Samsung Galaxy Note review

Samsung’s leadership in mobile OLED displays is well established, and the Super AMOLED-equipped Galaxy Note serves only to reinforce it. Contrast on this tabletphone’s display is simply incredible, with deep and menacing blacks juxtaposed against strong, vibrant colors. It’s frankly a struggle to express how delightful an experience it is to watch a movie or play a game on a screen like this. A common complaint against AMOLED displays has been that they oversaturate the picture, but Samsung has a screen mode adjustment that lets you choose between three levels of saturation. Still, the company seems to have improved its default setting as I was happy to use that instead of the desaturated Movie Mode that I preferred on the Galaxy S II.

The absence of the word "Plus" from the end of the Super AMOLED branding will tell you that the Galaxy Note has a Pentile Matrix display, meaning that instead of the usual RGB grouping, its subpixels are arranged in a ratio of one red and one blue subpixel for every two green ones. Under a magnifying glass, you’ll see this gives the display a brickwork-like pattern, which has a negative impact on fine-grain detail and can make high-contrast edges appear softer than they are. That’s long been a good reason to avoid the Pentile RGBG layout, but I honestly can’t see any such issues on the Galaxy Note. Its 1280 x 800 resolution deserves the credit, as it leads to a 285ppi pixel density, essentially making the downsides of the subpixel arrangement too small to be discernible. If you want the very best AMOLED display, though, you’ll have to look to Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.7 — it has a Super AMOLED Plus screen and looks simply phenomenal.

The high resolution of the Galaxy Note has a number of obvious benefits: the browser, email, calendar, messaging, and maps applications are all loaded with much more information, while 720p movies can be enjoyed at their full quality. Beyond scalable apps, Samsung has also opted to expand its TouchWiz UI to five columns of icons per homescreen, giving you masses of flexibility to work with.

In keeping with its Galaxy S II heritage, the Galaxy Note comes with a Gorilla Glass pane protecting its S-AMOLED display. The screen’s sensitivity to input, whether by touch or the included stylus, was pretty much perfect.

The 2,500mAh battery inside the Galaxy Note is enormous for a smartphone, and the tabletphone’s overall endurance compares favorably as a result. In my time using it in place of my regular handset, I could regularly go from the start of one day to the end of the next without recharging the Note. Looking at the Android battery level monitor, there’s a discernible stepped pattern — long period of very gradual discharge, punctuated by steep drops when the device is active — which can be explained by the power consumption of the display. Basically, the Note will last multiple days if kept mostly idling, but strenuous activity will limit it to just a few hours.

Our browser-based battery rundown test ran for 4 hours and 45 minutes on the Note, falling short of what full-sized Android tablets like the Galaxy Tab 10.1 are capable of. Still, it’s a respectable performance that’s in line with what you might get from a conventional smartphone. Additionally, let’s not forget that the Tab 10.1 has a pretty huge 7,000mAh battery powering its 10.1-inch screen.

Because of its extremely bright display, which is easily readable even at the lowest setting, I put the Galaxy Note through our battery test a second time, this time with all brightness controls (including Samsung’s arcane "browser brightness" setting) minimized. Contrary to my expectation, that didn’t lead to any appreciable improvement in battery life. When my colleagues tested the AT&T variant of the phone, we expected a drop-off in battery life, but got almost none — it ran about 4 hours and 30 minutes over LTE on our battery tests.

I can offer few complaints about reception quality, but that’s partially because conditions were in my favor — I live in an area with generally decent coverage where it’s hard for a phone to really screw up, and my US colleagues tested the Note on the relatively uncrowded AT&T LTE network. Audio quality during calls on the Note isn’t sublime — it’s not bad, it just wasn’t impressive in my experience — which also isn’t helped by the awkwardly high position of the earpiece. The best advice with this device is to carry out calls with a headset, anyway, and Samsung thankfully bundles in a very decent one, equipped with in-ear buds and an in-line mic with integrated music controls.

Maybe I’m just being optimistic here, but it’s my suspicion that Samsung is trying to keep up with HTC and its Beats venture by including the improved earphones. Whatever the cause, the Note comes with a set that I’d actually be happy to use full-time. The lone loudspeaker on the back can get muffled easily, though to its credit, it maintains clear output all the way up to 15 (the max volume in Samsung’s custom music app). I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the sound it produced, which should be considered an important aspect for a large-screen device that will serve entertainment purposes as often as any other kind.

AT&T LTE

Now is a really good time to buy an AT&T LTE phone, assuming you live in one of the few markets where the super-fast network is currently live. We tested the Note in New York City, and while the network isn't quite as unpopulated as when we saw download speeds up to 60 Mbps on the LG Nitro HD, it still blazes: we got download speeds between 7 and 17Mbps, and upload speeds up to 5Mbps (though uploads usually hovered around 1Mbps). The network's reliability is also an enormous upgrade over the carrier's 3G network, which also means LTE should be a must-have for your next phone if you're an AT&T customer.

The Note also automatically connects to AT&T Wi-Fi networks (they're in Starbucks, and the like), a fact I quite liked — it works seamlessly, and anytime you can get decent speeds without the battery drain of LTE is a good thing. You can also tether the phone or use it as a hotspot, but that's a separate plan from AT&T.

Camera

Galaxy Note sample photos

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The Galaxy Note’s 8-megapixel camera looks and performs very much like the one on the Galaxy S II, which is good news if you’re after high image quality and easy operation. Samsung has its own custom camera app, but nothing about it will feel too alien to cameraphone users: you have a comprehensive set of adjustments and tweaks, and toggles to switch between front- and rear-facing cameras and between still and movie modes.

As with any camera, the best results from the Galaxy Note will be obtained under good lighting conditions, but it does a decent job in low light as well. While noise and graininess make an inevitable appearance when lighting is poor, the built-in LED flash works well and the camera does a good job of measuring exposure correctly. I didn’t have to retake any pictures because of motion blur. Color balance is mostly accurate, though the camera sometimes gets it wrong and is also occasionally guilty of oversaturating images during processing.

Operating the Note’s camera is mercifully quick, whether you are switching modes or taking a quick series of pictures. It’s not as rapid as the iPhone 4S or the Galaxy Nexus, however. At full resolution, the images taken with the Note can exhibit blotchy patches where noise reduction has been applied, but the camera still captures and maintains plenty of detail — web-sized pictures from it come out looking wonderful.

The Galaxy S II has the most impressive video camera I’ve seen on a smartphone yet and it’s no great surprise that the similarly outfitted Galaxy Note lives up to the same standard. Delivering 1920 x 1080 video at 30fps is a feat in itself, but the way Samsung’s processing keeps up with motion on screen is pretty amazing. Fast-moving objects are rendered with almost no motion blur, and the high level of detail exhibited in still images is carried over to video. The only downside is that the Galaxy Note looks to be highly sensitive to any hand motion, resulting in quite a bit of rolling (the unsightly way that the picture seems to "wobble" like jelly in response to fast motion) if you’re shooting on the move. Exposure and focus are adjusted automatically during video recording, and though the latter hunts around a little bit, both are quick and for the most part accurate.

Not content with trying to obviate your tablet and smartphone in one fell swoop, Samsung wants to consign the humble paper pad to the rubbish bin as well. Its integrated S Pen stylus allows for quick memos, screenshots, annotations, and general UI navigation, while also serving as a precise text input and drawing tool. It is based on Wacom’s Electro-Magnetic Resonance (EMR) technology, meaning it works by induction and requires no battery in the stylus itself. In practice, you can think of the S Pen as a very accurate capacitive stylus: it can do anything your fingers can on the screen, although because it isn’t actually capacitive, you’ll have to use your own digits to press the Android keys beneath the screen. When the stylus is in contact with the display, capacitive input is ignored by the Galaxy Note, so you can rest your palm on the display without having to worry. There are also 256 levels of pressure sensitivity for more refined input.

Accuracy from the pen itself is very good, however Samsung’s handwriting recognition software is a disappointment. It produces errors that shouldn’t slip by even a rudimentary autocorrection algorithm: things like "Sefore" where I wrote "before" or "Yon" instead of "you," and a capitalized "Few" instead of "Tom." That shows a lack of contextual awareness, which limits the usefulness of handwritten input on the Note. Maybe it’s different for other languages — I’d imagine Korean input on this thing is sublime — but the English version left me underwhelmed. If I wanted to get something into the Note quickly and reliably, I opted for the onscreen keyboard, which is generously proportioned and a breeze to use.

The unreliability of handwritten text input on the Note is disappointing, as Samsung makes it possible for you to replace the onscreen keyboard almost entirely with the stylus. Still, when you get into some drawing apps, you quickly come to appreciate the precision of the S Pen. It feels more sensitive and accurate than the stylus on HTC’s Flyer, which combines with its much thinner profile to make it a clear winner in the two-horse race for best Android tablet pen. Additionally, if you’re not in love with, or somehow manage to lose, the S Pen, the Galaxy Note will work with other Wacom Penabled styli, so you should have access to a hardware ecosystem with broader support than just Samsung.

In spite of being the best stylus implementation I’ve yet seen on Android (which isn’t saying much), the S Pen suffers from an issue familiar to Android Honeycomb and Windows Phone users: a lack of killer apps. I downloaded OmniSketch and Zen Brush through the S Choice app on the Note (which tries to curate apps for Samsung devices), which are fun and decently versatile, but I still don’t think I’d be using them for more than a day or two. Additionally, if you go to Samsung’s dedicated Galaxy Note website, the top S Pen-friendly apps are still in a "coming soon" state. That's not an encouraging sign when you consider that the Note was fully announced in early September 2011 and its SDK for stylus-compatible apps has been out since late November. If the "coming soon" apps eventually see the light of day, the S Pen will be an impressive tool, but for now it's an underserved opportunity.

A small, hard-to-find button is built into the S Pen, changing its functionality when pressed. Its two main uses are for bringing up the S Memo note-taking app with a double-tap of the stylus on the screen or the taking of a screenshot with a long press. I can see the latter being pretty useful when you want to annotate something you’ve just seen on your phone before sending it off to a friend or a colleague, but that still seems like an uncommon use scenario. My best use for the S Pen was actually in games, with Fruit Ninja in particular being a natural fit for it. Still, once the novelty of it wears off, this stylus is likely to remain firmly entrenched in its dedicated slot in the Note’s case. In terms of technology, it functions beautifully, but Samsung’s handwriting recognition software lets the pen down and the app ecosystem around it doesn’t invite you to do much more than sketch or annotate pictures.

Galaxy Note screenshots

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Android 2.3.5 with a TouchWiz skin — doesn’t sound like the most appealing recipe for January 2012, does it? It’s a public secret by now that our entire staff and most of the human population of the planet prefers Android in its unskinned variety, an inclination that’s only been intensified by the recent debut of the beautiful and responsive Ice Cream Sandwich. Unfortunately, much like HTC, Samsung persists in enforcing its own skin atop Android, although in its defense, TouchWiz is far less intrusive than Sense and has occasional moments of visual brilliance.

Receiving a call on the Note turns into a feast for the eyes thanks to the terrific display and Samsung’s large, touch-friendly graphics. The same is true of the alarm interface. There are software tweaks everywhere, many of them quite useful: you can swipe the side of your hand across the screen to take a screenshot, or drag your finger along the notification bar to quickly change the screen's brightness. Samsung has added a few of these nice graphical flourishes that really exploit the underlying hardware well. Its move to a five-column homescreen is also helpful, stuffing each pane with room for apps and widgets. Despite running the phone-oriented Gingerbread version of Android, the Galaxy Note makes very decent use of its resolution.

I also still appreciate being able to unlock the phone straight into an unread text message or a missed call, however Samsung has replaced its previous unlocking animation with a static padlock icon and a surrounding circle you have to swipe out of. Without the visual cue for how to do this, unlocking the device feels odd and will likely be an unintuitive task for newcomers to touch devices (of which, admittedly, there are now few).

A far bigger issue around unlocking the Galaxy Note is how long it takes for its screen to wake up. You’ll see in our video review that the Note wakes from sleep over a second slower than the Nexus S does. This issue is also present when carrying out calls — there’s too long a wait between the proximity sensor recognizing that the screen should turn on and it actually lighting up. This was much less a problem on our AT&T model, and the display is highly responsive in everything else it does, so I’m pinning the blame for this on Samsung’s software team.

Performance

While the Galaxy Note’s crazy-fast processor ensures there’s no lag around the UI, I did stumble into a few inexplicable delays and stutters. The display also switched off randomly on a couple of occasions and I had to wake it back up. It’s sad to say, but software continues to be the one area of Samsung’s recent history where the company has been shooting itself in the foot repeatedly. I can try to reassure you that Ice Cream Sandwich is all about fixing the small things in Android and that Samsung has promised to deliver that update for the Galaxy Note by the end of March, but there’s no way of knowing what the TouchWiz-saddled ICS will look and feel like. This is what I find intolerable about Samsung’s consistent push for customization: its software is slower and less reliable than Google’s stock option, gets updated later (if at all), and doesn’t add extra utility to make it worthwhile.

We tested both the AT&T and the unlocked versions of the Galaxy Note, and both performed admirably — though the AT&T variant was consistently a hair below the unlocked model in our benchmarks. The unlocked Galaxy Note produced average scores of 3,818 in Quadrant and 3,053ms in the SunSpider browser test, to the AT&T model's 3,308 and 3,555. Quadrant is starting to become the Quake III Arena of mobile benchmarks these days, in that everyone still uses it because of its popularity in spite of the fact it no longer challenges the latest devices. Even so, the Galaxy Note scoring nearly 4,000 in Quadrant is notable, especially because the graphical subset of the benchmark runs at the device’s native resolution, making it tougher to achieve that score with the Note’s WXGA res. As to SunSpider, the Note’s score is actually comparatively low, but that’s why we do hands-on reviews. Actual browser performance on the Note is close to sublime. There’s no aliasing even when you fully zoom out of a page, scrolling is wonderfully quick, and pretty much everything you do is met with a rapid response.

Gaming on the Galaxy Note will be a delight for the senses thanks to its awesome display and superb underlying hardware. I couldn’t find a single game that didn’t work flawlessly on the Note, plus there are almost no loading delays. The tablet itself does warm up when you use it for a prolonged period of time, but it never gets to be uncomfortable. If there’s any one disappointment here, it’s that a number of Android games have versions with higher graphical fidelity available exclusively for Nvidia’s Tegra platform — it’d be nice to see the same level of quality brought to Samsung devices as well. The Note’s system-on-chip feels almost wasted on the stuff currently available on the Android Market.

Apps

Having bemoaned Samsung’s broader software execution above, I have to also note that the company is in fact capable of producing a decent app of its own. The standout from its app library is Kies Air, which also comes preloaded on the Galaxy S II. This setup-free utility lets you connect the Note to any browser-equipped device on the same Wi-Fi network, with a web interface providing access to your media, contacts, messages, calls, and bookmarks. It works flawlessly and is a great way to send data back and forth without having to resort to the Micro USB cable.

Samsung’s task manager is also nice and handy, functioning like a widget on your homescreen to tell you how many apps are active at a time, and turning red when any one application is using too much memory or too many processor cycles. Beyond that, the Readers Hub is a nice collection of third-party apps, including Kobo for ebooks and Zinio for magazines; the Music Hub provides an entirely superfluous music store, powered by 7digital; and Polaris Office is available if you want to work in more businessy formats like Word and Excel.

Purchasing the Galaxy Note unlocked, without connection to a carrier, has at least one considerable advantage: there's no bloatware. Our AT&T-subsidized review unit features the usual rundown of preloaded applications from both carrier and manufacturer, consisting almost entirely of apps you'd likely rather not have, like Yellow Pages and AT&T Ready2Go. The Note's not the worst bloatware offender I've tested, and having so many apps on each screen makes it easier to find the app you're looking for anyway, but the relative cleanliness of the unlocked model is a nice change, and thus the difference in score.