With the Samsung GALAXY Note II, frequent flyers and long-haul holidaymakers finally have a decent device that combines pocket portability with an HD screen big enough to watch their favourite movies on – essentially the perfect smartphone to save airline passengers from a whole host of travel tribulations.

To take advantage of the Note II's sizeable screen, we take a trip to the movies and look at the best apps to download that will unleash the Note's movie-playing power and make use of the brilliant 5.5-inch screen and fantastic audio prowess.

Samsung Video Player

Built-in on the GALAXY Note II

As stock players go, Samsung has managed to create one of the best video apps on the market – and there you were thinking you would have to look elsewhere for a decent video player.

A brilliant layout that manages to ooze both simplicity and coolness is the Video Player's main feature. Plus the fact that you can pop-out the video and seamlessly view it anywhere on the Note II's screen (while still performing other tasks) is more than a little impressive. And if you are ever growing sick of your own videos, then you can buy a wide selection of movies from the Samsung Video Hub.

MX Player

Free Get it here

One of the best-known third-party video apps for Android - and for good reason too: MX Player is a fantastic app that is simple to use but extremely powerful.

Once you have grabbed a bunch of movies and ported them on to your GALAXY Note II's SD card or internal memory, you can then load up MX Player and it will decode pretty much any video file format and then play it back on a stream that's superbly smooth. And on the rare occasion that it struggles to play the movie, it will direct you to the right codec so you can play it. Couple this with multi-core compatibility and what you have is a superb video app.

Google Play Movies & TV

Free Get it here

Google wasn't ever going to let the rest of the world take a piece of the movie pie without trying to get a healthy-sized bite for itself, so that's why it created its own movie store where you can rent content for as little as 99p a pop – although you will have to pay a few pounds more for premium titles.

Now, Google does offer a streaming service for this but that's no good for when you are up in the air, which is why it's lucky that there's an offline option available so you can back up a movie of your choice before heading off on that all-important trip.

MoboPlayer

Free Get it here

While many a third-party video app offers up fine video functionality, MoboPlayer goes one step further and gives its users a decent enough place to view all the videos they have, complete with video thumbnails.

Presenting your media in a different way is one thing but will MoboPlayer unlock your Samsung GALAXY Note II's video power? The short answer is: yes. Playback is smooth and there's no noticeable lag on audio and also there's the added bonus of being able change the colour of the player. A small thing, but not many video players offer up a little bit of customisation.

RockPlayer2

Free Get it here

If you want a video player that plays pretty much anything you want to throw at it then RockPlayer is for you. Not only does it play 30-odd video codecs (and that doesn't include audio and video encoders), it lets you view them in a rather nice user interface.

Play a file and what you get is a big timeline and easy-to-use buttons that offer play, fast-forward and rewind functionality. Our only slight gripe is that we would have liked some sort of visual thumbnail next our images but this is the only minor complaint we have for what is a fantastically functional video service.