Last month, at IFA 2012 in Berlin, Samsung announced the second generation Galaxy Note. According to Shin Jong-kyun, Head of Samsung's IT and Mobile Unit, the South Korean handset maker expects to sell over 20 million of them. Is such a herculean task possible?

We have to admit, when the original Note was announced in September 2011, we weren't exactly crazy about it. At 5.3 inches diagonal, the first Note was absolutely ridiculous when compared to everything else on the market. You have to remember, back then, the largest phone on store shelves, the Infuse 4G for AT&T, was no more than 4.5″ across.

One year later, Samsung is proud to tell people that the original Note has sold well over 10 million units. This writer sees at least one every day when walking around Helsinki, Finland. So what's so special about the Note II that makes Samsung confident they can double their sales? Let's start with the obvious: phones today are simply bigger, meaning people are used to them. The Galaxy Nexus blew people away when they found out it had a 4.65″ screen, but then HTC announced the 4.7 inch One X. A couple months after that Samsung unveiled the 4.8″ Galaxy S3. To go from 4.8″ to 5+ inches isn't really that big of a deal.

Then there's the whole speed issue. The first Note wasn't the fastest thing on the planet. The processor inside was meant to push the 800 x 480 pixel screen inside the Galaxy S2, not the massive 1280 x 800 panel in the Note. But things are now different with the Note2. There's a quad core 1.6 GHz processor inside paired up with 2 GB of RAM. Harry McCracken from Time says the Note II is “zippy and fluid”.

We're in full agreement with Shin Jong-kyun, Samsung will easily ship 20+ million units of the Note II; right now we're having huge arguments in the office over which one of us is going to review it when it starts shipping next month!