when I say I love my Galaxy Note 9 it's
less of a weird her type of emotional attachment and more just an expression
of my appreciation for the engineering that Samsung put into this thing they
went out and crammed the differentiating features of nearly every one of their
competitors into a single device then
they threw in a wirelessly charging stylus pen that you can use as a remote
camera shutter that's just showing off at that point nothing on the note 9 was
necessarily the absolute best on the market I mean someone somewhere had a
better camera a more responsive Android skin or even a bigger or more immersive
display but everything on it was pretty
close so yeah you were ponying up for one of the most expensive phones on the
market but in exchange you got one of the most featur and versatile phones on
the market which is exactly why the Note 10 and the 10 plus feel like such lame
upgrades to
me now obviously the specs of the new
phones are better or Samsung wouldn't have bothered to refresh this device so
at the very least the Note 10 and its
bigger brother the Note 10 plus have that going for them well mostly so
depending on your region you'll get Qualcomm or Samsung Zone latest 7 nanm
processor 8 or 12 gigs of RAM curved
Gorilla Glass 6 an unders screen fingerprint sensor and a 91% screen to
body ratio which kind of reminds me I I kind of feel like I should be referring
to these guys not as the Note 10 and its big brother but rather as the Note 10
plus and its little brother now when I
first read that the screen size of the 10 plus would be a shocking 6.8 in I
couldn't help imagining myself with the equivalent of a Nexus 7 tablet mashed
against my ear trying to talk on the phone so I assumed that the Note 10 with
it 6.3 in screen would be more reasonable but my expectations were
completely subverted when the 10 plus ended up being the more direct upgrade
having nearly the same size bezel to bezel as the note 9 while also being
noticeably thinner at the same time the non plus has almost the same screen size
as last gen while being a way smaller
device pretty impressive but that isn't
to say that I didn't have any handling issues with the 10 family now I praised
Samsung last time around for bucking the industry Trend toward millimeter thin
side bezel because in cases where you're
reaching across the screen one-handed or turning the phone in your hand say to
watch a movie having a small Dead Zone along the sides helps avoid accidental
touchcreen activation well I'm pleased to say that Samsung
took my positive feedback about that and
completely discarded it so sure enough the first time I watched a movie on the
Note 10 I ended up with my notification shade across it then my player controls
once I had swiped that away the good news is that at least I never found
myself accidentally mashing the Bixby button rip and the screen that I was
watching my movie on was freaking awesome now Samsung has been and
continues to be a Pioneer when it comes to bright color accurate mobile displays
and they frankly gone far beyond the point where my mere mortal eyes can find
any flaw in them whether it's late at night reading in bed without unnecessary
fatigue or trying to make out the details in an image while my screen is
under direct sunlight but that isn't to say that I think they couldn't have done
better here there are already multiple vendors notably OnePlus and Jus shipping
90 HZ and 120 HZ AMOLED phones
respectively by the way this is the RG phone 2 and stay tuned be subscribed
because I'm going to be reviewing it very shortly and that makes Samsung's
attempts at gaming marketing feel a little out of touch what even is Real
Time gaming unless you're playing chess by
mail gaming is real time and while
high-end specs and a solid Vapor chamber cooler mean that the Note 10 and the 10
plus put forth excellent performance in gaming benchmarks there is so much more
to a great gaming experience than just a
powerful rig and Samsung's ignorant tagline tells me Point Blank that if
they knew anything about gaming they'd be building in features that are
meaningful to Gamers rather than working on pointless exclusive launch
Partnerships furthermore a high refresh rate display contributes to to more than
just animation smoothness in games it makes for a very real difference in the
perceived responsiveness of the device I
mean fun fact the outstanding 90 HZ
screen on the OnePlus 7 Pro is made by
Samsung now it's possible that they're just waiting to ensure that they can
deliver both the High Fidelity color and
high refresh rates in their rumored upcoming M10 generation panels or it's
Al possible Samsung just doesn't care about how responsive their devices feel
as weird a position as that feels to take though for them it's not exactly a
new one uh Samsung's current software is better than their previous Android skins
by a long shot but it's still not built for snappiness when it comes to
navigation animations and style In fairness though I mean I have been daily
driving one UI for the better part of the last year and my complaints are less
to do with that and more to do with the random idle battery drain that still
crops up very occasionally for me and
the way that new notifications don't always go to the very top of the queue
that is if they show up at all check out this one on the Note 10 plus we've got
no fresh notifications but I do in fact have new emails nice with that said when
one UI isn't being buggy Basics like background app switching and the camera
launch speed are fast enough for my liking and while there's no timeline on
an Android 10 version of one UI the version that is shipping already on the
Note 10 has some of the Highlight features including built-in screen
recording and Samsung's Dex desktop mode
which I played around with recently and found pretty darn impressive if I had to
get something done in a pinch and my fingers weren't good enough which I
guess brings us to the big upgrades to the camera both the Note 10 and 10 plus
have triple rear Shooters so you can
oh good both the not 10 and 10 plus have
triple rear Shooters so you can zoom in on farway objects or take wide shots
with all your friends in them and everything in between and the 10 plus
also rocks a depth scanning time oflight sensor that should allow it to scan Real
World objects with greater accuracy and enhance its background blare video
recording capabilities that wait sorry why am I selling that feature it looks
terrible honestly it kind of feels like one of those things that Samsung just
kind of throws into its phone just to say that they have it and then later
pretends that it never happened like an iris
scanner zing in more realistic daily use
the Note 10 plus camera was definitely better than the note 9 more accurately
compensating for poor lighting conditions and pulling more detail
particularly thanks to its much better telephoto sensor out of far away objects
this shot in the park near dusk really stands out that looks great now as a
filthy casual though when it comes to photography I did find that it usually
didn't make a huge difference for me but
the keyword is usually it it is a better
camera and if you're a mobile shutter bug who hates iPhones and pixels I guess
it's probably worth a look I mean check out this difference in sharpness while
recording slow video in a well-lit gymnasium damn the S Pen has some new
gimmicks including Sixaxis motion sensing thanks to an onboard gyro and
accelerometer but the current use cases for that new hardware like swiping in
the air with it like a little bitty magic wand um weren't very meaningful to
me the good news though is that everything that was already great about
the S Pen is still here so quick GIF creation the ability to scribble more
accurately on screenshots etc etc and it feels a little more balanced in
the hand no complaints there whatsoever
which Segways us perfectly into my complaints and I do have a few so many
in fact that by the time you watch this I'll have already transitioned back to
my note 9 as my daily driver complaint number
one has got to be the hole punch I mean
it's actually pretty minor because mercifully it's at least symmetrical
this time and it's much smaller the one on the S10 plus also if you really hate
it you can just have your top note 9 bezel back by tweaking the advanced
settings but I'm still going to mention it because it's a cludy stupid solution
and Samsung knows it they already have pop-up camera full screen designs in
their a series and the S11 is rumored to follow suit so if you buy a whole punch
you are basically buying a weird chunk of phone history that nobody asked for
and no one will miss when it's gone number two is the speakers when I said
that you can have your note 9 bezel back a moment ago I lied because the note 9
bezel has a conventional speaker Grill on it that not only sounds better than
the Note 10 plus but also doesn't vibrate the whole phone at high volumes
making it feel like a cheap toy and finally number three
is well it's not there the headphone jack what frustrates me so much about
this one is not that the device is like somehow unusable without a headphone
jack I mean I already carry both a lightning and a type-c to headphone
adapter in my headphone case but it's
that its Omission takes away from what a
note is for me my note is the never get
caught missing a feature device it it doesn't have to do anything the best
because it can do anything reasonably
competently or at least that was true
last generation there's no combined facial and Iris scan for enhanced
security meaning that the most secure way to unlock this phone is to go back
to touching it and Samsung's unders screen fingerprint scanner while
definitely better than when they launched it is still not as fast as
oneplus's then making matters worse they did weird stuff like the non plus model
has a lower pixel density display and ditches the expandable storage and okay
there's not that much more but you know what I'm still mad about the 32 mm
because it means that if I'm stuck without a dongle in my friend's older
car I'm stuck with their crappy music instead of my own crappy music honestly
it's not the kind of thing that comes up that often but it's at those times when
I'm already kind of annoyed like oh crap I forgot to charge my wireless
headphones like those are the moments
when it's important to be confident that there is an easy backup plan I
appreciate what Samsung included here in
return it's not like they pulled the same move as some of their competitors
and are like we ripped away the headphone jack uh LOL everything else is
the same you get a noticeably bigger battery or well in the plus model anyway
uh you get wireless power sharing you get a better camera you get a bigger and
better screen and all of that somehow in
a thinner chassis also maybe unpopular
opinion here but I actually like the left side lock button instead of the
right side lock button but they already had the S Series to be the premium phone
for normies who don't care about certain Niche features with the note series for
the freaks who want everything crammed in and are willing to pay extra for that
so now then we're left with like the S
Series and the S series with a
pen I don't get it by the way if you don't like online ads maybe go check out
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