It’s tough to believe we’re already three generations into a device that launched a category few thought would take off. Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3 is a shrewd re¿nement of the company’s mainstream phablet—two words I never thought I’d put together—and continues to be an excellent combination of power and practicality in an oversized phone. It’s also considerably more powerful than the Galaxy Mega on AT&T, despite the latter phone’s even-larger display. The Galaxy Note 3 is the most powerful phablet we’ve tested to date.
DESIGN, DISPLAY, AND CONTROLS
No one will mistake the Galaxy Note 3 for a regular smartphone. It measures 5.95 by 3.12 by 0.33 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.92 ounces, which makes it a little thinner and lighter than last year’s model. I really like the new sides of the Note 3; the edges are flat, not tapered, and there’s a plastic chrome band engraved with ridges that make holding a supersized device like this easy. The rest of the comfort comes from the stitched faux leather back panel, which is flat save for a small raised protrusion for the camera sensor and flash. The overall look is classier than the Note 2’s and a nice step up from Samsung’s usual polycarbonate body.
The 5.7-inch, 1,920-by-1,080-pixel, 386ppi Super AMOLED display is a stunner, with vibrant colors, deep blacks, and wide viewing angles. Typing on the onscreen keyboard is a cinch even in portrait mode, and I love having the extra row of number keys at the top. Below the screen are two capacitive Menu and Back buttons, which stay hidden until you push them, and an oversized hardware Home button in the center.
The left side contains a Volume rocker, and the right side the Power button. On top you’ll find a 3.5mm headphone jack and infrared sensor. The bottom edge of the phone houses a micro USB 3.0 connector, which charges the phone and transfers data more quickly when connected to a computer, as well as a mono speaker and a small microphone. This being a Note product, you also get a stylus, which parks neatly underneath the phone’s bottom-right edge.
CONNECTIVITY AND CALL QUALITY
The Note 3 is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1,800/1,900MHz), quad-band HSPA+ 42 (850/1,700/1,900/2,100MHz), and 4G LTE phone. You also get 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, GPS, NFC, and Bluetooth 4.0. In Midtown Manhattan, the Note 3 scored 9-10Mbps both down and up whenever I could latch onto T-Mobile’s new 4G LTE network. Stepping back to HSPA+ 42 I saw 4Mbps down and just 200Kbps up, with ping times around 150ms instead of under 40ms like on LTE. As with many T-Mobile phones, the Note 3 features Wi-Fi calling, which helps keep you connected in areas with poor cellular signal.
Voice calls sound clear, crisp, and full in the earpiece, and it gets plenty loud. Transmissions through the mic are a little on the soft side, with some hiss detectable around words, and a bit too much external street noise
leaks through the mic. Reception seems strong. Calls sound ¿ne through a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset. I had no problem triggering voice activation over Bluetooth, but the phone never recognized my voice dialing commands through the headset. The mono speakerphone sounds clear and loud, and should be no problem to use outdoors.
HARDWARE, OS, AND APPS
American-spec Note 3s get a quad-core 2.26GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, along with 3GB RAM and Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, which is the latest version of the OS. This is one fast processor; it aced
every benchmark test we ran, and we noticed no hiccups while playing even the most resource-hogging games you can buy from the Google Play Store. As with all Samsung Galaxy devices, the Note 3 is about as far from stock Android as is imaginable. But in day-to-day usage, the Note 3 always felt fast to me and didn’t bog down anywhere.
There are five home screens you can customize and swipe between. The new Air Command is a half-moon bubble that opens when you pull out the stylus, or when you hover the tip over the screen and press the button, thanks to the stylus’s proximity sensor. Through it you can fire up a Post-It–style notepad, clip items from the screen and save them to a virtual scrapbook, snap and annotate screenshots, search your device, or use an improved version of Multi Window that greatly increases multitasking flexibility by allowing for multiple, resizable windows with different current tasks running. You can also drag and drop apps into different windows more easily than before.
S Note remains a fun-to-use, full-featured note-taking app, packed with voice memo, video, images, illustration tools, a clipboard, the new scrapbook, and Google Maps integration. The pressure-sensitive stylus writes accurately, and 1080p seems to be enough resolution that you don’t see any pixelation even when writing small.
Though S Health is an excellent health monitoring tour and Multiple Window mode is handy, some of the bloatware is near-useless and continues to undermine the stability of the OS. Samsung Hub is an abomination; it exists just to sell you DRMed media that only works on Samsung devices, and is completely redundant with Google’s Play Store. S Voice, though good, doesn’t really accomplish anything you can’t do with Google Now. With just the default apps installed, I saw a couple of process-stop error dialogs just with the phone sitting on my desk, which wasn’t con¿dence-inspiring. And unfortunately, this is one dialog box–laden phone; every time I did something new to test it out, Samsung popped up a large dialog with further instructions, and often yet another EULA to agree to.
MULTIMEDIA, CAMERA, AND CONCLUSIONS
There’s a roomy 32GB of internal storage, but Samsung’s huge amount of preloaded software knocks more than 7GB off the total, leaving 24.9GB available for your apps and media. My 64GB SanDisk card worked fine in the microSD slot beneath the battery cover. All of our test music tracks played, including FLAC files, and sounded fine through a Plantronics BackBeat Go stereo Bluetooth headset. Our 1080p movie files, including H.264 and Xvid, looked fabulous in full screen mode, although DivX files wouldn’t play.
Samsung bumped the Note 2’s autofocus camera sensor up to 13 megapixels, matching the one in the Galaxy S 4. This being a Samsung camera, there are many extra features and modes, including a useful Eraser that eliminates a person from a series of photos, Best Face for merging group shots and getting the right expression on each person’s face, and Rich Tone (HDR) for intensifying color and improving contrast. The main camera is fast to focus and fire, but the shots are soft—clearly “cell phone camera” and not point-and-shoot camera quality—and shots from the front-facing camera are usable, if a bit warm color-wise. The video side is excellent: Both the front and rear cameras record smooth, sharp 1080p video at 30 frames per second, and the rear camera’s stabilization and detail look really good.
S Note remains a fun-to-use, full-featured note-taking app, packed with voice memo, video, images, illustration tools, a clipboard, the new scrapbook, and Google Maps integration. The pressure-sensitive stylus writes accurately, and 1080p seems to be enough resolution that you don’t see any pixelation even when writing small.
Though S Health is an excellent health monitoring tour and Multiple Window mode is handy, some of the bloatware is near-useless and continues to undermine the stability of the OS. Samsung Hub is an abomination; it exists just to sell you DRMed media that only works on Samsung devices, and is completely redundant with Google’s Play Store. S Voice, though good, doesn’t really accomplish anything you can’t do with Google Now. With just the default apps installed, I saw a couple of process-stop error dialogs just with the phone sitting on my desk, which wasn’t con¿dence-inspiring. And unfortunately, this is one dialog box–laden phone; every time I did something new to test it out, Samsung popped up a large dialog with further instructions, and often yet another EULA to agree to.
MULTIMEDIA, CAMERA, AND CONCLUSIONS
There’s a roomy 32GB of internal storage, but Samsung’s huge amount of preloaded software knocks more than 7GB off the total, leaving 24.9GB available for your apps and media. My 64GB SanDisk card worked fine in the microSD slot beneath the battery cover. All of our test music tracks played, including FLAC files, and sounded fine through a Plantronics BackBeat Go stereo Bluetooth headset. Our 1080p movie files, including H.264 and Xvid, looked fabulous in full screen mode, although DivX files wouldn’t play.
Samsung bumped the Note 2’s autofocus camera sensor up to 13 megapixels, matching the one in the Galaxy S 4. This being a Samsung camera, there are many extra features and modes, including a useful Eraser that eliminates a person from a series of photos, Best Face for merging group shots and getting the right expression on each person’s face, and Rich Tone (HDR) for intensifying color and improving contrast. The main camera is fast to focus and fire, but the shots are soft—clearly “cell phone camera” and not point-and-shoot camera quality—and shots from the front-facing camera are usable, if a bit warm color-wise. The video side is excellent: Both the front and rear cameras record smooth, sharp 1080p video at 30 frames per second, and the rear camera’s stabilization and detail look really good.
Should you get a phone or a phablet? Samsung isn’t making the decision easy, thanks to its dizzying array of devices with all manner of screen sizes. For example, the Mega steps up to an even larger 6.3-inch display, but it’s lower in resolution, and its dual-core processor is signi¿cantly behind the quad-core, nextgeneration chip in the Note 3. Heading back down in the other direction, the Galaxy S 4 still has a 5-inch display, and because it’s also 1080p, its pixel density is even tighter. The LG G2 splits the difference, with its 5.2-inch display, and it has the same processing powerhouse internals, but it’s not in the same league software-wise.
All told, the Galaxy Note 3 is the best phablet on the market and an easy Editors’ Choice for T-Mobile. There wasn’t much wrong with the Galaxy Note 2 that some spec bumps and software refinements couldn’t fix, and we basically got them here.
Source: PC Magazine Novemer 2013
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