Friends+Design
- Stylish, beautiful, refined design - the “Aura Glow” version where the back reflects surrounding light transforming into all sorts of gradients, shapes and colors, looks especially mesmerizing
- The front is really sharp looking as well with a nearly bezel free display and a center punch hole front camera
- Samsung’s remarkable job of improving screen to body ratio continues here - in fact, the 6.8-inch Note 10+ has roughly the same footprint as the 6.4-inch Note 9 - which means it's reasonably easy to hold, if you have medium to big hands
- High quality build with glass on the front and the back, and an aluminum frame in the middle
- The power button can be programmed for long presses and double presses to launch Bixby (default) or other apps
- Of course, one of the key highlights of the Note series is the S-Pen: it's one of those things that some people don't use at all, while some swear by - apart from taking notes, handwriting recognition (much improved), it can be used to control music, advance slideshows and snap photos
- The ultrasonic in-screen fingerprint scanner is not quite as fast as 2nd gen optical fingerprint readers on the likes of the OnePlus 7
Display
- Incredibly good looking, 6.8-inch, sharp AMOLED display - it has excellent outdoor legibility, displays beautiful, vibrant colors, has excellent contrast, and excellent viewing angles - it's basically as good as smartphone screens get
- The screen does have occasional issues with phantom touches - since it has such tiny bezels, there are sometimes unintended touches from just holding the phone that interrupt your experience - Samsung could do here with a better palm rejection algorithm
Software
- Samsung's OneUI is one of the best custom Android skins at present - it's well optimized for single handed use with more controls in the easier to reach bottom part of the screen, looks stylish, and of course has a few useful options on top of stock Android
Performance
- Top-end performance with the flagship Exynos 9825 - as expected, it's a performance beast: it flies in benchmarks, receiving top scores, it performs excellent in games, and it features an immense 12GB of RAM which is a sweet overkill
- The storage is also of the new UFS 3.0 standard and it is the absolute fastest storage of any phone yet - the real life implications of having such fast storage it is just that everything loads and runs faster, from large games and videos, to smaller files
Camera
- Top-end quad camera setup on the rear - 12MP standard + 16MP ultra-wide + 12MP telephoto + DepthVision sensor
- The camera setup continues to be one of the best in mobile - and the inclusion of telephoto and ultra-wide lenses allow for a wide range of different shots, and the hardware coupled with machine learning makes it a lot more difficult to take a bad photo
- The live focus feature (Portrait mode, essentially) comes to video, with four different filters, including Color Point, which makes everything but the subject black and white
- Samsung’s also brought a very simple video editor into the mix here, which is nice on the fly - it's also one of the better uses for the S Pen
- There is also an improved Super Steady offering for videos, which smooths out shaky video, including Hyperlapse mode, where handshakes are a big issue
- There is clever Zoom-on Mic functionality - while shooting video, pinch-zooming on something will amplify the noise from that area
- The DepthVision Camera allows for many interesting AR use cases - including Quick Measure to measure object dimensions, 3D Scanner to click '3D images' and animate them, AR Doodle which uses depth sensing to orient live drawings, and of course AR emojis
- The 10-megapixel camera for selfies is very good as well - and it also supports Live Focus so you can blur the background and it does a very good job, with a good amount of detail and with vibrant colors
- Overall, as you would expect, this is one of the best, most versatile camera setups on any smartphone - you are going to love photography with your Note 10+
Audio
- Excellent dual loudspeakers - they are capable of blasting music with quite the powerful punch
- Samsung matches the industry trend here and lets go of the the headphone jack (you do get a nice pair of AKG USB-C headphones in-box)
Battery
- Good (though not exceptional) battery life with a 4300mAh battery - you will get close to 1.5 days with moderate use, and 1 day with heavy use
- Very fast charging with the included 25W charger (and support for up to 45W chargers) - you will get 61% charge in 30 minutes, and a full charge in 1 hour - one of the highest recorded charging speeds for any smartphone
- Support for wireless charging and wireless power sharing
Verdict
- Like always, the new Note, is Samsung's and the Android world's top-end 'everything phone' - if you have the moolah to spend, you won't go wrong with it - it succeeds as both a productivity device (thanks to additions like DeX and added cross-platform functionality with Windows 10) and an everyday handset - so if you need a new phone, are looking for something big and flashy and are willing to splurge, the Note continues to be the one to beat
- That said, the Note 10 series is no longer the 'best at everything' phones they used to be at one time - you will get a more fluid feeling experience on the OnePlus 7 Pro (thanks to the 90Hz display), an even better all-round camera on the Huawei P30 Pro or the Google Pixel 3, and some powerful 10x zoom on the Oppo Reno 10x - so there are lots of options to look around at now, many of them cheaper too
