Gadgetory

Samsung decided to go a whole step further skipping number six and going straight to seven in their new device in the note line but we do know that Samsung has made it clear that this is so they could have uniformity across the galaxy line but still we have to ponder whether the leap from five to seven is one that is truly justified and that's exactly what we're doing here because it's Joshua freghar from Android authority what's going on everybody and this is our full review of the samsung galaxy note 7 yes you get a curved display here on the galaxy note 7 and it's going to be the only version of the phone that will be available so at its core they're basically no surprises with the way the no7 looks you have the same large display with the home tactile button up front right below the display and all of the different ports that are still on the bottom there is one obvious change here however as the note 7 has made the move to USB type-c but next to it is the bottom mounted speaker and the headphone jack which thankfully is still sticking around above the display is the front-facing camera but now the other addition is the iris scanner which is essentially a dedicated secondary camera made for scanning your eyes and of course there's the little buddy that always comes with the note and pretty much defines the line and that would be the S Pen and no the S Pen does not go backwards into the phone anymore because the clicky top up here is just wide enough to keep it from going any more than just that much there have been some refinements made to the S Pen itself a thinner tip means more precision and the length of the pen is now as much as a regular ballpoint pen but when you're actually using the S Pen it doesn't feel that much different from the one that was from the note 5 and that might actually be a good thing because we already liked the experience from before but speaking of refinements we already talked about the curved display and we already know that the curved display can help with handling but we also learned in the note 5 that a curved backing can also do the exact same thing in the note 7 you get both and there was actually only one way for the Samsung designers to really describe it to us symmetry now by making the backing curved on the note 5 it made a somewhat bulkier device more comfortable in the hand but by making the display also curved it not only makes for a very symmetrical phone but it also makes the entire device that much more narrow and the result is something I've been waiting for for a while a big phone that's actually really comfortable to use and for a larger device that actually has very accessible handling the entire package undergoes one more change and that's IP certification at the very least however the vast majority of users will appreciate that this phone will still work even if it gets wet now Samsung hasn't really lipped forward much in the mode 7 in the of different aspects and that starts with the display you still get the Super AMOLED five-point inch screen that comes in a quad HD resolution for that high pixel density and the high quality that you would expect from a high-end Samsung product the Super AMOLED display generally does mean that the colors will be somewhat saturated maybe oversaturated but this can be changed in the settings among a number of different modes now even though this is a quad HD display you can actually output less than quad HD resolution on it this is in the interest of power saving and you can go into the device maintenance area in the settings to find it you can actually make this display output regular HD at 720p and you can actually tell the difference if you go between the two modes now a big deal from the galaxy s7 now makes it to the note line and that's the always-on display essentially you get a small area on the display where you can show a number of different clocks a few different calendars and some images that are canned and or predetermined but from there you get a little bit of customization on the note sevens version of it mainly because in the clock area and or many of them you can actually create a block of text that will always show up along with the clock and notification icons so you know what you're going to be getting when you unlock the device that little bit of customization is always nice to have and I personally really applaud Samsung for putting into this phone and as you can see I've already made full use of it now considering that the note now has a curved display of course that means that the edge UX makes an appearance here but for the most part it doesn't have anything different than the iteration that was found in the galaxy s7 edge it's not particularly useful unless you go through the effort to use it so for the most part it stays out of the way and of course this is all on top of what is already a pretty great experience that we've had in previous devices we had a ton of fun on this phone especially with games like Mobius Final Fantasy and videos across YouTube users familiar with the galaxy s7 and the s7 edge are pretty much going to know what to expect here the Snapdragon 820 is the version we have now with the audrina 530 and 4 gigabytes of RAM there is an accelerate even but it will not be coming to the States now 4 gigabytes is enough for a lot of phones out there especially when you take into consideration their core experiences but we're talking about the note here you already have multi window and pop-up view for multitasking and then you put on top of all of that the s-pen there are so many capabilities on this phone that may be a little bit more RAM would have kept it feeling incredibly crisp all the time now granted we didn't really find these problems to be very abundant they only really happened once in a while but even then that little inch that Samsung could have given could have felt like a mile in the RAM Department despite the lack of higher ram capacities Samsung actually did pretty well to appeal to power users when it came to onboard storage you now get 64 gigabytes of on-board storage and that is the deal you don't get any other versions of 32 or 128 you simply get 64 which is already pretty great add on top of that a micro SD card slot in which we've already put a 256 gigabyte microSD card and you have all of the storage you'll need for pretty much anything now calls on the note 7 actually sounded perfectly fine there were no complaints on either end of the call nor were there any drops but we can't really be as optimistic about the onboard speaker now the sound experience from here is simply singular it just doesn't really provide any richness or even any real volume when compared some plenty of other flagships that we've seen this year and of course it's a bottom mounted speaker so it already has that disadvantage luckily however the experience on the headphone jack that is over next to it has actually been kind of above average there's no DAC in the note 7 which means you're not going to be getting HTC 10 levels of sound as a matter of fact it falls pretty much just short of that but sound actually sounds really good out of here especially when you consider that you can cater the sound to your liking sound alive is available here and you might remember it from some previous Samsung devices and it can let you go from base to treble in terms of emphasis or it can emphasize the instrumentals or the vocals from there you can actually adapt the sound based upon a bunch of beeps that you hear through your headphone so we can take the sound and enhance it properly depending on what headphones you have but from there there's one thing missing from the audio experience and that's a dedicated amp without an amp the sound you get from headphones like these audio Technica's around my neck could be a little bit quieter than we would like battery life on the note 7 has been a major focus into that end they have put in a 3,500 milliamp hour unit in this phone one short test from our own Android authority battery testing app used a mixture of gameplay web browsing and video playback while on Wi-Fi and predicted that the screen on time could be about 6 hours in order to test that I actually did that myself I put YouTube on here and binge a bunch of episodes across YouTube for what felt like a really long time and when I took a look at the battery stats it certainly was I played some games at the tail end of it but overall the screen on time was over 6 hours but what that basically means is that with the note you'll get a normal day with 4 to 5 hours of screen on time especially if you have pretty much moderate usage but of course if you need to charge the phone in a hurry you have fast charging in order to do that an adapter that is included in the box will help make the transition a little bit easier as micro USB cords can be adapted to fit the samsung galaxy note 7 you just have to remember to use the included charging brick and then you will get fast charging no matter what now it still lives up to its claims it gets half an hour to get half power inside of this phone the same as it was with the galaxy s7 and but there's also fast wireless charging involved here but even then fast wireless charging still takes quite a while and it just pales in comparison to fast wired charging so we tend to stick with that so finally we can talk about the iris scanner this is where we'll talk about Samsung's new biometric scanner and it's also a way for us to segue into the camera essentially it's a new camera module that's right next to the front-facing camera and it does an infrared scan of irises or eyes the composition of one's eyes the setup is pretty simple you basically have to keep your glasses off and then scan your eyes and once it gets a snapshot of your eyes then it registers it and looks for that whenever you trigger the iris scanner honestly once you get the hang of it the iris scanner is incredibly fast almost surprisingly so when you have the phone locked you just have to wake it swipe and have the phone a regular distance muscle-memory will tell you how far the phone should be after you get used to it now as you're looking into the camera at the top it just unlocks right away you don't even have to look at the viewfinder that comes up in order to tell you where to put your eyes once you're used to doing it now I've gotten a lot of reactions while using the iris scanner already but my favorite one has been from a friend who told me that she thought I hated my phone the reason why is because it looked like I was giving it the evil eye that wasn't really the case I just wanted to be sure that my eyes were wide open so the iris scanner would work flawlessly and in the camera Department Samsung seems to be confident enough and what they did in the galaxy s7 to really make it a repeat so the same 12 megapixel F 1.7 dual pixel shooter of the note 7 is the same as it was before in the galaxy s7 if there are any real improvements it's in the camera app the camera app has simply just been a little bit streamlined so that's easier to use in one hand for the most part you just have to swipe up and down to change which camera you're using and then swipe left and right to access the different modes and also the different filters so for the most part anyone familiar with the galaxy s7 and its top-notch camera quality will know what to expect here it's still capable of some of the better batches of photos in really good lighting and even in low-light situations it might still have its quirks but it still provides some pretty nice-looking photos details are captured quite well with only some softness showing up when you actually zoom into the photos small text is still legible though so that means that the sharpness is still pretty good and self-portraits are not the super high quality that some people might be expecting especially in indoor situations but we can still give some credit to the F 1.7 aperture lens for trying to do what it can in low-light the main camera has quite a few tools like the f 1.7 aperture optical image stabilization and of course the larger pixels the dual pixels that are used for capturing more light and in low-light the color temperature tends to get pretty warm still now this isn't a huge problem but something that we noticed and you might need to have a steady hand because the slower shutter speeds require it and if you don't really have a steady hand you'll get a somewhat blurry picture but in times when everything falls into place the pictures can still look really nice even in these low-light situations and we were able to get some pretty nice photos of some food while at some restaurants late at night essentially it's going to be the same one that you saw in the galaxy s7 and for the most part that's not really a bad thing the software experience for no device always centers around the s-pen and that's still the case with the note 7 but there have been some refinements to the general Samsung UI Samsung's way of presenting Android overall the user interface has been given some unified colors to make everything feel more coherent with only the main elements providing some of the color the secure folder might be one of Samsung's best security features yet essentially it's a folder where you can put applications files and content and then on top of it or all of the same layers that you would use to unlock the device but what's awesome is that you can put apps into here and they act like brand-new installed applications for example Instagram is installed into the secure folder and I still have to log into it so I can put completely different accounts onto any of the apps that I put into that folder but of course the crux of the note 7 is the S Pen and there is a mixture of streamlining and adding upon the formula to make this iteration probably the most practical one yet smart select got probably the biggest and perhaps trendiest edition of them all essentially the animation select allows you to record a 15-second gif of whatever is happening on the screen that you can then easily send save or share with other people honestly you can capture pretty much anything any video on YouTube or even on Instagram can be used in order to capture that and the video that I used came from Instagram the other additions to the s-pen software family are not quite as deep but are found easily in the air command menu we start off with magnify which provides a small square to magnify parts of the screen up to 300% which can be useful if you actually need to get a closer look at something now glance is an interesting one that shrinks any app to a small square that snaps to any corner of the screen and then you hover the tip of the S Pen over that square to make it blow up again it could be nice to use if you want just quick glances or updates as to things that have changed in that app but other than that the use case scenarios seem a little bit then and then finally there's translate the feature that we really want to see evolve translate essentially allows the hovering of the s-pen to translate single words from one language to another and there's a myriad of languages that you can use here now we do want to eventually translate full phrases or even full sentences or full blocks of text but for now if you have a word that is on a website or an online menu for example that you need to have the definition of you can just hover the pen over that word and you'll get your translation the only other main addition comes in the screen off memo essentially while the screen is off you can take out the s-pen and you're given a blank black canvas in order to write any memo or anything down and what you can do now is pin this screen off memo to the always-on display so it's always available so that if you have a quick task or reminder that you only need immediately for the time being you can have it always displaying on the phone samsung really wants people to actually take this s-pen out and use it more often now the note line has been notoriously or rather infamously known for having users that never ever even take out the s-pen they just use this phone as a large device so maybe these changes will make people use the s-pen more often but at the very least it means that the s-pen has become a pretty practical tool to use in the note 7 and all of this does come at a pretty steep price not necessarily the monetary price which I'll get to in a second essentially there are so many features in the note 7 that every single user will have their own distinct learning curve if you actually go through the effort to learn how to use all of them that could take up a pretty big chunk of time in order to get the most out of the note 7 you kind of have to do your homework so perhaps for one of the few times in their tenure samsung has made a phone that is trying its darndest to justify its very high price point and currently on the Samsung website the phone is available for a total of eight hundred and forty nine ninety nine a very steep price for a phone that simultaneously feels fresh enough yet feels undeniably familiar if you can genuinely say that you don't need an accessible big display device high on board capacity with expandable storage great battery life a top-notch camera experience one of the most feature heavy Android iterations ever and or a s-pen that just won't quit then you can look elsewhere but unless you can do that you simply need not look any further than this I'm some Galaxy Note 7 so as always thank you guys very much for watching and I hope you enjoyed this review of the samsung galaxy note 7 now for a phone that actually is incredibly familiar there was actually a lot to talk about on this device and it did take up a lot of time so hopefully you guys got something out of it and we pretty much let you know that because this phone is so feature heavy more so than pretty much any other galaxy device it might actually justify its price point and if you've been holding out on a note device up until now this might be the best upgrade that you've been waiting for so from there you can keep it into Android 34 even more about the galaxy note 7 we have a lot coming up and of course we have shows like Aoife right around the corner you can go to our sibling sites that include VR source comm tab times and sound guys and then you can bring it on back to Android or decom and our youtube channel because of course we are your source for all things Android