Key Features:
5.7-inch 1080p Super AMOLED screen; 32GB internal memory with microSD slot;
Snapdragon 800 2.3GHz CPU; Android 4.3 with TouchWiz; 13-megapixel main camera
with LED flash
Samsung Galaxy Note 3 - Design and Screen
Quality
What is the Samsung Galaxy Note 3?
The Samsung Galaxy Note
3 is a slightly larger-screen stylus-equipped alternative to the Galaxy S4. It’s arguably a much more
interesting phone than the Galaxy S4 too, although at £600 SIM-free this comes
at a price. We’re not hugely into every design change Samsung has made this
year, but this is a tech-head’s dream.
Samsung Galaxy Note 3 – Design
The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is a large phone. It’s a very large
phone. But it’s not in the same league as mobiles like the Galaxy Mega
6.3 and Xperia
Z Ultra. You don’t feel entirely
ridiculous holding the thing, and fitting it in one hand is not a struggle.
Samsung has managed to make the Galaxy Note 3 narrower than the Galaxy Note 2, even though the new phone has a larger
5.7-inch display.
It’s an impressive
feat by Samsung, but let’s not forget the phone is still 8cm wide. If you want
a phone that you can easily use one-handed, this is not it. For a bit of
context, the iPhone
5S is just 5.8cm wide
The Samsung Galaxy
Note 3 is also among the first Galaxy phones not to use a glossy plastic rear.
Samsung has tried to fool us into thinking the Note 3 has a leather rear. It
looks like leather, and the battery cover has fake stitching around its outer
edges. But make no mistake – this is not leather.
So
what is it? It’s rubberised plastic with a leather-effect grain to give it a
frictional quality of the real thing.
Take the battery
cover off and you’ll see quite how similar it really is to the backplate of the
Galaxy S4 and Note 2. It’s thin, it’s bendy, it’s plastic. And while it doesn’t
feel bad as such, we prefer the aluminium of the HTC One and the matt plastic of the Nokia Lumia 925
.
This is not a deal-breaker, but don’t approach
the Note 3 thinking Samsung has revolutionised its approach to hardware design
– it hasn’t. If anything,
the new stylistic tweaks are likely to polarise opinion more than the old
phones.
As well as a
leather-effect rear, the sides of the phone are ribbed chrome effect plastic,
clearly intended to look like metal. And it ends up looking a bit naff.
Moreover, the white version has a less convincing feeling than the black.
This ribbed plastic
is also seen on the S Pen, which slots into the bottom edge of the phone. There
is at least some consistency, even if the surface-level generational upgrades
feel like changes for change’s sake.
One such change –
but also something that tech geeks will lap up – is the new connector socket on
the bottom. It looks like a microUSB with a partially developed conjoined twin
attached. It’s not graceful, but it does come with benefits. The Galaxy Note 3 has the first
USB 3.0-compliant socket we’ve seen on a phone. This hugely increases the rate
at which the phone can leech data from a computer (when using a USB 3.0 port),
and will increase the rate of recharging when doing so over USB (again when
using a 3.0 port). With just 32GB of internal memory in a Note 3, we’re not
hugely excited about faster file transfers. But faster charging from a work
laptop sounds good to us.
Samsung Galaxy Note 3 – Screen Quality
The Note series has
seen a gradual increase in screen size across its three generations. The first
had a 5.3-inch screen, the Note 2 has a 5.5-inch screen and the Galaxy Note
3 has a 5.7-inch screen. These small increments have been made without any
negative effects on the bodywork. The Note is less wide and less heavy than
either of the former Notes. The
Note 3’s core screen technology is similar, though. It uses a Super AMOLED
display of 1080p resolution. Like Galaxy S4, the Galaxy Note 3
uses a PenTile ‘diamond’ display, where the sub-pixels are arranged into a
diamond shape. In a lower-resolution screen, using a PenTile display would
result in fuzzy text, but here the 396ppi pixel density is high enough to make
it a non-issue. This is a super-sharp screen despite being oversized.
And as comes with
any good OLED-type screen, contrast and black levels are excellent in the
Galaxy Note 3. Colours are a little more problematic. Fresh out of the box,
they are a little hot, but Samsung gives you some control over the character of
the display.
In the Settings menu you can pick between
Dynamic, Standard, Professional Photo and Movie screen modes. Dynamic is as
ugly as a TV in a Curry’s high street store (i.e. oversaturated), but the Photo
and Movie modes get pretty close to giving an impression of accuracy. As we saw with the Galaxy S4,
top brightness is excellent for an AMOLED panel, although whites aren’t quite
as searing as you’d see on a top-end IPS screen. This is a great display.The
most interesting part of the Galaxy Note 3’s screen, though, is the digitiser
layer. You can’t see, it, but it’s what lets the S Pen stylus work. Wacom makes
the digitiser in the Note 3 – it’s the company behind the ‘industry standard’ Intuos graphics
tablets, used by professionals
across the world. We’ll get onto what it’s capable of later.
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