I was one of the 80 lucky bloggers from all over India to be invited to check out the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 which has been launched in India for an isn't-that-too-much price tag of Rs. 58,300. I spent a decent amount of time with the Galaxy Note 4 at the event, checking out how the various advertised features of the latest flagship device from the world's top smartphone manufacturer work out in the real world. I shall be sharing all that I experienced about the Galaxy Note 4 in this mini-review.
Samsung Galaxy Note 4 - First impressions
Look and feel:
If you've previously owned a smartphone belonging to the Samsung Galaxy lineup, you will fiwnd that the Galaxy Note 4 continues with the same design language. Listening to the plastic haters but Samsung lovers out there, the Galaxy Note 4 features a metal frame on its sides. The back side has a faux leather back with soft textured feel, which results in a decently firm grip and unless you work at some oil/grease company, you won't be afraid of slipping the phone. For those accidental slips, the Note 4 has a 2.5D Gorilla Glass 3 screen. If you aren't a geek and are not familiar with the terms, this 2.5D and Gorilla thing means that the phone's screen should be able to withstand a few falls, and scratches. As happens with most flagship devices, a few drop tests of the Note 4 will pop up on Youtube pretty soon.
Inheriting Note 3's faux leather back, and Galaxy Alpha's metal sides makes Galaxy Note 4 one of the better, if not the best, designed smartphones that we've seen from Samsung in recent times. Note 4 will be available in four color shades - Frosted white, Charcoal black, Bronze Gold, and presumably for the ladies, Blossom Pink.
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| This is what the Note 4 looks like from the front side |
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| This is the faux leather back of the Galaxy Note 4 |
Display:
Samsung has been the world leader in terms of smartphone displays since quite a while now. Galaxy Note 4's 5.7 inch Super AMOLED display with its quad-HD screen resolution (for the geekier folks, that means 3.86 pixels light up the screen, which is ~515 pixels per inch in terms of density.) makes it the best smartphone display I've ever used (on a side note, I'm yet to see how LG G3 and Nexus 6's display looks like in comparison). Color reproduction is brilliant, and the images are as crisp as they can probably ever get (given our eyes don't mutate to absorb more details in the near future). Viewing angles are also good, images stay true to their colors even when viewed from odd angles. This, along with the size of the screen, means that you and your friends would enjoy watching videos together without kicking each other to get the best angle (it might be just the fact that I'm still in college, but my friends and I still fight, in the literal sense, to stay in the front of the laptop while watching a movie).
Under the hood:
The Note 4 packs the latest and the best processor from the Qualcomm family - Snapdragon 805, clocked at a ferocious 2.7 GHz. Elsewhere in the world, Note 4 will be shipped with the 64-bit Exynos 5433 processor, but India, Europe, and many other countries will be receiving the 32 bit Snapdragon 805. The Note 4 eases through any task that you put it up to - be it the 4k videos that its 16 MP camera records at 30 frames per second, or any graphics intensive game. In all the time that I spent with the phone, I failed to find any single moment of lag, any frame drop or something of that sort. 3 GB RAM is really a blessing when it comes to multitasking. You can almost forget relaunching any app, most of them stay gracefully in the memory for long times. If you've used a low-end/mid-end Android device, this means no app reloading when you switch back to it and no killing of the services in the background. In terms of raw power, this is the best combination one can think of right now.
Camera:
I didn't manage to transfer the photos I captured to my laptop to analyze them, but the 16 MP rear camera takes crisp photographs in the lighting conditions that I managed to test it in (the room I tested it in was artificially lit). The phone's camera app comes with various modes - Live HDR, Selective Focus (lets you apply software background blur), Rear-cam selfie (really cool, allows you to select the position where you want your face to appear in the photo while using the rear camera to shoot a selfie), Beauty face, Virtual tour shot among others.
The front camera ups the megapixel count to 3.7 megapixels with a wider f1.9 aperture, which means that the camera will take up to 60% brighter photos in low light conditions. The front camera captures a 120 degree wide selfies, allowing more people to pop up in your group selfies.
S Pen:
One of the most talked about feature of the Note series is the S Pen. The S Pen has been the USP of every smartphone in the Galaxy Note lineup, and seeing the latest iteration, the S Pen lives up to its name. Note 4's S Pen has doubled pressure sensitivity compared to last year's Note 3, which, according to Aditya Babbar, Senior Product Manager at Samsung, gives a fountain pen feel to the user.The new S Pen also allows better tilting angles than the previous generation.
As Samsung told us in the introductory presentation, Note 4's S Pen can act as a scissor (for cutting/dragging things), as a mouse, and obviously, as a pen. I really loved the calligraphy pen option while using the S Pen, it beautified my worse-than-a-doctor's handwriting a lot (and I really mean the "lot" part).
One interesting point I noted about the new S Pen is that we can use it to tap the capacitive menu and back buttons now. Earlier with the Galaxy Note, Note 2 and even with the Note 3, you had to switch to your fingers even when you were operating the phone with the stylus (confirmed by Devashish Lodh), which obviously was an annoyance - to say the least. The fact that Samsung is listening to user's needs and responding to them with such details made me feel really appreciative for the efforts being put into their efforts.
You can take handwritten notes using the S Note app, draw over any screenshot or a photo, among other stuff. Note 4 also brings a new perspective to the multi-window feature - which allows you to drag and resize any open application, and fload it over any other app. Samsung is calling this PC-like multitasking. The lack of any announcement for native support of any multi-window like feature in Android Lollipop assures that the Note 4 will be the best phone for multitasking for quite a while.
Battery:
Though I couldn't really test how long the battery is going to last, the Note 4 has a big 3200 mAh battery, which supports Quick Charging 2.0. Samsung claims that the Galaxy Note 4 will get 50% charged in about 30 minutes (33 minutes to be precise). This, combined with the Ultra Power Saving mode, will allow users to last long durations without emptying their juice pretty soon.
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| A Galaxy Note 4 touting its Fast Charging feature |
The Indian Touch:
The Galaxy Note 4 comes loaded with support for 14 local Indian languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Oriya and Assamese. That means you'll be able to read any messages that you receive in local languages, and browse webpages in your native languages without having to resort to techniques like using bitmap fonts to do so.
Other Features:
Arguably, the features we discuss in this section will probably not be used on daily basis. But they can act as a bragging point, right? Galaxy Note 4 has an improved Fingerprint scanner, to let users secure their phone without having to tap any password or pin. There's a built-in UV sensor (world's first in a smartphone) which will tell you what SPF sunscreen you should wear before heading out for an outing. The Note 4 also packs 3 microphones for better noise cancellation when you have to call from noisy surroundings. These microphones also allow near 360 degree sound recording, and to listen to (or remove) a particular source of sound from a recorded sound. This can actually be helpful when you are recording group conversations.
Conclusion:
If you are comfortable with large displays, Samsung Galaxy Note 4 is the best Android smartphone you are going to get right now. It will be interesting to see how it fares against the just announced Nexus 6 which packs an even bigger 5.9 inch screen and the exact same processor. Perhaps the only differntiating point will be the user interface - Note 4 runs Touchwiz UI over KitKat, while the Nexus 6 will be running stock Android.
If the notion of spending near Rs. 60,000 on a smartphone doesn't shock you, and you can actually afford to buy one, go for it. The iPhone 6 Plus is a tough competition at this price point but if you would love a better, crisper screen (believe me, on this screen size, the pixel count actually matters), superior multitasking and want your phone to work the way you want it to, by customizing it to the core, the Note 4 would be a smarter choice.
