen phone make it easier to grip.

But I found the new phone to be complicated to use. There's too much going on. Between Scrapbook, My Magazine, Air Command and dozens of other functions, it might take even the most experienced smartphone user several hours to figure out.

I tested out the Note 3 for about 45 minutes Wednesday at a Samsung press event in a New York hotel. The company also unveiled its next tablet, the Galaxy Note 10.1, which is basically an extra-large version of the Galaxy phone, but without the cellular service. The phone and its pen were both tied down to a table with a security device, so I was hampered testing it out. A colleague spent several minutes with the tablet and was likewise hampered.

The biggest changes are with the S Pen. The pen unlocks a new feature called Air Command. With that, you can open five other features:

• With Action Memo, you can handwrite a note.
• Scrapbook lets you circle content you like, such as a YouTube video or a news article. It automatically saves and organizes the content into a format that's easy to scroll through. Scrapbook, with its boxy format, looks a lot like social media site Pinterest.
• Screen Write captures a screen and allows you to write comments on that captured image.
• S Finder is the phone's search engine, to find chat messages, documents or other content on the phone.
• Pen Window, the most promising of the five, lets you access one of eight apps by drawing a box of any size on the screen. Let's say you're on a Web page and need to calculate something. You can open Air Command, then Pen Window. Draw a box on the screen, and eight icons pop up. You then click the one for the calculator. Pen Window currently opens a limited number of applications: calculator, clock, YouTube, phone, contacts, a Web browser and two separate chat apps - Samsung's ChatON and Google's Hangouts. (Two different ones? Did I mention the phone's complicated to use?) It's possible Pen Window will support additional apps later.

The tablet has a few extra bells and whistles. One of the big perks is the tablet's file organization system, which is similar to that of a traditional personal computer. It lets you create folders and sub-folders for documents, providing easy access. Also like a PC, the tablet lets you create up to eight profiles, so you can let your kids, spouse or guests use the tablet without fear that they will read your email, delete your photos or access apps you don't want them to.

The tablet also comes with a host of freebies that the phone doesn't have, including free trial subscriptions to The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek and other news sources, along with extra space with online storage service Dropbox.