Gadgetory

with key improvements across the board what we might be witness to here is Samsung truly establishing what is their flagship smartphone line hey it's Josh regard from Android authority what's going on everybody and yes here is the full review of the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 what a difference a little metal makes undeniably the first thing you'll notice about the note 4 is it shine across the frame an aluminum frame provides an incredibly sleek addition to the returning Foley there backing that no longer has the fake stitching all around the frame is basically flat all around with just a tiny bit of rise near the top and bottom corners those flat sides curve inward to the panels and in this dark edition of the phone the shine is simply eye-catching all of the usable tropes returned with the signature tactile home by now with the fingerprint scanner embedded and it is flanked by back in recent apps capacitive keys that are noticeably underneath a striped design found underneath that 2.5 D glass the S Pen is nuzzled in the bottom right corner as always and a return to the conventional microUSB charging port on the bottom is accompanied by the headphone jack up top the faux leather backing provides the kind of texture that grips to the palm making this a comfortable phone to use despite its larger size and there's no way around it this is simply the prettiest phone samsung has ever made certainly true when considering the note line specifically even if it might look like another note device to everyone else you as the owner will know by the subtle reflection of the 2.5 D glass and the shine of the metal frame that this is the wonderfully designed Note 4 that you own and you're going to love knowing that I've mentioned 2.5 D glass a couple times already and that is only one of the big enhancements in the note display game in the case of the note 4 it is kind of a return from the Samsung Galaxy s3 the 2.5 D glass is basically the kind of glass you'd see on most high-end watches these days slightly thicker and raised up but it slopes downward on all sides but underneath the surface is a big upgrade to today's hot screen flavor quad HD the super-high resolution helps this large screen still achieve over 500 pixels per inch which leads to a great sharpness in text and as usual the high saturation contrast of the Super AMOLED display brings the kind of experience any Samsung user comes to expect colors that really pop out and punch you in the face viewing angles are stellar making the screen look like a sticker at times and the white balance in the camera might make the color seem a little bit bluer in this screen but rest assured that if Super AMOLED is your thing highly vivid and highly contrasted Media will follow and you will be very pleased by it so doesn't really matter that the note 4 has a super high resolution screen after all there is still a very apparent lack of applications that fully take advantage of it you can find the difference if you look hard enough and it is there but for plenty of general users out there you're pretty much going to just enjoy the great experience that is on here no matter what you think about quad HD and now you can be sure that the best performance possible is accompanying the new note for the Snapdragon 805 with the Adreno 420 backed by three gigabytes of RAM now this is the configuration that my specific model has but a beefed up exitos octa-core setup can be found in the alternate model but no matter how you slice it there is raw power in this phone and there has to be given Samsung's pension for incredibly saturated software experiences that being said the experience on the note 4 is best described as TouchWiz at its most fluid thus far that's not to say there aren't any moments of stutter or lag as I'm sure many of you will be hypersensitive toward but I've had tons of applications running at once I've blown through multiple multitasking scenarios and I've been able to play some great games with that much incident at all as far as Samsung is concerned this is the best performance experience they've managed to put out which shouldn't be much of a surprise you might be able to find more fluid experiences out there but the margin between them shouldn't be very large at all and in Hardware Samsung continues to push the envelope with its offerings in the note line the Aspen has been beefed up but other additions have found their way to the note 4 as well the most glaring one is the new heart rate monitor found squarely on the back the application of health monitoring via the s health application is an individual matter but at least the HRM can be used for other purposes now like as the shutter release for the camera personally I'm not a big user of Samsung's flavour of fingerprint logging but nonetheless it's a feature that has arrived in outline now all other expected bits and pieces are here call quality was expectedly good but despite some decent volume in the speaker setup its rear mounting still puts it at just average performance the removable back cover allows you access to a replaceable battery which comes in at 32 20 milliamp hours that's not a big upgrade from the battery capacity of the note 3 but even with a higher resolution screen and all of the power underneath I found battery life to be where it should be for a large device in particular one day of heavy testing brought the phone down to single digits in about 14 hours and if you were using power saving features especially the ultra power saving you should usually get a day and a half out of the note for possibly quite a bit more so optimizations went into ensuring the battery life didn't at least go down a lot but Samsung made sure to add an important feature fast charging using a nine volt charger in lieu of the conventional five volt charging adapters Samsung claimed that battery life gets to 75% under just half an hour of charging now that wasn't really the case but their secondary claim was true full charge in about 100 minutes while that might mean having a specific charger or adapter on hand at all times the ability to go from 0 to work ready in a short amount of time will undoubtedly be an indispensable tool for plenty of users as it was for me multiple microphones have been added on to help with the voice calls and in the quality it seems to work but they are also there for voice recording which now can be used in an app to segregate specific portions of this sound spectrum it's a nice feature but ultimately it's not really useful for anything more than reference audio I see interviewers taking advantage of it most because students can't even really have their phones out in class to record lectures anyway and we finally make it over to the s-pen which doesn't carry with that many changes from the previous model at least physically but enhancements in the experience probably make this one of the most useful Suites for the stylist yet higher sensitivity allows for even better stroke sensitivity in the S note application which means new pens a new smart select feature lets you cut apart specific sections of your screen for easy access later and perhaps the most useful addition is the ability to hold down the button on the pen to easily do selections across the system like dragging a mouse in order to do selections on pewter by far the pen as mouse features the one I see people using most as I found myself pulling the pen out for just that very purpose because holding that a finger and then trying to do my selections accurately it's just not the business anymore even if the other capabilities of the S Pen might not prove useful later on I think doing selections easily like this will never go stale and now we make it over to the camera which brings with the optical image stabilization we've been waiting for on top of the 16 megapixels of power a more open aperture should allow for better low-light shots and this is true for both the rear-facing camera and the front-facing 3.7 megapixel shooter key modes return from previous iterations like live HDR and the selective focus but a few selfie centric modes are now available as well when using the front-facing camera a wide selfie mode allows you to move the camera in panorama fashion yielding a 120 degree angle to fit in all of your friends but if you want to use the rear shooter for your selfies a face detection mode helps achieve that though the focal length is definitely more narrow so you have to keep that in mind 4k video capture is possible and its quality is actually quite good getting a good amount of detail though the file sizes can be very high picture quality continues the tradition of samsung quality with pictures exhibiting very high saturation which means vivid photos though not necessarily too accurate to the actual color low-light shots those suffer as expected but the optical image stabilization yields a better photo in the note 4 than any Samsung phone that went before without it shooting photos with the camera app is actually a pretty fast affair with processing time only getting long one in low-light situations or when using special modes otherwise it's pretty easy to get a shot off and you will likely get a pretty good looking shot and finally TouchWiz returns in the Galaxy Note 4 with further enhancements not only with the s-pen but also in multitasking we already went through the s-pen updates but the S note application has been given one very powerful addition the photo notes the application will go as far as morphing surfaces taken at an angle in order to capture any text on that surface which then can be converted into lines that are erasable and replaceable using the s-pen opening up true and creative editing Samsung's own version of the second screen comes back to it is now called briefing it is still basically a big Flipboard widget but it's designed as much easier on the eyes now and actually makes scrolling through the newsfeeds bearable and actually looks really nice unfortunately the briefing is still very curated with no room to pick custom feeds you can select from a limited amount of categories but that's about it and finally we come to the multitasking capabilities which have been heavily bolstered multi-window has been given center stage with a new icon that is found at in a redesigned recent apps screen press this button and you'll launch right into the dual window holding the back button still brings up the familiar list of compatible applications which continues to grow but tapping on any of these apps will bring up a floating window that brings another level of multitasking you're able to go from here to a floating icon that can be put aside and large the floating window to be full screen again or drag it up or down to once again create the multi window combination the final but flashiest element added in is the drag down from either top corner when using a compatible application it will shrink down to a floating window which you then can perform any of the transitions to multi window or floating icons that we've already talked about to your heart's content this seamless movement from one multitasking method to another really shows the power of this version of TouchWiz and even if you don't really use multi-window or floating apps the ease of use just might convince you to try it more often I have always said that TouchWiz with it's generally bloated elements even after its recent aesthetic revamp looks better on larger screens and it is still true here especially with the higher resolution it all seems to fit quite well and honestly I haven't wanted to install another launcher yet if there are a bunch of features that you already were not using in previous Samsung iterations then that's not a whole lot is going to change when you use the note 4 but the focus on multitasking and the new additions in the s-pen I believe actually might survive what I call that galaxy syndrome the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 will be the premium offering across all contracts and carriers and the off contract price will be at least $700 which is no surprise for a high-end smartphone though the LG g3 and the Oppo find 7 comes to mind as competitors due to their quad HD displays much of the talk will likely center around the iPhone 6 plus as the main large form factor competition don't worry a full comparison will be underway soon to see how all of these stack up updates to high-profile smartphone flagships generally get a lot of buzz but lately the excitement has been waning and due in no small part to the fact that small steps or what we get where we thought we were going to get big leaps in the case of the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 we might not be seeing giant leaps forward for the note line but the steps taken were the right ones Samsung has figured out design and crafted one of the most attractive phones I've seen quad HD was the expected step forward in display but they've managed to make the battery life still on par while adding fast charging to get you back to work quickly optical image stabilization finally arrives here and then TouchWiz focuses once again on multitasking this time providing a seamless experience that should make multitasking easier for a lot of users and finally the s-pen continues to be the unrivaled note lines marquee companion further bolstered by capabilities that make a number of once menial tasks much easier now the number of enhancements that have proven exciting and ultimately useful is longer than in any past release samsung or not and that's what makes the note for such a great phone in almost every respect the note 4 ups the ante not only for note veterans but also for anybody looking for an attractive package and an upgrade to a larger display or to a stylus experience with this fourth iteration in its note line samsung has truly established which phone is their true flagship and that is why it gets our editors choice award for being one of the best offerings of the year in the smartphone game as always thank you guys very much for watching and I hope you enjoyed this review of the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 we have even more coverage of it including comparisons to other phones like the iPhone 6 plus that will be coming pretty soon but until then make sure you keep it tuned here for not only the note 4 but all of the flagships that are coming out because there are quite a few of them so you can stay tuned for full reviews and videos on those don't forget to take a look at the content of my colleagues in Android here at Android authority comm also drop us likes in our videos subscribe to our channel if you haven't already and once you're done with all of that head back on over to the home page and road authority comm because we are your source for all things Android