Such a simple and efficient approach. Just use a history list of WeakReference to previous values. Remember, the head of the list is a strong-reference, so the current value will always be in memory. We are only talking about the history.

You need to make sure that you retry any transaction when you can't find enough history, but you have to do this in most other solutions anyway.

Between garbage collection (GC) cycles, your history list will grow vey long until something triggers another GC. So you will have lots of history in memory and should not expect any transaction that started after the GC to have a problem getting the correct snapshot value from history. Then at around the time of GC, some transactions may have to retry, but only if they need history values and not the latest value.

This is a review of the Samsung Galaxy Note N7000 after owning it for a few months.

I'm assuming you've read a number of reviews and have seen some video of the Note. This review is incremental to the general reviews of the Note that already exist.

The following is a quick summary of my view after using the Note:

• The device is not too large; it could be larger.
• The Note is probably the best example of a smartphone you can buy. The smart capabilities are more usable than any other smartphone due to its large screen size. Compare this to something like a iPhone, which is more a phone than a smart-phone because the smart capabilities are less useful with the smaller screen (otherwise there'd be no reason to buy an iPad).
• The hardware is top-of-the-line.
• The screen is amazing.
• Every smartphone should have a stylus attached to it.

Single Hand Use Issue

The controversial issue with the Note is the size of the screen. From reading lots of reviews it's obvious that you can still hold the Note in your hand and carry it in your pocket - the main issue raised is using the Note with one hand. The solution for this is already beginning to appear and I would suspect we will see this becoming a common solution as more phones with larger display are released. 

If you are developing an app that is likely to be used in a one-hand scenario on a large screen then make the input part of your app smaller and move it to one corner of the phone. We have already seen this with the new update for the Note from Samsung. The keyboard is smaller and can be moved to the left or right side of the phone specifically to help one-handed use. You'd think that Google would standardize a way of doing this in the future.

I'd think that just allowing the user to shrink (and stretch) the whole screen and move it to the most useful location would be a good start. You would then get the best of all worlds, a small screen for one-handed use and a large screen the rest of the time. The device would still be the same physical size, just the usable screen area (and location) would be set by the user for what they needed at the time. This wouldn't need anything to be done by app developers, just an update to Android and then you have the feature to use or ignore. You could even shrink your screen down to half size, just to see what it would be like to own a iPhone.