Think of the Samsung Galaxy S2, make it bigger, badder and better and you have the Galaxy Note, a tablet that looks like a smartphone and makes calls too.

Tech site Mobot reports that the smartphone will be launched in late October or early November 2011 according to a Samsung account manager whose identity was not revealed.

The phone should arrive well in time for Christmas and is apparently already being used regularly by Samsung employees in Korea.

Therefore, the likelihood that Samsung will make an extra effort to get the Note on sale at the same time as the iPhone 5 is big, almost a dead cert.

At £600 (according to online retailer Clove) though, it is not cheap, but given the specifications and some of its unique selling points, it should not be a hard sell.

For example, the Note comes with a massive 5.3-inch capacitive touchscreeen with a 1280x800 pixel resolution; this is bigger than the Dell Streak and the HD resolution is the highest on any smartphone on the market.

It is also the only smartphone on the market to come with a digitising pen (not unlike the HTC Flyer), a dual core SoC clocked at 1.4GHz and with the Russia's GPS equivalent, GLONASS.