The fabled Galaxy Note 10+, often heralded as the Productivity King might just retain that title in our review. However, that doesn’t mean the phone doesn’t have it’s flaws, but how much of an effect that has on your purchase decision, really is dependent on the type of user you are. But with that being said, let’s get straight into the review of this one. Sit back, relax, and enjoy our review of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+!
Display and Design; Fancy Lookin’ Thang
The display on the Note 10+ is one of the best I’ve ever seen. Not only in terms of colour, proportions, and size, but also I’m just how much of a pleasure it was to use. It’s equipped with a 6.8-inch Quad HD+Dynamic AMOLED display, with a 19:9 aspect ratio. And in case you were wondering, it has a 91% screen-to-body ratio. The Note 10+ has 162.3 x 77.2 x 7.9 mm dimensions, making it quite a tall, and pretty wide device, but more on that in a bit.
The phone features a very simply design philosophy, with a clean glass back, and seamless curved edge display. But on the topic of the curved edge display, it definitely isn’t my favourite, solely because of accidental touches. You’ll notice it especially if you’re using the phone single handed, or watching a video with one hand on the train. It really was a pain, so that’s why it the display doesn’t totally cut it for me.
The design as mentioned, is pretty simplistic, but classy at the same time. You can tell it’s a premium device. The display has a small cutout for the camera in the middle, and the rest of the sensors seem to be in the screen. It makes for a pretty seamless experience, but you’ll notice it while gaming sometimes, or while watching full screen videos/movies.
The Note 10 + comes in four different colours, which are Aura Pink, Aura White, Aura Glow and Aura Black. Quite an array to choose from, but personally, I like the black. The back of the phone is reflective enough to honestly be a mirror.
Performance; A Solid Performer
Of course, there wasn’t really an issue with the performance of the phone at all. The Snapdragon 855+ makes gaming, streaming, and multitasking a breeze. Of course, the 12GB RAM helps that too. Playing Call Of Duty Mobile was great on the phone, and the display was a main factor in that, but paired with the silky smoothness of the 855+, made it even greater.
One thing I do want to note, (haha) is how much I disliked the fingerprint sensor on the Note 10+. Most times it would take 2-3 tries to unlock my phone, even after resetting my fingerprints multiple times. Not to mention how slow it is to open, because relatively, many other phone manufacturers decide to nix the animation to get a faster unlock. That’s what the Note 10+ should’ve had.
There’s no headphone jack, which didn’t bother me till I had to use a wired headset. Considering it’s the first Samsung phone to remove the jack, it does give it less of an overall versatility to the phone. But it’s not that bad if you’ve switched to wireless anyway.
Huge Battery and Fast Charging, Great, Right?
The Note 10+ has a 4300 mAh battery, and it comes with 45w fast charging. And while on paper, it’s impressive, I found it to be less so while testing. I had a the phone on 92% at 7 AM, and with basically only music playing the whole time, as well as some light browsing, I was at 76% by 8:30 AM. Now, that’s open to your interpretation on whether that’s a long lasting battery, but it didn’t quite cut it for me.
That, alongwith not so fast charge times, made me wince at the device often. But another thing I noticed, is that when you’re using any other phone manufacturers fast charger, it will seriously throttle it. For example, the OnePlus charger, which is one of the speediest charging I’ve ever seen, on the Note 10 + would show that it would take 19 hours to charge.
That’s probably because of the whole Note 7 fiasco, and therefore them implementing safety features to throttle how much power they can handle. It makes sense, but it was essentially in a pain in the a** most times.
S Pen; Is It Worth The Hype?
Okay, now to the part of the device that actually differentiates it from the rest. The S Pen. Now, I’m sure many people would’ve found a great use for the S Pen, but I just couldn’t. Not because it didn’t function well, but I just didn’t find too many practical uses for it to justify using it rather than typing. Air gestures are cool, but often times too confusing to be used practically. Making notes on the fly, or even drawing on the screen was cool, but I didn’t really use it after the first few times.
So if you were planning on getting the Note 10 series, I would highly recommend you think about whether you really need the S Pen. Because if not, you could just get the S10, or basically any other phone. Regardless, the Note 10 + is still one of the best phones around, but the S Pen really should justify the purchase more.
Camera; Crazy Good Shots
The camera takes some beautiful shots, and clear, stable videos. The onboard video image stabilization was really good to use, and made it easy to film videos without having to worry too much about your hands shaking. The Galaxy Note 10+ is equipped with 4 cameras on the back, a 12.0 MP + 16.0 MP + 12.0 MP + VGA cam, and has a 2x Optical zoom. Honestly, the camera is pretty damn good. It takes clear shots, even when zoomed, which I was thoroughly impressed by, and that’s good enough.
Videos taken with the phone were especially great, considering the Super Steady video feature on the 16MP shooter, really made it easy to take videos. It was easy to shoot, as hand shakes didn’t affect it much, as well as having the option of shooting in 960fps @HD. The normal resolution for shooting videos was UHD 4K (3840 x 2160)@60fps, in case you were curious.
Final Thoughts
The Samsung Note 10+ really is a great phone. It’s a consistent performer, has a beautiful screen, a pretty massive battery, and takes super good photos. What’s not to like? While it has its flaws, overall, it was an enjoyable experience using the phone. It looked good, and performed when it needed to. At the end of the day, isn’t that all we really need? The one thing I will say, is that the phone really is better off with someone who would fully utilise all it has to offer. I feel like I missed out on something, but probably not much, because I still think, it’s a really good phone.
