Galaxy Note 10+ Review: Samsung Phones In A Winner By MrMobile [Michael Fisher]

(gentle music) - This is the Samsung Galaxy Note10+. In a vacuum, it's a no brainer of a buy, with a feature list longer than almost any smartphones and an eight-year legacy of almost nothing but hits. But you shouldn't buy phones in a vacuum. You should buy them in context. When you look at how good the competition has got 700 and even $400 price points, the Note10+ has to work harder than ever to justify its $1100 tag. I've been using the phone for seven days.

Let's see how close it gets to that justification. Flashback to last year with me real quick. It was tough to justify a four-figure price tag for a phone, especially since I'd just eviscerated the iPhone XS Max for the same offense. But I argued that the Galaxy Note9 was worth it because it was as close to no compromises as you could get. Well, while the Note10+ doesn't bring as many compromises as it's smaller Note10 sibling, the ones it does make are contentious.

Let's start with the now-absent headphone jack. I mentioned in my hands-on that it won't bother those who've already made the switch to Bluetooth headphones. But for creators, whom Samsung is specifically targeting with this new built-in video editor, the 3.5 millimeter jack is still a crucial tool. If we take a situation like this, where I'm talking directly to the camera, it's cool to use the S Pen as a remote, and the Live focus effect can make it look like I'm on a malfunctioning Holodeck, which is cool, but without a headphone jack, I can't plug a lav mic into the Note. And with the field of view of just 80 degrees, the framing gets a little cramped unless I use a selfie stick.

This phone really could have used something like a 97-degree camera, like the wide-angle selfie on the Pixel 3. And then there's the new fingerprint sensor. When in-display readers are implemented, like they are on the One Plus 7 Pro, I really like them because that optical reader is super fast. And if it does make me wait, at least it gives me visual and haptic feedback while it tries to authenticate me. The Note10's ultrasonic reader is slower to begin with.

And since you get no haptic feedback and barely any visual feedback on the AOD, well, that makes it feel even slower. There's no longer a heart-rate reader or an iris scanner on the Note10+, neither of which I really miss. But what I do miss is the notification LED, still the best way to tell you that someone's trying to reach you if your phone is across the room. Now I hope you're not bummed out about me starting with the negatives because Samsung does give us a bunch of goodies in exchange. Starting with the biggest battery ever put into a Note.

I punished this thing. The first thing I did after unboxing was set the always on display to persistent mode. And I set that gorgeous screen, also the biggest ever on a Note, to maximum resolution. This being the summertime, it stayed close to max brightness most of the time too. To to pile on the pain, I paired the phone to a smartwatch and two sets of Bluetooth headphones.

And I never took fewer than 30 photos a day. Despite all that, the phone never got close to zero before bedtime after 18 hours. When I did charge, the 25-watt adapter in the box got me from zero to 58% in a half hour and to a full charge in 75 minutes. I only had to do that for testing, though. I usually used wireless charging, the Note10+ gives you that capability in forward and reverse.

In case you have a Galaxy Watch or Galaxy Buds you need to juice up on the go. Oh, that's a feature that came over from the Galaxy S10, and so did the camera array. It is so nice to have this diversity of angles, especially the Ultra Wide Camera, so I'm pretty forgiving of the shortcomings like the inconsistent color science and the lackluster low-light performance. Yes, even with the new Night Mode, it's not great. Here's a fun fact.

I spent most of my review period shooting video with the Note10+, instead of stills, because of how much I enjoyed that new Super steady stabilization. This was shot with no gimbal, no rig, just a phone in my hand. Samsung has peppered in a few new features here. You get a Zoom-in Mic, probably inspired by HTC, which increases microphone sensitivity as you magnify on a subject. ♪ I shout from the mountain ♪ - And speaking of stuff borrowed from other manufacturers, Super Slow-motion is back again, largely unchanged from the S10 but still more useful than it is on the Sony phones.

Package all that up with the built-in video editor and you get a potent production platform for mobile filmmakers. Not as potent as it could be with proper manual controls and the camcorder and the aforementioned headphone jack, Samsung is still bested by LG there. And the free video editor is very basic and a little buggy, you're gonna need to invest in something like Adobe Rush to produce something with any kind of polish to it. Incidentally, I will have the opportunity to try that, and next week I'm gonna produce a video entirely on the Note10+, when I test out Verizon's new 5G network in Providence. If you wanna see that when it goes live, make sure you're subscribed to TheMrMobile on YouTube.

We've left the phone's halo feature pending for long enough, wouldn't you say? Yeah, Samsung is once again leaning mainly on the S Pen to differentiate the Note and it's still the phones most compelling feature. No, not because of the new gyro gestures, which I find just as useless after a week as I did in that first minute. And certainly not because you can doodle on people's faces now. Those are the kind of gimmicks that lead to people dismissing the S Pen as a toy when really, it's a very useful tool. In addition to being a helpful anachronism for those who still love the feel of handwriting, it's a mouse that brings the precision clicks you need if you're gonna do stuff like edit video on the go.

It helps with the flow of the edit process, with the button controlling play and pause so you can more easily navigate the timeline. It's great for photo editing, making precision changes to certain regions of the photo. And for someone like me, whose thumbs are finally starting to feel the effects of years spent swiping smartphone screens, it's much-appreciated alternate input method. It's like those old Jeep stickers, you need to use the S Pen for a while to understand it. Or you know you could just get hooked on this.

(S Pen clicks) That's what happens when you spend too long making a phone video, things get a little weird. "Okay," say the meat-and-potatoes folks, "What about the cake underneath all the icing?" Mixed metaphors aside, the fundamentals are strong. Voice calls are bright and loud. And those dual speakers also make watching media a pleasure with only a slight casing rattle to complain about at max volume. - Hi, I'm Michael Josh, and you're watching GadgetMatch.

- The phone's design boasts more attention to detail than any Samsung phone up to this point, right down to the fully-aligned ports at the top and bottom. I already mentioned the screen, but during the edit process I saw this tweet from XDA's Max Weinbach on Twitter. And he's right, I think this is the prettiest display I've ever laid eyes on, refresh rate be damned. And the phone itself is strikingly beautiful. You gotta love a phone that looks like a compact disc.

But if you're tired of the fingerprints, or those reflections messing up your out-the-window Amtrak shots, you can kill two smudges with one skin thanks to my sponsor, dbrand. Whether you go for a special grip case or just the classic vinyl skins, you'll get protection and looks that you just can't find anywhere else. Hit the link in my description to deck out your Note10 or 10+, and thanks to dbrand for sponsoring this video. Folks, I'm gonna bring it home with a slightly controversial opinion. An expensive smartphone is fine, as long as it packs extensive features.

The Galaxy Note10+ fits that bill from its spec sheet to its S Pen, and if it's between buying this or an iPhone, the Note is definitely the more compelling product. But if you forgive my speculation, it seems like Samsung didn't try as hard to blow the roof off with this one. And if that's true, I think the reason for that might be that when the Note10 was being designed, Samsung still expected the Galaxy Fold to be the thing that would wow the Note's traditional base. Needless to say it hasn't worked out that way. At least not yet.

So as impressive as it is on a few fronts, on others the Note10+ feels like the launch event that announced it. Flashy but also by the numbers. It feels like a phone from a company that knows it doesn't have meaningful Android competition in the US. A company, that as my colleague Andrew Martonik puts it, "is already winning the race in neutral. " And in 2019, with excellent phones like the Pixel 3a and OnePlus 7 Pro on shelves for many, many hundreds of dollars less, you're soon gonna have to do better than this to earn the kind of glowing recommendation the Note used to be known for.

My friends, as long as this video is, there's more I didn't get to, from Samsung DeX to more of those camera modes, so be sure to check out the full review from Android Central, which I'll link below. Big thanks to Hayato Huseman and my other friends from AC for their help assembling this video, which was made possible by a review sample from Samsung. The company did not offer compensation for this review or receive copy approval rights. That means they're seeing it at the same time you are. Please subscribe if that's the kind of review you'd like to see more of on YouTube.

Until next time, thanks for watching and stay mobile, my friends.

Source : MrMobile [Michael Fisher]