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Camera

Apart from the stylus and TegraZone, the other most obvious adjustment to Android on this tablet comes in the form of a replacement camera app. The stock Android app can't claim to be among the best, despite serving its brief, so Nvidia made the canny decision to replace it with Camera Awesome from SmugMug, available to other Android users at a £1.87 premium.

Camera Awesome brings with it a slick, tablet-friendly interface that includes a variety of modes including burst, panorama and HDR. These are all accessed from a tab just above the shutter button, while ISO, white balance, grid options and a gyroscopic alignment tool are all available without having to dive in to a single menu.

Along with plenty of settings that any discerning, albeit slightly bizarre looking tablet photographer would ever require, Camera Awesome also caters for the Instagram army with an abundance of filters, frames and textures to apply to your photos.

So now you may be wondering how that 5MP sensor actually performs, and the results as far as a tablet goes are pretty mixed. In good lighting results are acceptable and manage to avoid being overly noisy, though zoom further in and you'll see plenty of image processing going on.

Even indoors, pictures come out pretty well without a huge amount of ISO noise, but unfortunately detail starts to deteriorate pretty quickly. Without any LED Flash, taking pictures in complete darkness is out of the question.

Colours come out a little cold, and motion quickly gets blurry, but for a quick tablet snapper, things could be a lot worse here.

Video tops out at 720p and again manages to verge on the side of acceptable. Motion was handled happily and colours come out vivid, despite the overall picture lacking in contrast.

For selfies, the front-facing camera is verging on embarrassing. It's as if it's been fished from the bin of smartphone parts from pre-2009, and its VGA resolution and over-processing from Camera Awesome make it pretty useless for anything other than Google Hangouts or Skype.

The 4.3 update brought an always-on HDR mode to the Note's rear camera, and it did appear to improve shots, particularly in lower light, and though not everyone will appreciate the vivid, somewhat unrealistic, colours HDR can bring, it's done real harm to the camera quality, and Nvidia claim it to be greatly improved.