Samsung's Galaxy Note 2 "phablet" will go on sale by mid-November with the major U.S. carriers AT&T, T-Mobile USA, Sprint, and US Cellular. Samsung announced this for the first time on Wednesday, Sept. 19. The U.S. version of the device can run on the fast LTE or HSPA+42 networks the major carriers offer. Pricing, however, will be announced at a later date by the carriers themselves, added Samsung.

The over-sized smartphone was first announced back in August at the IFA trade show in Germany, as the successor to the company's popular smartphone/tablet hybrid. Its arrival by mid-November means it will hit the U.S. market just in time for Black Friday and the lucrative holiday shopping season.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 sports a Super AMOLED display (1280 x 720) as large as 5.5 inches, which puts it somewhere between the familiar smartphone and tablet formats. The Note 2 is also the first device in the U.S. to pack Samsung's 1.6GHz quad-core Exynos 4 SoC. Other features include 2GB of RAM, LTE connectivity, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 1.9-megapixel front-facing camera, and the latest Android operating system, version 4.1 Jelly Bean. The second-generation "phablet" measures 3.17 x 0.37 x 5.95 inches and weighs 0.40 lb. Meanwhile, the battery is 3,100 mAh, 24 percent larger than on the original Galaxy Note. The new device, however, is slightly lighter and narrower than the original.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 comes with 16GB of built-in storage, expandable to up to 64GB via microSD. While Europe gets models packed with more built-in storage - 32GB and 64GB - it is not clear whether those versions will make their way to U.S. shores as well.

"The original Galaxy Note created a new category of smartphones by combining the best of a smartphone with the best of a tablet," Dale Sohn, Samsung's president of Telecommunications America, said in the press release. Sohn further added that Samsung sold more than 10 million Galaxy Notes in less than a year, proving that the Note category is "taking hold."