Samsung Galaxy Note for AT&T comes our way, here’s the hands-on

Despite looking just as imposing as its global sibling, the LTE packing Samsung Galaxy Note I717 for AT&T certainly is a different character from the international N7000. For starters, the U.S. bound phoneblet has gone through the same treatment as its local cousins from the Galaxy S II family, which includes having four touch-sensitive buttons at its front, instead of the three button configuration with a hardware button at the center of the global version. The AT&T Galaxy Note has also ditched the mighty Exynos chipset for Qualcomm-made silicon instead.

Like I mentioned above, the Samsung Galaxy Note for AT&T features a Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 chipset with two Scorpion cores, clocked at 1.5GHz. The GPU is Adreno 220. There is a gig of RAM on board and 16GB of built-in memory, which can be further expanded via the microSD card slot. The screen of the AT&T exclusive phoneblet is a gorgeous Super AMOLED unit with 800×1280 pixels resolution, covered by Corning Gorilla Glass – the same as the one found in the the global version. Camera has remained unchanged as well. It’s an 8MP unit, capable of capturing Full HD videos. A 2MP unit at the front will handle the video calls.

The measures of the Galaxy Note I717 are massive for a smartphone, but highly acceptable for a tablet. They are 146.8 x 83 x 9.7 mm, while its weight tips the scale at 178 grams. This includes the S Pen tucked at the device’s bottom.

AT&T Samsung Galaxy Note live shots

On the software side, the phoneblet comes with Android 2.3.6 out of the box. dressed in Samsung’s own TouchWiz UI. A couple of handy, S Pen specific apps are on board too. Check out the Galaxy Note in action below.

We have a full review of the phoneblet in the works, so stay tuned for more giant screen goodness!