Gadgetory

I hope you guys like that intro because I changed it up at the last second how's it going guys this is Dave TV and this is my review of the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 so every year that goes by phones are getting bigger screen sizes are getting bigger and for the most part companies just kind of keep up with that trend by making bigger versions of phones and there's nothing wrong with that but Samsung has always had the notes line and they add extra functionality to their large screen devices by adding a pen or a stylus and the truth is I've never really enjoyed using the note line mostly because I find them very uncomfortable to hold and they're also often very ugly but this year things have changed drastically I've had mine for a week in a bit use it heavily with a lot of emphasis on that s-pen here are my thoughts the note 5 starts at $750 off contracts and in the Box we get the phone itself some pamphlets the sim tool and underneath you get some earbuds USB fast charger and some spare pen tips the design elements are very similar to the s6 and the s6 edge lots of Gorilla Glass for lots of metal and I think it looks really nice but like every other glass covered phone fingerprints are a real issue here so if it bothers you I would highly recommend picking up a D brand skin at least for the back because it gives you a little bit of grip and they look good in the process the front has a fingerprint sensing home button here and two capacitive buttons both of these things work well going around we have a power button on the right side mic and SIM card slot on the top volume rocker on the left side and on the bottom we have a headphone jack micro USB port a speaker and the s-pen holster I like the s6 the speaker here is pretty unimpressive it's a single speaker reasonably loud but it sounds tinny and hollow and is projecting downwards right so that's never ideal the s-pen is really well implemented this year it has a clickable top which you can use to inject the pen and slide it out and the mechanical clicker feels really well made and it's seriously addictive they also give you two kinds of nibs that you can replace so there's a black nib which is like a softer rubber and if I had to describe it it's like kind of like a mechanical pencil when you're using it and the gray one is a harder plastic it feels more slippery and I don't like this one as much it feels kind of like an old Palm Pilot so often where for the S Pen is improved across the board there are a ton of things you can do with the pen and depending on what you're doing on screen like the function of ejecting the pen does different things so I tried all these out pretty extensively and some of them are really cool but for the most part they're very situational like really situational like this one here the ability to screencap multiple pages into one long strip and then to annotate it features like this are really cool and I'm sure some people will find them really useful but it's not something most people would use regularly there's also a little bit of UI lag with the S Pen overlay which is kind of weird when you consider how fast that processor is and it kind of casts a shadow on the whole s-pen experience because you constantly have to wait a split second before you can scribble stuff down but there is one really practical and super fast feature which is the ability to jot down something on the screen immediately after ejecting the pen so this feels really natural and it's actually one of the main features that drew me to the phone I use it a lot it's fast it's simple and it works for almost everything you would normally use a piece of paper for okay my take on the whole pen gate thing when I first heard about it I thought why would you ever put it in backwards like it's super obvious to put it in tip first but after using it for a week I can totally see how people can do it by accident and it's crazy how easily it slides in the wrong way and how little you actually have to slide it in to cause physical damage I mean I wish Samsung had designed the pen a little differently if you put it in backwards even like a couple inches it gets caught on a tiny little lever and it'll break the lever and sometimes just break the pen so just don't do it the TouchWiz UI is relatively light this year I mean there's less Samsung sauce covering everything there has been in previous years but it's still there and I've never been a fan of it I know some people love it it's on buggy or anything but I just prefer the look of stock much more so I go with the material design theme on their theme store it's a really nice screen AMOLED quad HD one of the best screens if not the best excellent viewing angles super bright and visible in sunlight whites look white and blacks are super deep now the colors are a little oversaturated like you'd expect on an AMOLED but it's a fantastic screen I like the note 5 screen more than the iPhone 6 plus screen and the Nexus 6 screen the camera is really solid same camera as the s6 that we'd expect it to be great and it doesn't disappoint excellent photos when there's lots of light very usable photos in low-light situations and the videos are also really solid up to 4k video at 30 frames per second it's got good dynamic range good colors I really love this camera performance is super fast games run really well apps run well and the UI is just really really snappy but as I mentioned before there is a little lag with some of the s-pen UI but aside from that I never experienced any noticeable slowdowns the battery life is really good I considered a comfortable all day battery screen on time was usually like four or four and a half hours and on days with really heavy use I would have about 10-15 percent left at night so when you're done for the day turn off the lights and charge it wirelessly okay recap of the Galaxy Note 5 it's got a 5.7 inch AMOLED display really wonderful screen one of the best in the business a fast fingerprint reader with two capacitive buttons a five megapixel front-facing camera all covered with Gorilla Glass 4 on the back we have a 13 megapixel camera that is arguably the best camera on smartphones right now and a Gorilla Glass 4 back that gets covered in fingerprints on the inside we have a 3000 milliamp battery that easily gets you through a full day and eight core beast the Exynos 7420 with 4 gigs of RAM ridiculously fast aside from that pen UI 32 or 64 gigs of non-expandable storage and also has NFC and wireless charging that supports fast wireless charging if you have the pad for it okay so some closing thoughts the note 5 is clearly a top-of-the-line smartphone everything about it is like flagship and premium and it's great but it comes at a very expensive price so it's value or whether or not it's worth it really depends on how much you're going to make use out of that pen because really that s-pen is what distinguishes this thing and it kind of defines the whole product so if you're an avid pen user and you're coming from previous notes go for this thing it's an amazing device you're going to love it but you're not I mean it's a great device even if you don't use the pen but you're going to get better value out of other phones if you're not a pen user so that's the end of this review hope you guys liked it if you did give me some thumbs if you loved it give me some subs it's been nice I'll see you guys next time