SAMSUNG ADDS TO MINI- TABLET MARKET

Galaxy Note 8.0, Samsung, price TBA

I had an early look at Samsung’s newest tablet, the Galaxy Note 8.0, and while we still don’t know details on pricing, this looks to be an interesting contender in the fast- growing mini- tablet market. With an eight- inch screen, the Note 8.0 is very close in size to Apple’s iPad Mini. The newest Note comes with Samsung’s latest generation S Pen, a stylus that helps the Note live up to its name. It’s compact enough to double as an ereader and it has a reading mode that you can turn on to make it easier on your eyes when you’re reading ebooks. The display is 1280- by- 800- pixel resolution, somewhat sharper than the 1024- by- 768 resolution of the iPad Mini, although not the Super AMOLED screen of the Note 2 and the Galaxy S3 smartphone. Its multi- window options split the screen and you can run two supported apps on the screen at the same time. It’s powered by a 1.6- GHz A9 quad- core processor, running the Android 4.1.2 operation system — Jellybean, not the latest 4.2. Its rear- facing camera is five megapixels; its front- facing camera for video chat is 1.3 megapixels. At 338 grams, the Note 8.0 is a tad heftier than the 308- gram iPad Mini 308.

It has 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB storage with a microSD slot to add up to another 32 GB. Samsung unveiled the Note 8.0 at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona ( without giving details on pricing and availability). Specs released by Samsung Canada indicate Wi- Fi connectivity, although Samsung is expected to release 3G, 4G and LTE models starting in the second quarter of this year. www.samsung.ca.

Liberty Mobile Hotspot, Roam Mobility, $ 130

Every time we hear a new horror story about sky- high data roaming bills — the latest was $ 22,000, although Fido reconsidered and dropped the bill to $ 200 — I pull out my top tips for avoiding humongous roaming charges. Among those tips is Vancouver’s Roam Mobility, which offers services for travellers heading to the United States. Along with SIM cards for travel in the United States that give you data at a lower cost than you would get with your Canadian carrier and unlimited talk and text plans that start at $ 3 per day, Roam Mobility has a mobile hot spot that you can use to connect up to five devices at a time with data starting at six cents a megabyte. It comes with a power plug but if you don’t have power, its battery will keep it running for up to four hours. Data charges start at $ 30 for 100 megabytes, $ 40 for one gigabyte, $ 60 for 2GB and $ 100 for 5 GB of data. If you don’t have an unlocked phone that will let you use a Roam Mobility SIM card, you can also buy a phone from Roam for $ 50. www.roammobility.com.

iSafe Urban Crew Campus backpack, from $ 90

This iSafe backpack has all the features of a campus backpack including a sleeve for a computer and an audio player pocket. It also has an alarm activation switch that’s built into the right shoulder strap. Once triggered, it blasts two 124- decibel sirens with a highintensity strobe light. It comes in five different colours. www.isafebag.net.