Review of the Samsung Galaxy Note10 +: it's too much phone, but we like it



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Samsung line Galaxy Note smartphones have always been known for their magnitudebut in the last two years Samsung has been trying to differentiate them for their phone. The note is usually a lot more phone than most people would need, both in size and in features. Advanced steam cooling chamber? You're welcome, Samsung sings.

The world's largest smartphone vendor insists its customers around the world love this thing. I imagine that is true. it's a certain type of user who sees a 6.8-inch phone with a tiny matchstick stylet and shouts, "Take my money!" And I guess that will also be the case with the latest phone, the Galaxy Note10 +. It's a very good phone. It costs $ 1,100.

There is also a Galaxy Note10 of normal size, with a 6.3-inch screen. Incidentally, this phone is almost the same size as the Samsung Galaxy S10 smartphone, released in February. For some unknown reason (although I suspect this is part of Samsung's product differentiation strategy), the smaller Galaxy Note10 was not available for review this week. With a starting price of $ 950, the Galaxy Note10 is cheaper than the Galaxy Note10 +, and it is a normal size phone. Samsung clearly wanted to draw all the attention to the giant Galaxy Note10 +, at least for a short period of time.

It's hard do not pay attention to the Galaxy Note10 + – its opalescent finish, its four-lens camera, its unbearable lightness despite its size. Longtime Note lovers will find themselves in love again. For the rest of us, it's a nice exaggeration.

Samsung's stylus, the S Pen, now features gesture controls that you can use to manipulate certain Note10 + applications.

Lauren Joseph

The device is really beautiful. One of our photo editors at WIRED (also named Lauren) was eager to get his hands on it and photograph it. The finish of the phone I rent calls Aura Glow; almost all Samsung phones this year have an iridescent skin type. Of course, the reflective and glass-coated back of the Note10 + ensures that everyone will know that you have your hand on your hand. It trails faster than a room with white walls filled with toddlers wielding colored pencils. But the reflective back is also a convenient way to check if pieces of spinach salad are in the teeth after lunch.

The Note10 + aluminum chassis has harder edges than its cousin, the Galaxy S10. This angular design gives the phone's appearance more gravity, it's Business-But this should not be confused with weight. The phone really feels incredibly light and balanced for its size.

The Note10 + has a diagonal display of 6.8 inches. I do not really need to repeat it, and I promise you it's the last time, but it's very big. It's the biggest Galaxy Note ever, bigger than the iPhone XS Max, bigger than the OnePlus 7 Pro. I would say it's yugebut this qualifier is just not funny anymore.

This "Dynamic AMOLED" display is brilliant. When you drag, tap, text, tweet and you're sucked by the streaming video on the Note10 +, you can not help but notice the quality of the display. It extends almost from one edge to the other on the front. And yet, it's essentially the same screen as the old Samsung Galaxy S10. It has a built-in fingerprint sensor on the screen. (Unfortunately, the sensor does not work perfectly, but it works most of the time.)

If you look at the bottom edge of the phone, you will notice two things. The first is that, like all previous Galaxy Notes, the 10+ has a built-in stylus. The other is that, contrary to all previous Galaxy notes, the 10+ does not have a 3.5mm headphone jack. That sucks. Sometimes the future comes quickly to you.

S & # 39; open

The Galaxy Note10 + uses Android 9 Pie, the latest version of Google's mobile operating system, but Samsung is also doing its best to offer its proprietary applications during the setup process. The phone requires that you navigate to the Galaxy Store app for software updates and store your photos in its own default Gallery application instead of Google Photos. It will also make its way into your mobile games by launching its own AI-based Game Booster system. But in most cases, you can avoid or ignore many Samsung applications. And thankfully, the overall user interface is remarkably clean, especially compared to Samsung's previous user interface.

All about running applications – download them, change them and perform resource hungry tasks – is a kid's game on this phone. The Note10 + runs on Qualcomm's latest mobile processor, the Snapdragon 855, which can also support a 5G modem (Samsung distributes a 5G compatible version of the Note10 + later this fall). This chip is a 7-nanometer, 64-bit octa-core processor, and it's almost more powerful than the average smartphone user needs at the moment. The basic specifications of the phone are nonsense: 12 GB of RAM, with 256 GB of internal storage. You can also add storage space.

The display measures 6.8 inches diagonally, making it the largest screen Samsung has ever placed on a Note handset.

Lauren Joseph

The Galaxy Note10 +'s camera has so many features that you probably will not use them all. Take, for example, slow motion video: This is a great idea in theory. Maybe catch a few slow-motion videos showing the wings of a hummingbird that passes over your loader before you realize the place occupied by an image at 960 video frames per second takes on your phone.

Ditto with Live Focus in video capture, something new and specific to Galaxy Note10 +. A few years ago, smartphone manufacturers started using cameras and intelligent software for depth detection to superimpose a bokeh effect on still images (some did a better job than others) ). Samsung goes even further by allowing you to erase the background when shooting. video. I've used it only once so far, and my editor's curly hair is fading.

Other photo features are much more useful and portend a future in which the camera of each cell phone is incredibly smart. The back of the note combines an ultra-slim 16-megapixel camera, another 12-megapixel wide-angle camera, a 12-megapixel telephoto lens and a dedicated depth detection camera. The front camera controls its own 10 megapixel sensor. If you're going to capture a still image on the beach, as I did last week, the camera is smart enough to not only optimize the scene, but also suggest you move to a wide-angle shot . A small prompt appears, directing you to this wide angle option in the Camera application. This kind of smart camera is rather scary, but also very useful.

The video capture also benefits from a boost on the Galaxy Note10 +. The "Super Steady" mode is based on software to stabilize the video, which I admit I did not use during a race at the skatepark, but it obviously stabilizes the scene when you turn it on, even with filmed videos from moving vehicles. And when you zoom in while capturing a video, the phone can isolate and enhance the sound of the subject you zoomed in on. It generally works better with a motionless, talking human subject than in a less controlled environment or rich in ambient noise.

And you can even use the S Pen now to capture photos. Oh yes … the S Pen.

The way to write

The S Pen Pen is and has always been the main factor that differentiates the Galaxy Note from other smartphones with comic dimensions. The utility of a stylus on a phone is debatable. And yet, no one can deny that it is at least nice to use your giant smartphone as a notebook. And some things on the phone are really nicer to navigate with a little sharp pen instead of a big finger.

With the launch of last year's Galaxy Note phone, Samsung has turned the S Pen into an autonomous shutter. Lift the phone, move away from it with the S Pen Pen and you can capture photos of yourself from afar by clicking a pen button. This year, the S Pen has been equipped with an accelerometer and a gyroscope, making it a gesture control device. This means that I could use the S Pen Pen not only to capture a photo, but also to navigate the Camera application, by pressing the S Pen Pen button and waving the wand while changing the settings to every gesture. You can switch between video and photo, or draw a circle in the air to zoom in. All this accompanies a learning curve; there is no way to get around it. I thought I had learned everything about phone navigation, and the S-Pen as a magic wand left me stunned. I still do not know how much I'm going to use that.

The Samsung Notes application, which makes it possible to note random thoughts, has also been upgraded. It now exports directly to Microsoft Word. You can access a recorded note, highlight some handwritten words, and turn them into text. "It's the best way to export to Microsoft Word," reads one of the converted notes, which means the technology is still being learned or my word scribbling test was so bad.

When you're tired of converting notes to text or exporting notes to MS Word, you can use the S Pen to draw volumetric ARs in space. It works just as well on individual faces as in the open space in front of you. It sounds silly, but drawing cartoon cat ears on a colleague and watching them move with her while she was crossing the real world was delightful.

Of course, these features seem new or fanciful to most of us, but Samsung presents them as remarkable features for a reason: the company wants to make sure it 's safe. address to a more professional audience (see: Microsoft Word), just as much as creation. crowd. And that's where DeX comes in. It's Samsung's solution for running your home screen and mobile apps on your PC. Is it something that people want to make? To be determined. In the past, DeX required a special docking station; Add your phone notes in it and you will be able to run the phone software on your PC. You can now connect the Note10 + to your computer using a USB-C cable.

This should work on both Windows PCs and Macs, as long as you have downloaded the required Samsung software. It worked well on an HP Windows 10-based laptop, where I could browse my Note10 + photo gallery, scroll through the mobile version of Instagram and send mobile SMS messages, all from the desktop. However, DeX was not working well on a recent MacBook Pro running MacOS Mojave and at the time of this review, the issues had not been resolved.

DeX is one of those things that is great in theory, a sort of attempt at competing with the more fluid and integrated software experience that offers something like iOS and MacOS (making the messages available to both, by example). In practice however, it's still embarrassing. If, for example, you are sending SMS from the application running on your laptop and you are trying to pick up the phone to answer a message, you must restart the application on the phone. The Instagram application stutters in DeX on the laptop. It's not as homogeneous as it has the potential to be.

Hard charger

It is difficult to empty the 3400 mAh battery of the Samsung Galaxy Note10 +. I have tried. I used it during the weekend and I did not have to recharge it once between Friday afternoon and Sunday night. Then I determined that I needed to use it for a whole day of work, when I use Gmail, Slack, Twitter and other apps throughout the day. I watched the train schedules. I've been looking for surf videos on Instagram. I played Angry Birds 2 above. The thing will not die. This is the batteries cockroach.

Of course, he will miss finally. Part of the reason I have never experienced the experience of dying was due to the fact that I occasionally connected it to my laptop via a USB-C cable to test the Samsung DeX, and that this would improve every time I would do it. In addition, the range of Galaxy Note phones will never escape its fall 2016 footnote. So it's hard to be very excited about the batteries until we're sure they're not 39 will not explode on commercial flights.

Charging is also fast, whether you're using the 25-watt charger provided or buying the Samsung 45-watt charger separately.

So, is this big phone worth the expense? The answer to this question is not a necessity. It's a question of need. The Note10 + is impractical, expensive and stacked with unnecessary items. It's a brilliant phone show, a kind of playground for Samsung, where the company can play its acrobatic talents.

It's exaggerated. And if that's what you want, you're going to like it.

(The Galaxy Note10 + is available unlocked at Samsung, Amazon and Walmart stores.)

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