Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus Review By CNET

From the moment that I first started using the note 10 plus I, had a feeling. I was going to like it, but now after reviewing it, I can say that it's pretty much the best found that Samsung's made in years. There are so many things I like about this device from the really beautiful, brilliant display and the sophisticated design to the camera quality. I think that Samsung really did a lot of things right and there are very few drawbacks. It has this really beautiful, 6.8 inch, dynamic, AMOLED display that may binge-watching. Netflix's videos extremely easy, read some e-books on it just fantastic experience.

It's got this front facing camera right in the middle, which is exactly where it should be, and the curved sides that are signature to Samsung, Galaxy phones, sometimes I accidentally hit the sides when I wasn't supposed to, so that wasn't great, but pretty minor, I, really loved the shape of this phone I think it's really slim pretty heavy, but that doesn't really bother me this gorgeous backing. This color here is called aura glow or a black and/or. A white art is interesting, but I just think this is fantastic. To look at really stands out. The note 10 plus has Gorilla Glass 6 on the back and on the front really beautiful, but it gets smudged up really quickly, and you're going to want to put a case on it.

So once you do bye-bye pretty colors now one of the first idiosyncrasies I notice is that I turn off and use the phone differently. Now that the button is on the Left, Samsung calls this the side key, and it's your power button, your lock button and your Bigamy button all in one. So if you're, not a lefty already, you do need to retrain yourself how to unlock the phone and launch the camera. It did take me a couple of days to get the hang of it and when I switched back to a different phone, I noticed that I was pressing the big speed button on the left. What I wanted to unlock it? Thankfully you can't remap the side key to do other things.

You can take off Bixby completely so that you can in fact power down the usual way at first I used these buttons by default, but I have actually pulled Bixby off, and now I just press and hold to power down the phone. The major elephant in the room, with the note 10 phones, of course, is that there is no more headphone jack. Samsung was a holdout for the headphone jack for a really long time, but the way the industry is going. It was only a matter of time before this was going to go way. It's the same thing with embedded battery.

Everybody wanted their battery to be removable, and Samsung was one of the last that did that. But now there are almost no removable batteries. I would say most of the time, I didn't even really notice. That's because I used the wired headphones that came in the box, or I used my wireless Galaxy Buds. However, there are people who have invested and wired headphones and for them, it's going to be really annoying.

They have to use a dongle. There is no dongle in the box and that's something that Samsung could have really easily included, especially because they're, so cheap Samsung will sell you one for ten dollars, for example, so you're either going to have to carry around a dongle that you might lose, or you're going to have to buy one I tested for other dongles. That worked perfectly fine, but there might be some that have some proprietary information, and they may not work. Cameras are really important for every phone and I really like the effort that Samsung has made to close the gap with some other rivals. We've got three lenses on the back plus an AR depth camera, and we've brought a single lens on the front.

Overall, the photos are really great. Just like you would expect. Except that depth sensor, the cameras are exactly the same as on the s10. But what makes this different is some of the software that Samsung has added to enhance the experience. My favorite is the dedicated night mode that comes baked into the note 10, plus what this does are it? Basically, it takes a couple seconds to take in a very low light or nighttime scene, and then it processes it in a way that brightens it and also brings out a lot of details that you may not originally see.

I still don't think that night mode is quite as good as competitor devices like the pixel 3 and the Huawei P30 Pro. That's mostly because the photos are in fact a little too bright. For example, I still want my pictures to look like it's nighttime, but I think sometimes the Note 10 plus can make that blue. Look like daytime sky, not evening sky. Also, there's no countdown clock, so you don't really know how long you're sitting there waiting for the photo to process, and I can feel like it's taking a long time or like it's not really working.

There are a few more portrait mode options as well. That just makes it really fun or something called big circle which makes your photos look really dreamy. This actually works pretty well for backlit shots, but any even bigger feature is one that Samsung calls live. Focus video in this creates portrait modes of videos when I first tried it out on the galaxy s 10 5g. It wasn't very good, really blurred your arms and sides of your head, but on this phone it was much better.

You still get a little of that, but you can control it in the slider I found that setting five works pretty well for me, and it does create this interesting effect. The focus is kept on your face. So if it gets a little soft around the edges or at your hands, it really doesn't matter as much. I still think. There's work to do, but now I think the future is actually usable and interesting.

Another video feature will increase the audio sound as you zoom in closer to the subject. So, for example, I was downtown, and I saw some live music playing, but I was pretty far back in the crowd and I used that zoomed in when I replayed. The video I could hear this singer a lot better. I could really see this being useful if you're at a concert. One drawback, of course, is that, as you zoom in you can't really control the point of the zoom, so I was zooming in and getting the guy's chest and not his face.

Also, the more you zoom in the worse the resolution. One thing I really liked on the note 10 plus, is what you can do with those videos once you've taken them. There's a baked in video editor that lets you add music and transitions, and you can scrub really easily with the stylus that comes with the notes head, you can write on the screen. There are just a lot of really cool tools that you can use to make. This feel like a really complete package that you can edit on the phone and then publish and share out immediately zooming in is one area where Samsung can still improve its photography.

You've got two X optical zoom. You've got 10x digital zoom, but you also have rival phones out there that have 5x optical zoom, and it really makes a difference. Furthermore, you can be much further away and get a much better shot. For example, John Travolta was in the CNN office and I assumed it as far as I could, and it still just wasn't close enough for me, because I was pretty far away, and I just thought. That was a moment where I wanted to have the best zoom lens on the market.

There was a fourth lens on the back of this phone. It is a free, D, depth-sensing lens. There is also a feature on the device called the AR doodle. The two, interestingly, are not connected. Ar doodle is a feature where you use the s-pen to draw all over a person's face all over the world around you, and then you can interact with what you drew.

So if you move the phone around, you can still see it there in space. It's fun, it's silly, I, don't really know what you use it for, but it doesn't actually use the depth sensing camera at all and the way you know that is because you can also use it on the front-facing camera, which doesn't have a depth sensor. So what the top sensing camera is used for is an app called quick measure that lets you measure out something in front of you like a rectangle, for example, it's not very developed, there's not much. You can do with it other than save the capture. Also, there's a feature: that's going to be coming out in the future called 3d scan that lets you map an object and then use it for I.

Don't know what we weren't able to see it. So I didn't get a chance to test it. One of my biggest complaints with the galaxy s- 10 phones- was the in screen fingerprint reader, not very accurate for me, but on the note, 10 plus Samsung has completely turned it around. It's really responsive, and I get in almost every time that I try to unlock the phone, so this has become something that I really actually enjoy using a micro SD card slot is one advantage that the 10-plus has over. The 10 will take up to one terabyte of external storage.

You wouldn't have the Galaxy Note if you didn't have an S, Pen and I found it really easy to use really easy to navigate with I found that I didn't accidentally press the button, as often as I have in years past. So whatever Samsung did to change the design I think worked to me. The S Pen is really comfortable to hold and use I. Don't even really think about it. Most of the time I'm just focused on what I'm doing I like to use it to navigate around I, also like using it for more precise things like taking a screenshot or really diving into a submenu I find that I like to use the s-pen more when I know, I'm going to be sitting comfortably for a while and even just to give my hands a break because I do a lot of typing.

My thumb's always hurt, so it's nice to just kind of switch it up and do something else instead and when I'm, walking, and I know I'm on the go. That's when I put that S Pen away, and I just start using this like a regular phone. One of the things that I keep coming back to is using the s-pen to just jot down a shopping list or a phone number, an email address, or the name of a restaurant that somebody mentioned to come back to it later. There's a new feature called handwriting to text where you can write the note and then tap it and have the phone convert it into text, which you can even share out to a Microsoft Word file. This is not the way that I personally use the phone, but I think it's great that it exists, and I thought that most of the time it was actually a pretty accurate conversion.

Not all the time, though, especially with numbers, but I have pretty messy. Writing and I was surprised with the accuracy. Last year, Samsung added Bluetooth Low Energy functionality in the S Pen, so you could use it as a remote and there's a little battery in here that charges up. When you put the stylus back in the phone this year, it added gesture support for some apps. So, for example, if you are in the camera app, you can press and hold the button and then flick your wrist in certain directions to do different things.

This makes a lot of sense if you've got the phone set up sort of like a tripod you're trying to either take a picture of yourself from far away without asking a stranger to do it, or you're trying to take a group shot- or maybe you even want to take a picture of an animal in nature, and you're. Hiding behind a tree, and I was surprised with how well it works. Took me a while to get the hang of the gestures. It's a lot easier. If you just sort of like flick quickly, you can also zoom in and zoom out, Samsung says that you make this big semicircle, but I found that you could just press the button sort of flick, your wrist in one direction or another and hold, and it will zoom in and zoom out for you.

This will also work with apps, like Spotify and with a lot of the Samsung native apps and, of course there is an API that is open so that other third-party app makers can also build in functionality. The note 10 plus has a huge battery 4300 William hours, and it shows battery life. We'll definitely take you all day when I was testing. This phone I woke up at 6:00 in the morning threw everything at it. Tons of photos and videos was constantly online reading.

Uploading downloading, and it lasted me until 1:00 in the morning with battery life to spare, and it charges up really quickly using the 25 watt charger that comes in the box, consistently charged up from 0 to 100 in 65 minutes, which is incredible, Samsung will also sell you. A 45 watt charger aftermarket haven't had a chance to try that one out, though wireless charging also gets faster, increasing from 12 watts to 15 watts. So you're going to see some improvements there and, of course, there's wireless power share built in, so you can charge up another device. The no 10 plus the screen is huge and that's fantastic, but if you want to use an even larger screen, you have two options: to connect this phone to your computer. The first is called link to Windows.

If you've got a Windows 10 computer, then you can see your photos, your messages and your notifications right on that device right now, it's a little limited to just those three functions, but in the future, Samsung and Microsoft say that you'll be able to mirror even more from this device onto your Windows 10. Machine link to Windows is on the right track, but I think what's even more useful is Samsung tags. I wasn't very impressed with it. When it first got it started, it was really clunky, but now it's so much more streamlined. You can just take that USB, cable and plug the phone into either a Windows or a Mac and just see the entirety of your phone there.

So you can see all of your apps and interact with them. You can drag and drop files from your computer onto the phone. It's a whole new world that I think is going to make productivity a lot more interesting when you want to mostly just work off of your device, so instead of typing away on the phone or using the stylus, I actually have this big screen and all the benefits that come with the laptop think. It's going to make productivity a lot more interesting and I. Think it's going to keep you from transferring things or emailing things back and forth.

You've got the files all on your device. I think that Samsung probably has business users in mind when it comes to decks, but as we spend more time living our lives on our phone, it's going to become more useful to have this sort of interface. When you take a look at the note, 10 plus overall, there are a lot of little refinements that add up into this really great device. This killer screen that awesome battery life was superfast charging and also these great new camera features that are gonna. Make your photos in your videos, terrific, it's also really expensive.

Eleven hundred dollars and foam prices just keep going up, but we also can't ignore other phones, including the smaller Galaxy Note 10, which costs $150 is less and there's, of course, the Google Pixel for around the corner and Apple's next iPhone, as I've said before. This is one of the best phones at Samsung's made in years and all of its energy effort and focus have really paid off. There is so much to like about it and not a lot to dislike. I think that if you're on the fence, I really love it I recommend it and I think that you're going to love it too. Well, everyone thanks for watching.

What did you think of the note 10 +? Are you going to get it? Are you gonna maybe hold out for another phone? Let me know, in the comments be sure to subscribe and check back to see net for even more note, 10 and note 10 + videos.

Source : CNET