[r00fus]

Phablet, yes. Definitely a strong niche.

Stylus No. I have 3 co workers who have Galaxy Notes (or Note II) and none of them use the stylus while I've seen them. They all say it's nice, but none admit to it being key or even useful.

There is no killer app for the stylus, when an onscreen-keyboard or finger would do just as well. Even finger-based signatures are pretty easy with modern smartphones' capacative touchscreens.

The only thing a stylus allows is for UI elements and hit areas to be smaller - and not many folks (other than Win8 geeks it seems) are clamoring for that on their smartphone or tablet. In fact, I know folks who run iPhone apps on their iPad because the hit area is 4x larger and much more easy to operate.

[bryanlarsen]

I assumed that the killer app for the stylus would be Chinese and Korean character entry. Any actual Asians want to validate or dispel my assumption?

[jarek]

Korean at least is an alphabet fairly easily entered via a standard qwerty keyboard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_South_Korea.svg

The letters are composed into blocks describing syllables, rather than strings describing words as in Latin alphabets, but entering letters on the keyboard is the same.

Might help with Japanese but I can't really speak about that.