Gadgetory

hey what is up guys I'm KB HD here and this is the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 successor to the galaxy note 2 and older brother of the samsung galaxy s4 and this is a phone that takes a little bit from both to combine into a really unique interesting Samsung flagship device so first things first yes this is a large device it has a 5.7 inch 1920 by 1080 AMOLED display but it's packed into a body that's both thinner lighter and narrower than the galaxy note 2 it fits in its footprint and it has a larger battery so when you consider all that this one is actually more compact than its predecessor but nevertheless it's a bigger than average phone and that makes it a two handed device for most people but if you take a step back and look at it this is a pretty interesting phone aesthetically the front is the typical Samsung squared-off look like the Galaxy s4 has we're used to it plus the home button in the middle on the front that Samsung loves so much all around the sides there's this silver metal band that wraps all the way around and has the buttons so your power button and volume button I feel like they're a little bit high up on the chassis I don't think that people with smaller hands are gonna like that it makes you reach a little bit more but then again you'll probably never press them accidentally and up top you have your headphone jack your microphone and the IR blaster and out the bottom is a smaller weaker speaker and the USB 3.0 port that I'll get to in a second it has a removable back which reveals the gigantic 3200 million power battery one of the biggest and longest lasting in any phone right now in fact it's about the same size as the iPhones display by itself and you can see the camera and flash module the SIM card and SD card readers and the stylus on the left hand side the backing has an extremely subtle curve on the edge to the center of the back so that it doesn't rock on a table and you set it down but it feels pretty good when you're holding it in your hand oh and a lot of people have been quick to judge the way this phone looks because it looks like leather and a lot of people want to get their hands on other phone but this is not leather this is plastic that's shaped to look like it feels like leather but it doesn't even actually feel like leather it feels like plastic because it's plastic so now that we're not fooled by the aesthetic into thinking this phone is crazy well-built what's the deal with this USB 3.0 basically this is the first smartphone to have a USB 3.0 port at the bottom this allows for faster charging with Samsung's cable and much faster data transfer speeds if your computer supports USB 3.0 but if you lose that super ugly charger don't worry it's still backwards compatible with USB 2.0 for all the same stuff anyway inside this device is an absolutely ridiculous spec list this is the octa-core version here so it has a 1.9 gigahertz quad-core processor and a one point three gigahertz quad-core processor and it's got three gigabytes of RAM so that would lead you to believe that the Galaxy Note 3 is a monster performer and it is it handles just about any application I throw at it both regular and every day and even heavy testing with just ease it's graphic performance was smooth and gaming responsive to my finger and stylus input they were both fantastic and scrolling around larger web pages and heavy applications was smooth on most devices you may have heard that Samsung has been known to sort of ramp up the CPU cores when it detects that you're running a benchmark application so I am done with showing benchmarks on samsung devices but you can trust me not only is this device fast but it shows off how fast it is now I have hopes that this kind of speed will stay with this device for a much longer period of time because this guy is running Android 4.3 the first version of Android to support trim which is probably the most underrated feature in this newest version of jellybean but the bottom line here is that the phone flies through everything you'd expect it to and all the same stuff that the Galaxy Note 2 and galaxy s4 fly through also but the Galaxy Note 3 has some tricks up its sleeve and it packs some new unique features that make this more than just a spec bump upgrade from the note 2 and no I'm not talking about an extra color option or anything like that this is part of the note line so a big deal with this device is this stylus the note 3 stylus is redesigned from the one in the note to so it's a little more square it fits in the phone upside down or right side up it can also now click the capacitive menu and back keys on either side of the home button and it comes with some new software features built into the phone to make it more useful but less obtrusive so now when you take the phone out you take the stylus out of the phone while the screen is on or off you'll get a small circular window that pops up with the most commonly used touch with stylus features that you can hover over to read and then single tap on for easy access I'm not a huge stylus user myself but when I do use the stylus when I actually take it out the phone I usually know exactly what I want to do with it so the pop-up window actually made it really quick and easy to get the stuff done that I wanted to get done now there's another feature in the Galaxy Note 3 that Samsung insists on including in every new Galaxy device and that's s voice and it's of course present here on the Galaxy Note 3 it's still not that great it's still not even close to Siri or Google now but they've added another feature for the Galaxy Note 3 where you can interact with it while the display is still off sort of like the way you can on the Moto X with the Moto X you would say ok Google now because it uses Google now but since this uses s voice it responds to high Galaxy weather uh-huh anytime all right there there we go so now it's got the weather it doesn't speak anything back to you but it does give you a couple of limited options for information or if you want to text or call someone it'll do that but you know it's not even close to Google now now despite everything else that was awesome about this phone on the inside it is still a Samsung device which means it's still running TouchWiz on top of Android if you guys know me well you already know I prefer stock Android over any sort of skin version of Android like this but touch weighs still has its faults it still has occasional jank it still has the occasional hiccup and weird stutter that it really shouldn't have on a device with awesome specs like this but I don't want to make it sound like Samsung skin is all garbage because it's not there are some features that I actually really like in it I like the Flipboard power to my magazine app that can pop up from the bottom of the screen and aggregates all your social news kind of like blinkfeed on the HTC One I like having the quick toggles above the notification bar and the immediately available brightness toggle that's something I've gotten used to having I also like the multi window feature and how much better it's getting with every update I mean at this point you can have two apps running in the background and one overtop of all of them I mean you can multitask in your multitasking wall multitasking okay it's it's pretty awesome I mean it's just obvious that Samsung through every single possible feature they could into this device just like they did with the galaxy s4 everything but the kitchen sink in hopes that something will get you to like it enough to buy it a familiar strategy but using the Galaxy Note 3 there are two major things that I notice are the biggest improvements over the note 2 one is the display it's a 5.7 inch 1080p display so that gives a super sharp pixel intensity of 386 pixels per inch and it's an AMOLED display and it's not a pentile matrix and it gets super bright and has great viewing angles it's super sensitive and it gets almost edge-to-edge on the display so it's not quite edge to edge but it's easily one of the best screens on any mobile phone right alongside the LG g2 and the HTC One top of the class and it's easily the note 3's best physical asset the other is the camera the note 3 is outfitted with a new 13 megapixel camera and you'll probably recognize that from the galaxy s4 so you'd expect the pictures to look about the same way as the galaxy s4 pictures do but they don't there's some very updated image processing going on with the galaxy note 3 some very aggressive sharpening some noise reduction and they almost make the shots look a little bit over sharpened and over processed which is a look that some people like and it'll work with some shots but it's not always my favorite I'll leave a gallery of the full-size test shots that I took in the link right below that like button so if you want to check them out basically the full-size tops will get you a better idea of how they look I think the pictures of thing takes are in a league of their own it's super fun to shoot with especially because the viewfinder is that whole 5.7 inch display and the performance in regular light is pretty stellar dynamic range is pretty good and sharpness like we say with that 13 megapixel sensor is quite good but you can check all that out for yourself and in terms of video mode the Snapdragon 800 version of the Galaxy Note 3 that'll be sold in the United States will shoot 4k Ultra High Definition video so that is just insanely sharp you'll probably never be able to share with anyone who will be able to watch it in native 4k but I mentioned earlier that I would have liked to have seen optical image stabilization in the note 3's camera to smooth out that 4k video but that's about the only downside to the camera so when you think about it a lot of the note 3's best features besides the stylus functionality come from the Galaxy s4 so it'll keep being this way as long as the Galaxy S line is updated before the Galaxy Note line every year so you'd want to make sure the notes advantages over the s4 are very clear and very strong right now these advantages are the stylus that the s4 doesn't have the larger display and slightly more RAM and more power and the much larger battery and I think that's the kicker right now that's my favorite advantage the huge battery I mentioned earlier that the Galaxy Note 3 here packs a 3,200 milliamp hour battery and it kicks ass all day every day the Galaxy Note 3 is a reliable all-day driver it got me somewhere in the ballpark of 5 hours of screen on time with very heavy use this is the same sort of use that got me less than 4 hours with the galaxy s4 so this is pretty impressive stuff as defin truly an all-day phone so I guess what I'm saying here is I like this phone I like a lot of things about this phone one of the hardest things to do when picking a new device is changing a screen size by a drastic amount but once you go big you never really go back once you get used to have a phone with the display like this you'll never look at the smaller devices the same way again I can guarantee you that the note 3 is one of those phones that isn't revolutionary and it isn't obviously the best phone out there or anything like that but it's pretty damn good in every single department that could possibly make a phone good it's not perfect it has it's quartz it's definitely not perfect it has the weird plastic backing material it still has its settings menu that is so messed up that Samsung decided to throw in a search box I mean it's definitely not perfect but you could almost not care when you hop into your favorite applications and see how much more space you have and how much more smoothly they run the experience is what really matters and this is an awesome experience device in conclusion the Galaxy Note 3 is one of my favorite phones of 2013 and it's gonna be really difficult to move from a smaller device like I was using before like the Moto X to something like this but again we've talked about this before I easily get used to a device like this I came from something the size of a Galaxy Note 2 so this isn't really all that big feeling in my hands and a lot of people who have been using a big device like this will say the same thing it looks really big at first but once you get used to using it it feels like a totally normal sized phone that being said that's about it for this review of the galaxy note 3 if you have any questions at all feel free to leave a comment right below that like button and speaking of the like button do feel free to hit that thumbs up it helps us out a lot here thank you so much for watching and I will talk to you guys in the next video peace