One huge army – Apple – dominates the land, while a ragtag group of insurgents keeps raiding and probing, hoping to find some opening it can exploit.

The good: The Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 sports a proven, sensible design, a bevy of useful features, and fast performance.

Lastly, there’s a 4 inch long, ill placed holding space in the tablet’s bottom right corner for the S Pen Stylus.

The iPad’s screen can’t sense sharp objects, so any stylus has to be fairly blunt.

Hopefully, Samsung will encourage more app developers to get on board with S Pen support, and reveal Galaxy Note 10.1 specific apps in the S Suggest guide.

Samsung will make several after market pen options available as well, but the included pen is larger than its Galaxy Note phone cousin.

The Galaxy Note 10.1 pen’s detection distance is better, too, at 14mm versus the Galaxy Note phone pen’s 8mm.

You can jot down notes, or edit photos in an included version of Photoshop.

Handwriting is slower than typing, and the tablet’s interpretation introduces errors, so it’s not clear why you’d use it much, though.

Samsungs latest tablet, the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, aims to combine some of the best features of its Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 tablet and Galaxy S III with the pen functionality of the Galaxy Note.

The pen also comes with a side button that works much like the left mouse button, giving access to extra features with little effort.

Some S Pen features aren’t enabled by default and others don’t work properly.

It’s designed for use with fingers, but the stylus makes it much easier to draw intelligible pictures, because it’s easier to see what you’re drawing.

At the current level of software support, the stylus is just slightly better than a gimmick.

You can contrast that with the signature feature of the latest iPad: the ultra high resolution screen.

Many people found the notion of a phone with a screen that edges in on tablet territory alluring: Samsung says it’s shipped ten million Galaxy Notes to date.

One is a slot for microSD memory cards, which means you can expand the memory of the Galaxy Note inexpensively.

Now Samsung is releasing its second Galaxy Note device, the Galaxy Note 10.1, which goes on sale in the US Thursday.

The other feature is an infra red light, which can be used in place of a remote at the home entertainment center.

It’s welcome, too – some people spend hundreds of dollars on universal remotes, which the Galaxy Note effectively replaces with this feature.

Even though Samsung scaled back on its pen specific apps from the collection that it showed earlier in the year, the Galaxy Note 10.1 benefits substantially from the serious effort that Samsung has put into integrating software with the pen capability.

Also, though most Android tablets struggle with skin tones, the Galaxy Note 10.1 produced some of the most realistic skin tones we’ve seen.

Samsung’s quoted battery life of nine hours is somewhat shorter than equivalent models, possibly because of the pen sensing layer or the new processor.

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean will come, according to Samsung, by the end of the year.

The display has a resolution of 1280 by 800 pixels, the same as displays on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 and the Toshiba Excite 10 LE.

The Asus Transformer series of tablets takes another tack: They’re built to work with an accessory keyboard, which also contains an extra battery and more connection ports.

That’s another way a competitor tries to take advantage of a blind spot for Apple and the iPad, for which physical keyboards seem like an afterthought.

Unlike the iPad, the Galaxy Note 10.1 is designed to let you rest your palm on the screen as you write or draw without getting confused by the fact that two parts of your hand are in contact with the display at once.

Kenneth Kennedy is a business journalist based in Hong Kong, China. Kenneth has a passion for financial markets and breaking news stories and loves writing about business news, stock market, and economic opinions that matters most to its audience. Kenneth spends a lot of time discovering and researching latest financial markets and industry news stories in order to make sure the latest and greatest stories are brought to you first on BigBoardNews.com.