Actually this has been bugging me since JK Shin announced that Samsung has sold 38m Notes.
Just thinking aloud. I guess it was the sleeper hit that Samsung has been keeping silent about, but I suspect the other manufacturers somehow got the numbers crunched, that is why you see so many phablets now.
If you put in perspective that 50m S3s vs 38m Notes across 2 years, this is very good affirmation that people do want large screens and probably active digitizers. Samsung has now let the cat out of the bag, so I expect we can see a few more entries by other manufacturers.
As I also posted before, for this year at least, the only other remaining *potential* contender is the Asus Fonepad Note.
Someone also mentioned that it's more than just an active digitizer. This is also true, as Samsung has successfully embedded stylus aware functionality all throughout the OS. However, this is Android, and you can mod almost anything you want.
My own 2 sen is that one should remain as vendor independent as possible, therefore I will try hard to select apps and functions that can be replicated across platforms or works with any other Android instead of being locked in to Samsung.
but only Samsung's Note series use that digitizer from Wacom right? please correct me if i'm wrong because i don't do research on phones/phablets that i'm not interested in.