Samsung starts pre-booking of Galaxy Note 3 Neo at a discounted Rs 38,990

Just a couple of days ago Samsung launched the Note 3 Neo for India at its event in Bali for Rs 40,990, and now the device is available for pre-booking. As an introductory offer, the Note 3 Neo is listed on Samsung’s e-store at a discount of Rs 2,000. The first 1,000 customers to pre-book the Note 3 Neo can take it home for Rs 38,990. We spent some time with the phone in Bali and if Samsung manages to trim down the price a bit more, the Neo could very well be a superhit. It should also be noted that the bigger sibling Galaxy Note 3 ( our review ) is currently selling around Rs 44,000.

The Note 3 Neo is a budget variant of the premium Galaxy Note 3. The company also lets users take advantage of the popular S-Pen on the budget variant too. The Neo has a striking resemblance with the Note 3, except for the difference in length and width. The Neo is lighter at 162 grams, but comes with the same faux-leather back seen on the Note 3. The Note 3 Neo sports a 5.5-inch Super AMOLED display, compared to the 5.7-inch screen fitted on the Note 3. Needless to say, the less expensive phone gets a 720p display, and not the Full HD 1080p.

Samsung packs in 16GB onboard storage and a microSD card slot. Samsung has given the premium 13MP camera and 4k recording a miss, as the Neo gets an 8MP camera and maximum 1080p video recording. The device comes fitted with an 8MP BSI sensor and a 2MP front-facing snapper for video calls and selfies.

It is powered by a hexa-core chipset with two 1.7GHz Cortex-A15 cores and four 1.3GHz Cortex A7 cores, compared to the 1.6GHz quad-core Exynos processor seen in the Galaxy Note 2. Here all six cores can run simultaneously thanks to the use of Heterogeneous Multi-Processing (HMP). There is no word on whether the India-b0ound version will get LTE, though it will have HSPA+ for cellular data.

The connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, GPS/GLONASS and also an IR blaster (available depending on the region). The devices get the 4.3 Jelly Bean flavour of Android, out of the box and naturally it will have TouchWiz on top. All of this fuelled by a 3100mAh battery.