Gadgetory

hey what is up guys i'm kim Bhd here and my daily driver smartphone for the last two weeks has been the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 so this is the follow-up obviously to the note 3 and the biggest change between the two is hardware so right off the bat you get metal I talked about this in my hands-on video a couple weeks ago about how I was most impressed with the new feel on the hand of this phone and that's all come through you get the black metal band all the way around the device where it was plastic before and it's chamfered at basically every edge every corner so coming from that super rounded super seamless feel of the iPhone 6 plus this Note 4 actually feels kind of sharp at the corners and the edges but it's honestly definitely easier to hold because of the flat sides and also being metal I have increased hopes for durability obviously having a metal frame should fare better than plastic and so far it's held up well so the back material is still pretty similar to what you had on the note 3 it's this soft touch faux leather feel that honestly feels fine it's pretty durable too even though it's got a lot of crap for being not real leather but it ditches the fake stitching look and all that stuff from before so it's just one smooth piece now and it's removable and is soft and flimsy when it's not attached to the phone obviously but that's the point that's what allows you to remove it and get access to that removable battery and the micro SD card slot but if you'll solve it and as soon as you put it back on the phone you're good so overall nothing can change the fact that this phone is still big right it's a 5.7 inch display and of course you add bezels you add the home button you add the earpiece and you're here again pushing the limits of what people will accept as a phone something you can put in your pocket so what's interesting about it is it's the same vertical height roughly as the iPhone 6 plus but it's a bit thicker to how's that huge battery that I'll talk about in a second and a bit wider from left to right but for some reason when going from the iPhone 6 plus to the note 4 the note felt kind of compact despite having a larger display which is weird but I want to talk about this display it is pretty gorgeous the Galaxy Note 4 is rocking a 5.7 inch quad HD Super AMOLED display so it's big bright super high-resolution super sharp it has great outdoor visibility super vibrant colors and basically any environment has great viewing angles great responsiveness basically it's the best display on any smartphone right now the best one I've used a lot and this is the one I mean it's it's extremely saturated it's not totally accurate yes it has a strange pixel matrix but I love this display because it's the only one left that still impresses me every time I turn it on it's a big part of why I love this phone so much so crispy and then it's up to TouchWiz on top of Android 4.4 on this guy to utilize all the space this huge screen now when you talk about software on these quad HD phones which have really all been Android phones for the most part there have been very few apps that totally take advantage of all those pixels of course you know there's Samsung's properties so you get their crazy high resolution wallpapers and their icons and the whole TouchWiz user interface everything there is optimized but if you were expecting to download a whole bunch of games or watch a whole bunch of videos that are going to look way better than they do on 1080p phones not so fast I mean we're still waiting for that it's still going to look good it's still a big bright beautiful display but yeah most games and apps out there are still scaling from 1080p actually the one thing that looks better from a higher resolution point of view is web browsing so all the text and images are definitely sharper and you can at least notice that and appreciate it now if you've used or you're coming from another Samsung phone like a note 2 or a note 3 or a galaxy s3 or s4 the software experience here is going to be really familiar Samsung's added features of course and now it's on top of the latest version of Android but it's actually promised to get Android 5.0 lollipop in a couple of weeks so of course that will be skinned like this and it'll look nothing like stock Android and it will continue to look like TouchWiz but touch which still has the quirks I mentioned when I reviewed the galaxy s5 now preface this by saying my model I I got very tired of Samsung's launcher and keyboard so I installed Google now launcher and a few keyboards but everything else here is stock and for the most part performance is great as you would expect from a phone with a quad-core Snapdragon 805 chip and three gigs of ram and a super high end GPU most stuff flies in app performance is great scrolling frame rates and gaming frame rates and just navigating through the UI in general is very fast so performance is awesome the only thing that seemed slow pretty consistently is when I press the multitasking button there's always a brief pause before it opened my carousel and then another pause after I click the app and it waits a second before it brings me in it's a little slow honestly the occasional touch was jank lag is there when you're pulling down the notification tray too fast or something but that's you usually few and far between so it's a very fast phone other than the occasional TouchWiz jank now when you have a huge phone with top-notch specs like this and a massive gorgeous super sharp display you really want to take advantage of not just the extra pixels but the whole package so the one thing Samsung has been improving from generation to generation of the note lineup is the multitasking options so of course you still have the familiar holding down the back button and being able to use two apps at once so you split the display in half between two of the supported apps and this multitasking mode is smoother than ever before it's just as useful since the display is so big but you can copy and paste text and information back and forth between the panels it's more than just two apps at once so it's really great but a new multitasking feature they've added is windowed apps so you can with again supported apps dragged down from the corner of the phone the top corner to move your app into a windowed size on top of everything else and you can resize it and reposition it wherever you want and it stays a live app the whole time so you can interact with it and keep it over stuff in the background and everything still works so you can also minimize them into these little icon bubbles when you hit the homescreen and activate them anytime you want by tapping on them again so you can have multiple window taps open at the same time over the top of whatever you're doing which is pretty nuts if you ask me but this is the kind of stuff Samsung has been doing and building in to take advantage of the larger display with all these extra pixels support for this windowed stuff is still a small list of apps kind of like the half screen stuff so sometimes we'll pull down from the corner window and it just won't work it actually happened to me a bunch of times also I'll be one handing the phone and I'll go to pull down the notification tray from the corner by accident and it will shrink down the app I'm using or tell me it's not supported I don't know it's an interesting feature with a slightly confusing implementation at first but it can be really useful in some niche situations people will really like this when I get to know it so my battery life experience on the note 4 has been a little interesting so I started off with the international version of the note 4 it's a Korean phone it has different radios and it's looking for different signals than the US version would and it has an X nose chip inside so it's a slightly different SPECT model but it's a note 4 nevertheless but I was getting not so high battery life a little bit concerning that I had to plug in before the end of the day I was getting three to four hours of screen on time which is a lot less than I would expect out of a phone with a 3220 milliamp hour battery but then I switched over to the one from AT&T so I finally got my hands on a US version of the Galaxy Note 4 so it has all the correct radios now it also now has the Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 chip instead of the Exynos chip and I was just blown away by the battery life so the battery improves significantly I started getting six and a half hours of screen on time I never had to plug in before the end of the day with the AT&T model so if you're getting in the United States obviously grab it from a carrier and you will have absolutely no issues with the battery life on the note 4 so I'm happy to report thumbs up I initially had concerns that I was tweeting about but those are all gone now so awesome battery life on the note 4 also as a bonus even though they downgraded the charging port back to USB 2.0 he'd get fast charging and that gets you half a charge in half an hour of being plugged into the wall so not bad for 30 minutes of charge and all this comes with a phone that's just eight point five millimeters thick so it's not even that much thicker than the thinnest phones out there so now the last major change to the galaxy note 4 is the new camera so it's a 16 megapixel camera with optical image stabilization and also you get 4k video and it takes honestly the best imagery of any Samsung phone yet so the characteristics of a photo out of this camera would be really vibrant photos and really sharp photos and honestly it becomes super obvious with this image processing that Samsung is trying to sharpen everything in a shot it basically applies a sharpening filter over every image you take which can look pretty decent sometimes but even in a photo with a clear subject and a clear background that should be blurred and out of focus it still tries to sharpen everything so you end up sharpening the bokeh and getting these weird artifacts on thin that aren't supposed to be sharp and honestly with 16 megapixels to play with I don't think you need to do that much sharpening at all I wish they would tone that down it does take some very great looking vibrant photos though especially in daytime light and it gets a decent amount of dynamic range even without turning on that super overdone HDR mode so I think people are going to like this camera in most situations just like the Galaxy s5 camera or the note 3 camera and of course 4k video and stabilization is a deadly combo so you can be shooting wide here in 4k check out dat zoom plus the optical image stabilization oh is helps me stay locked on whatever subject I'm at so I'm 20 yards away from these guys but again since its 4k I'm not losing that much detail and practically zoomed in on a 720p image of the frame and then zooming back out of course will reveal the whole 4k image but it's pretty impressive stuff for just a camera and a smartphone and yes it is still sharpened 4k video but it's going to look pretty good anyway so there are some new other features of the galaxy note 4 that I don't use so much like a slightly improved heart rate reader on the back that monitor still works the slightly improved fingerprint reader on the front again I don't use that on the home button that much but it's better slightly improved speaker on the back oh and a slightly improved s-pen in case we forgot what the note series is all about it's all about having a stylus and a big screen so here's a rundown of the s-pen just so we have it you take it out of the back of the phone and it displays four options on the screen you get action memo smart select image clip and screen right and you can even hover the stylus over the display to see the names of these and make your selection so screen write takes a screenshot of whatever is on your display and then lets you write on it and crop it rotate it whatever save it for later which is nice smart select does something similar it captures whatever is in your selection and does its best to translate it into text or something usable for saving or sharing image clip lets you make a free selection of anything on your screen and share that and action memo brings up a quick post post-it note and then you can write on that post-it and save it into S note otherwise you can use it just like you would for your finger swiping around moving in naps typing stuff it's basically the same functionality as the previous stylist checking notifications you can even touch the capacitive buttons too and it will respond to that so at the end of the day I have no problem saying that the Galaxy Note 4 is the best phone Samsung's ever made and of course it should be it's their latest phone people say this all the time but it's the best display on the market and it's one of the best built phones you can get right now it has an awesome battery life the specs are top-notch higher than any other Samsung device they put out in a long time so this is the best phone I think Samsung has ever made and I would have no problem recommending it to anyone searching for a large Android phone obviously it's a lot bigger than some others but it still feels more compact in the hand like I've said than other 5.5 inch to 6 inch phones so in the phablet territory as much as I hate the word this is really the front-runner right now and I have no problem recommending the note 4 so there you have it thank you for watching and if you enjoyed it feel free to thumbs up button below also the subscribe button below should be read again thanks for watching and I'll talk to you guys in the next one bass