Samsung Galaxy Note 3 Review - Featuring SLICK!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,585 words · ~7 min read
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Corsair's Raptor line of quality gaming peripherals has the features you need to
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win at a price you'll like click now to learn
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more I'm no phone expert so this is more just going to be an overview of the Note
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3 and a comparison of my experiences with the Note 3 compared to my Galaxy S3
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I think this is fairly applicable because I think a lot of people that have S3s might be kind of looking into
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new phones now not necessarily upgrading yet but just kind of looking at what's
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out there because they've had their phone for a little while the first thing you start noticing when using a Note 3
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is the fact that it has a 5.7 in 1080P AMOLED display it looks beautiful and
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it's huge this phone when compared to size is about six hard drives tall in
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the body and about an SSD thick in the
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body as well and that body houses some serious power with 3 gigs of RAM a 2.3
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GHz quad core processor uh 32 or 64 GB
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of memory depending on what model you get Android 4.0 Jelly Bean a 3200
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milliamp hour battery a micr SD slot
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which is actually nice because a lot of phones nowadays are coming without micr
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SD slots because of influence from say Google or other sources a 13 megapixel
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camera which happens to be able to take 4K video although it doesn't have image
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stabilization and it's a phone so it's not exactly going to look as good as if
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you took 4K video with a big professional camera and USB 3 .0 on the
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bottom which back which is backwards compatible to USB 2.0 which is quite
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handy if you do happen to lose that USB 3.0 cable coming from an S3 when I heard
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the rumors about a Note 3 one of the features I was most excited about was
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the leather back and then I figured out that it wasn't a leather back it was
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definitely still a plastic back it is a plastic back that is made to look like
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it feels like a leather back and it is still definitely a plastic back it does
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have a more grainy texture than an S3 smooth back has and it has that fake
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threading although you don't don't really feel it now as many of you are aware lately Samsung has been kind of
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cheating on benchmarks a little bit when it detects a benchmark being run it will
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kind of ramp up its CPU power and doesn't make a realistic score so we
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won't be providing benchmarks for you guys now what we'll be doing is just
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talking about experience in games now I haven't been a huge mobile gamer but
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lately I've been jumping on the humble Android bundles and I've been playing
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quite a bit on my S3 when I moved to the Note 3 to test it out unfortunately I
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don't get to keep it it was a massive Improvement the increased screen size
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was amazing and I don't have any problems with it because I do have larger hands and have no problem
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utilizing the phone in playing Raiden the increase screen size was just
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perfect because that game it seems to be more designed for a larger screen size
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in general so having a larger phone made a really big Improvement and not only
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that but the Note 3 was much faster and was very noticeably smoother than my S3
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moving to Bloons TD5 I noticed way later in the game when there was a lot of
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balloons on the screen it made a big difference being on the Note 3 because
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it was much smoother gameplay experience and I noticed my S3 chopping quite a bit
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and in both of these games and in everything else I've actually checked out the screen on the Note 3 was much
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more vibrant and looked a lot better before the Note 3 I've never had
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extensive experience using a pen on a phone before I started with the Nexus S
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and then I moved to a Samsung S3 so the main thing I noticed was Air Command it
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was a nice really easy to use system because right when you take your phone
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out it's right there and if you don't want to use it you press anywhere else in the screen it just goes away and my
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favorite feature within Air Command was pen window I thought this was absolutely
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fantastic because you just draw a square or whatever kind of shape you want
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wherever select what application you want to be in that shape and it will
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just work it'll be right there so the main two things I noticed that it was
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useful for was if I'm browsing the web and I just kind of want to have a song
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up or whatever I can open up YouTube in a little square just very easily
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manipulate it move it around shove it out of the way make it small make it big
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whatever I want and then it's it's I find it easier than multitasking because
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it's much more easy to manipulate now the other thing that I found really nice
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was say you're reading an email that email has a whole bunch of different numbers in it and you need to manipulate
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it in some way so you need to add a whole bunch of stuff up you can just pen
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window a calculator onto your screen make it as big or small as you want and
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then that's a super easy and simple way to do it there's a bunch of other functionality in Air Command that might
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be useful to you as well but my favorite one was pen window next up we have the
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camera and as quite a few of you know I'm not exactly the best cameraman so I
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had Boll or Brandon take the photos and video for me what I noticed is that in
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NVIDIA and photo the Note 3 definitely has much more sharpening than the S3 now
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if that's something you want or don't want I'm not entirely sure and that's more of a preference thing so you might
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like that idea or dislike that idea but that is definitely something I've
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noticed I've noticed in other people's test shots as well S Voice left a little
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bit to be desired especially when Google Now is sitting there on its own pedestal
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it it it was not nearly as responsive and not nearly as helpful and didn't
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have some of the features that I really like one of my favorite things about Google now is that it will respond to
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you when you try to ask it a question so you can do it basically handsfree and
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without looking at it with SVO you can
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talk to it but you still have to look at the screen to figure out what's actually
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going on which is not really that intuitive in my opinion personally I
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find the build quality on Samsung phones never really to be quite as high as
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other phones say like Nexus devices or an HTC1 but comparing to an S3 I did
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find it to be a little bit better I like the silver band around the outside I I
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like feeling that it seems a little bit solid and it's better than the kind of
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rounded curvature that there is on an S3 and I like the back it seemed a lot more
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solid it seemed a lot more clipped on I found with an S3 it would just kind of
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fly off this one I have to pry it off a little bit and I do actually like that
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while my screen was the favorite feature the battery life on this thing was monstrous and one of my biggest pet
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peeves in phones is extremely short battery life that I find on most of them
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and this actually got away from that I played a considerable amount of games on
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it during the day then had light to medium usage on it throughout the day
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and it still had a fair amount of charge left at the end of the day so that if I
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had forgotten to charge it overnight I would have been able to use it at least for the first bit of the next day which
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is actually pretty impressive if you're not scared of the very large form factor
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and don't mind using it possibly with two hands the Note 3 is definitely a
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phone to look for if you're looking to upgrade in the comments below are you
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looking for a phone that has very large screen real estate and a really large
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battery like a Note 3 or are you looking for something that fits into your hand
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better and it's just more adaptable like some other phone like say a Nexus 5 and
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