Gadgetory

what's up everyone John rhett endure from TechnoBuffalo here at Lee for view of the giant Samsung Galaxy Note let's go see if this phone is as big in performance as it is in size and whether or not it deserves a giant place in your pockets it's going to get started alright so let me go ahead and run through the specs of the samsung galaxy note because as of right now and that's pre CES it is probably the best SPECT phone on the planet so it is running Android 2.3 there's no Ice Cream Sandwich action here although Samsung has said it will be coming sometime in the next few months for my dimension standpoint it is five point seven eight inches by three point two seven inches by a very thin point three eight inches so large screen that screen is 5.3 inches and it weighs six point two eight ounces all right so that 5.3 inch screen that I just talked about is WXGA it's an HD resolution it's significantly actually HD with a resolution of 800 by 1280 and it's a super a moto abdun HD Super AMOLED display so there's a lot of words that go in to describe to sing it is a pentile display they don't talk about that a little bit powering this guy is a 2500 milliamp hour battery it's going to give you 13 hours of talktime and 570 hours of standby time it's a 1.4 gigahertz dual-core cortex a9 that's the heavily regarded Exynos chipset Giga Ram can get it in either 16 or 32 gig configurations and it's got microSD on the back of it 8 megapixel camera with LED flash makes your 1080p video on the front we've got a 2 megapixel sensor right there no network has officially picked this device up today a little unlocked and compatible with AT&T HSPA+ network although if you believe the rumor mill then you can think that it's perhaps coming to AT&T and Sprint sometime in the next few months right so we talked about the specs let me go ahead and jump in just very quickly about call quality call quality was great actually I didn't have one drop call on up is using this phone as my daily driver for actually a week exactly today I haven't had a single drop call on it so you know yay for that speaker is a little bit on the tinny side but it works well for phone this big you probably think there could be a little bit more room for a speaker than just a little grill right there but its averaging on par with the rest of smartphones out there so if you rely on speaker phone you'll be fine if you need it for business you'll be fine too but you're not going to get booming sound out of it all right so let's just go and talk about the big monkey in the room first the size of this guy now on video you might not be able to appreciate the size of it so let me go ahead and bring in a 3.5 inch iPhone which you can see what the size of that is let me bring in an even larger HTC Titan with the you know for about four and a half inch screen and which previously felt giant to me and looking at this the Titan somehow looks diminutive so one more time there it is with the iPhone 4s and for further comparison let's bring in a Galaxy Nexus so you can see our size comparisons so yeah it's a huge huge huge screen and with a huge screen comes huge screen questions you probably the same questions I did first of all how silly you're going to look talking on this phone putting it up your head it's going to look like you got a Galaxy Tab up to your head away making a phone call you know was the first question second is how is it going to fit in your pocket the answer is it looks a little bit silly up to your head if I've tested pretty much every phone that's come out over the past few years I've never had people stop me more than with the Galaxy Note and want to say what the heck is that is it a phone is it a tablet people haven't heard the Galaxy Note because it hasn't been released here in the US but it works very well if you can get over that little bit of awkward feeling now it feels pretty normal to me now those two other people seeing it they sort of stop and turn as far as the pocket test goes it's extremely pocketable with normal do jeans I'm able to fit it in my pocket that any difficulty even while sitting down if your jeans are on the skinnier side if your woman maybe wears tighter pants you might have a bit of trouble but just for a normal dude surprisingly worked well alright so we've got the bad potentially bad stuff the screen says out of the way let's talk about the good stuff shall we and there is a lot of good stuff here on the first one because the screen so big and because our resolution is so high at 800 by 1280 you can see a lot of content on the screen and because the screen is bigger and the resolution so high the pixels actually don't look that small so you can view things actually pretty easily so if you zoom in on text I've never once there's any sort of pixelation on here so it is pentile but I haven't noticed any sort of issue at all hasn't been any green color tints got pretty good visibility from all angles hopefully you can see that looks like it's my dog Lucy by the way she's a French Bulldog you know what you guys have been asking about her if you follow me on Twitter at John 4 Lakers so the pentile display definitely that's because the resolution are the screen size is so big it's tough to get a AMOLED plus display affordable in a 5.3 inch variety something to keep in mind some of the great things though that you're going to get with this when you're reading a book or weather and you know you're doing anything sort of reading intensive so go ahead and take a look the Kindle app here it's great taking this phone to the gym and go ahead and hit well that sync up to my current location I sitting at the gym and riding a bike and being able to read this thing is incredible much easier to read than any other phone I've ever used just due to sheer size so that's definitely one of the positives you've been sort of lugging around the tablet and lugging around a phone this is really going to be a wonderful choice for you as a personal story I did have someone stopped me outside of a restaurant who pulled out one of the original Galaxy Tabs and said he carries it around with him he's looking for something in between so I have to carry a phone and a tablet so for people like that this is probably going to be an ideal choice something to show you some of the images in here as well we'll go ahead and jump into gallery let me show you some of the stuff that comes standard on here so we'll jump in to actually show you what the pictures that I've taken which is kind of fun we'll talk about the camera a little bit later but you can see what the all it looks like most of the subjects appeared to be my dog Lucy let's go ahead and go to a recent one here is you see enjoying a stick pretty decent visibility here the camera quality was pretty nice it's a little bit bad in low light but on a screen this beautiful when you're looking at it not on a computer monitor things absolutely look great and pop and really no problem at all so if you wanted a beautiful screen to look at pictures or movies this is just an awesome phone to do that on alright so let's go ahead and talk next about the speed and the speeds a lot of things a lot of topic of discussion let's just say so if those you that are wondering get it out of the way quadrant score 3410 and then two to six thousand three hundred and seventy eight the phone was extremely fast opening applications I never had any slowdowns I will say though that I did have two pretty actively managed my applications here soft times would go into RAM and all sort of clear stuff so you can see how much free you have out of that one gig or one megabyte one gigabyte rather so have to go ahead and clear that but as I managed it hasn't been that big of an issue the speed has always been very fast opening applications and such has never been a problem matter how many I've had open this phone is an absolute screamer and really just hulls no matter what you're doing whether or not you want to play Angry Birds which is awesome on a screen this big or they want to go back and open a ton of applications you're not gonna have any trouble at all it's probably one of the fastest phones that I've used and you really see the speed and from the specs come into play here on the galaxy note so very fast also one in surprising things that's been very fast about it has been HSPA+ I go ahead and turn off Wi-Fi you guys have seen me do a lot of HSPA+ be test and I never get anything screeching fast highest I usually get some time I'll get three or four on a really good day well see if it'll do it for us here but speed test I've been getting into sixes and sevens on this device this is not LTE this is just HSPA+ let's go ahead and see what it will what it'll give us here live on camera very rarely good things behaved on camera but we'll give it a shot and see and again it's going to vary depending where you are I'm in Southern California so your HSPA+ beads may vary but this is definitely the fastest HSPA+ device I've tested on a TN t--'s network and it is behaving for the first time something on camera actually worked why hope to - we got almost 5 megabits per second down which would even be considered on the slow side of LTE but certainly acceptable the upload speeds certainly you can see a slowdown but the download has been great this phone has been surprisingly impressive so we'll go ahead and exit out of that it is running Gingerbread so you've got Gingerbread button so we can see them light up there in the background but there are two capacitive buttons here on the bottom might not be able to see it with the on the light so I've got a back button and a menu button you've got a giant home button so I like having the physical buttons people may vary one of the other things that this phone offers is on the back its s-pen technology go and pull out out 22 have a phone with the stylus again this uses Wacom technology to use some pressure-sensitive scribing so imma go and show you some of the stuff first you can go ahead and go through your phone and use this to point and zoo and whatever you want if you want to take a screenshot for example actually go ahead and do that right now you can use a pen there's a little button on it right there if you hold down the button and you tap the screen it's going to go and take a screenshot and now you can edit screenshot and you can see some of the applications that you can use so let me go ahead and show you a few things here and all sort of hall through this very quickly go ahead and open up this area right there which will give me the specs to change color when I'm writing on and the pen size sub got as big as it'll go then go ahead and move it down to you know a reasonable size and we'll go to pen you can choose the pen and the color and all that kind of stuff we'll use red and let's go back home so I'm going to go ahead and try and trace the time gauge so it's 223 I'm going to use the pen and I'm going to zoom in as far as I can a little still shake show clear so you can see where the pen is I want to show you the accuracy of the spen technology so I'm going to go ahead and put the top of it right in the middle of that - I'm going to try and trace it as close as I can stays inside pretty well now it tracks a little bit behind but I'm definitely able to get inside of there so it's more accurate to any other capacity I'll start seeing isn't actually a capacitive stylus but the concept is very similar as I touch and type you can see it drags a little bit behind as I go it catches up but it's not bad I do wish there was some sort of handwriting recognition on here that I could sort of type and it would transcribe it there is some capabilities but it hasn't been as useful as I would have liked sort of wanted that to be a little bit more useful this is going to be handy if you want to take notes or scribble I found it to be a bit more of a novelty and since I first unboxed the phone and tried the s-pen I have yet to take it out of the box to use it or take it out of the bottom to use it for anything else so what's the time it's probably going to live down there and is not going to be overly useful when I saw this one get announced at IFA Samsung actually had a caricature artist that was using the S Pen and was drying people's pictures and emailing it off to him kind of fun and a random side story so we talked to a bit about the camera it's fine it's the standard camera if you ever use the Galaxy S 2 you'll know exactly what you're in for it's good it's not great take decent pictures video looks fine I'm not much for camera guy if I can see a picture that's generally good for me I didn't have any pixelation or blurry miss on it alright so next let's talk about battery which is one things I was really worried about this phone it's got a big ol display and it's got a big old battery to go with it 21 500 milliamp hours if I did this review the first two days I had the phone I would have said the battery life stunk come for five o'clock I was down to 10 20 percent and I thought that it was because I was using the phone as much as any other phone I got you know to email applications pulling down emails all the time using it a lot for phone calls Bluetooth connected your usual phone stuff but as the days went on and started using it for three four and five days I started using it more as I'd used an average phone as much like he's an average phone I really forgot way better so you can see now it's 2:23 in the afternoon I still have 77 percent of the battery now when I go to bed around 10 or 11 o'clock I'd really have 45% of juice left here on the phone so battery life is surprisingly good I think I was just really excited to have a phone this big I was playing with it quite a bit and I was killing the battery but using it normally your life has been pretty outstanding so something to keep in mind you're not gonna have to worry much if you're a frequent road warrior let's say you're going to the Consumer Electronics Show you may want to pick up an extra battery for it so let's talk a little bit about TouchWiz TouchWiz is a dog it is what Samsung puts on top of their Android devices it's what makes these icons look different it's what gives you I'm going to pull that down this stuff here at the top which is nice and there are some nice tweaks here that touch was has done but it's pretty heavy on the memory you should standpoint so I would have preferred a stock Android experience and you know something I'm never going to get generally with the stock and Samsung device unless it's a Galaxy series or you choose to root and put on a custom ROM this phone is dying for Ice Cream Sandwich dying dying dying fresh Cream Sandwich as I go through and close applications and go to ram and hit clear I keep thinking how nice would be just to go ahead and hit my multitasking button and swipe away all the applications that I'm using had I never used Galaxy Nexus I never experience Ice Cream Sandwich I'd say this is hands-down the best Android phone I have ever used or would ever want to use but not running the most recent build of ice cream sandwich is a little bit sad you've got just incredible parts here to put together for an awesome phone one that's just not a hundred percent there yet however there is hope Ice Cream Sandwich is coming and coming very soon samsung says and the very capable cyanogen team has released an alpha built of a completely blank slate Ice Cream Sandwich for the Galaxy Note will have a release candidate hopefully soon and I think that once those two things are one of those two things finally come you are looking at the best Android phone currently available from a screen size to a processor to user experience this has just been incredible to use and that user experience is something that is very important and you can have great specs but if it's not going to work well it's not going to be of much use to you this has been a really enjoyable user experience on the samsung galaxy note I like having a phone this big I like that I have to carry my iPad when I'm sitting downstairs and want to check my fantasy team I can do it right from here and I can pinch and zoom and everything just works well not to mention it does have you know abilities to play Flash content which a pant use that much but for some people that's important this phone definitely would get a 99.9% score get that extra 100 as soon as it gets Ice Cream Sandwich so if it does come to ett if it does come to sprint definitely going to be a phone that you're going to want to seriously consider if you're looking for an Android device or really looking for any type of phone Galaxy Note really gets two thumbs up so for all your tech news be sure to check us out to TechnoBuffalo calm we've got reviews and boxing's hands on all kinds of other stuff like this will be at the Consumer Electronics Show all this week covering the latest and greatest stuff coming out if you're watching this after CES I hope you checked out all of our CES coverage I am John Rhett enger' from you guessed it TechnoBuffalo I'll see you and the Galaxy Note in the next video bye-bye you