76
Criteria
Comments
Rating
- Features Out of the box Android 2.3.5 with ICS4.0 coming. Great Android experience, and the S-Pen adds to it!
- Display Super AMOLED, 1280x800. enough said.
- Battery life 2500mAh battery good for two days with average use.
- Ease of use Big screen makes things easy to hit, big size is easy to hold on to, S-Pen is intuitive and works everywhere except for the soft buttons.
- Storage capacity 16Gb on-board seems standard for Samsung Galaxy line, but not for other Android phones from other manufacturers.
- Design and form factor It's big. Bigger than an Evo or SGS2, but not really that much. Also, it's a small tablet. BUT ITS A PHONE!
- Portability (size / weight) Absolutely no issues here. I don't wear skinny jeans. Even my crappy car dock expands to fit it. Only looks slightly funny when held up to answer a call.
- Durability I can't find any cases yet, but the screen will probably get scratched just because it's so big. Plastic backing could get scratched too, but hasn't yet.
Detailed review
This phone is for people with larger than average hands who don't wear skinnyjeans. It's a big phone, but still a phone. It's also a tablet, but a small one. Perfect if you ask me. This is what I had wished the Dell Streak 5 to be, but Dell utterly failed. Samsung did it right. Now I don't have to worry about carrying two devices(phone+tablet) and a way to keep them charged, or pay huge monthly bills for data plans on both.
The Note also has a really neat power saving ability which I haven't seen detailed in any review so far. I'll describe it here in the hopes that it's not something that everyone else has because it's built-in to Android; Power Saving...
Hit that from the Settings menu, and you'll see a checkbox to enable "System power saving", and another selection to enable "Custom power saving". From what I can tell, enabling "System power saving" reduces the max speed of the CPU, lowers rendering speed, and sets the screen brightness all the way down (which is plenty bright already). "Custom power saving" can be adjusted to take effect at 50% battery to 10% battery in 10% increments. Custom will (at your individual selection) turn off WiFi, BT, GPS, data Sync, has a selectable brightness setting, and can adjust the screen timeout. Both power saving options can be enabled at the same time at 50% battery or less.
I've played with the S-Pen a little, but I'm not the artistic type, and I don't have good handwriting so the best I could do is mark up some screenshots or deface some pictures before uploading to facebook. The S-Pen prefers to be used perpendicular to the screen surface, as any angle introduced to the S-Pen will cause the drawn line to stray from underneath the point of the Pen. It seems like you could control that, or even use that to your benefit if you had the patience.
720p videos look just incredible. Even high bitrates, it just smoothes out the playback to it looks like you're watching a TV. And the black levels! Sometimes I can't tell where the edge of the screen is.
The camera is pretty good too. Definitely the best I've seen so far, across a few other Galaxy devices I've encountered.
I'm sure there's something I missed, so leave a comment and I'll try to answer your questions.
The Note also has a really neat power saving ability which I haven't seen detailed in any review so far. I'll describe it here in the hopes that it's not something that everyone else has because it's built-in to Android; Power Saving...
Hit that from the Settings menu, and you'll see a checkbox to enable "System power saving", and another selection to enable "Custom power saving". From what I can tell, enabling "System power saving" reduces the max speed of the CPU, lowers rendering speed, and sets the screen brightness all the way down (which is plenty bright already). "Custom power saving" can be adjusted to take effect at 50% battery to 10% battery in 10% increments. Custom will (at your individual selection) turn off WiFi, BT, GPS, data Sync, has a selectable brightness setting, and can adjust the screen timeout. Both power saving options can be enabled at the same time at 50% battery or less.
I've played with the S-Pen a little, but I'm not the artistic type, and I don't have good handwriting so the best I could do is mark up some screenshots or deface some pictures before uploading to facebook. The S-Pen prefers to be used perpendicular to the screen surface, as any angle introduced to the S-Pen will cause the drawn line to stray from underneath the point of the Pen. It seems like you could control that, or even use that to your benefit if you had the patience.
720p videos look just incredible. Even high bitrates, it just smoothes out the playback to it looks like you're watching a TV. And the black levels! Sometimes I can't tell where the edge of the screen is.
The camera is pretty good too. Definitely the best I've seen so far, across a few other Galaxy devices I've encountered.
I'm sure there's something I missed, so leave a comment and I'll try to answer your questions.
good review!
9 people find this review helpful