Samsung Galaxy Note 3 Review
by Brian Klug on October 1, 2013 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Mobile
- Android 4.3
- galaxy note 3
Battery Life
Battery life remains probably the single largest differentiator for devices lately, and of huge concern to enthusiasts and normal shoppers alike. We’ve already caught a glimpse of how well 8974 fares from a power perspective inside the LG G2, a device that posted some seriously impressive battery numbers. The Note 3 we’re looking at is also 8974 based since it’s a T-Mobile model, and thus we expect the same kind of battery life.
With this generation of Note, battery gets even larger. The Note started with a then quite large 9.25 watt hour battery, then Note 2 moved to 11.78 watt hours, and Note 3 now moves to a very large 12.16 watt hour battery with of course the newest 3.8V chemistry and all that comes along with it. Display size goes up, but those power gains are offset in other places.
After we talked about the panel self refresh features in the G2 a few people reached out and let me know that this feature has been shipping for a while in some phones, and it’s easy to check for. If we look under the display subsystem we can see that the same MIPI_CMD_PANEL type 9 is used, which refers to this type of interface.
Qualcomm HWC state: MDPVersion=500 DisplayPanel=9
define MIPI_CMD_PANEL ‘9’
Our battery life tests are unchanged and consist of a set of popular webpages that are loaded on a schedule with the display set to exactly 200 nits and repeated until the battery runs out and the device dies on both WiFi and cellular data connections. In this case that means T-Mobile LTE which is 10 MHz FDD in my market, I haven’t had a chance to run the Note 3 on HSPA+ yet, or complete the call test (which is starting to get ridiculous, and probably breaks 24 hours in the case of the Note 3).
On LTE the Note 3 does very well, coming just shy of the pack of iPhones, at just over 8 hours. Interestingly enough it’s just north of the G2s as well, which do have a smaller battery but also smaller display. The Note 3 also is the first device to ship with Qualcomm’s QFE1100 envelope tracker solution from the RF360 front end portfolio, which lowers power consumption by up to 20 percent and heat dissipation by up to 30 percent by allowing the power amplifiers to follow the desired output waveform. There’s more on that later in the cellular section.
On WiFi the Note 3 does better by 22 percent, but not the kind of huge jump I’m used to seeing between cellular and WiFi testing. This tells me the Note 3 battery life is really gated by the display, which is almost always the largest consumer of power in a device. That said the Note 3 does very well all things considered, especially in comparison to the APQ8064 (Fusion 3) phones which came before it, like SGS4. New silicon and new process inside MSM8974 definitely helps move battery life forward here with the race to sleep game.
Charging is an interesting story on the Note 3, but primarily because of what doesn’t change. The Note 3 continues to use Samsung’s tablet charging specification and charger, which has 2 amps of maximum output. The Note 3 draws 2 amps over a considerable amount of the charging curve, like other Samsung devices (in the linear part of the charge curve). USB 3.0 doesn’t change things up here quite yet with the new supported charge voltages that are coming eventually with the power delivery specification.
The Note 3 does charge faster overall compared to the SGS4 however thanks in part to the new PMIC (PM8941) which is part of the overall 8974 platform story.
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DukeN - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Anandtech is a prime example of this.The Apple products and news are covered in vast, but others are neglected based on personal opinion of some of the contributors IMO.
BB is a prime example. As much as I dislike Blackberry's last few products, Anand could have given them them the courtesy of a single BB OS 6 or OS 7 device review. Blackberry did have a 10 or 15% market share a couple of years back when the 9900 launched, but no writeups to be found here.
joe_dude - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Yeah, I've started to checking to see if I'm reading an American review. Even the British and Aussie reviews are not so ridiculously biased. I remember reading a comment a few days ago that it's because all American journalists use Apple stuff, hence the inherent bias.djboxbaba - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Wait... "Anandtech is a prime example of this".Anandtech? the same site that has been bashed in the previous comments, for not being harsh enough on Samsung for artificially inflating benchmark scores? What are you talking about.
identity - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
A lot of these clones are from other sites, infiltrating it with their garbage. They trash whatever sites their own and will hop on anybody's at the moment. A couple months ago when Eric Snowden came out as the NSA leaker, the whole Ars community was pissed at Ars for releasing info on Snowden's past Ars history. Now, they're the toast of the internet world today.Spunjji - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Historically there have been a lot of instances where devices are criticised simply for being different from Apple in an objectively benign way (see any conversation about how notebook keyboards feel). Similarly, anything the devices do well tends to be referenced in comparison to Apple as well. It's nice to see that approach being phased out.Spunjji - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Bear in mind that you're also comparing the reaction to an article released in the last week to historical judgements of a site built up over years. So your comparison is inherently disingenuous at best...djboxbaba - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Yeah it only beats the Note 3 in all 4 CPU benchmarks tested here. This is also the Note 3 which is artificially inflating benchmarks. Objectivity prevails, maybe you should try it sometime instead of drinking the kool-aid.ddriver - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
There is no cheating here, it is nothing like the intel compiler "preferential" compilation, nothing like the image quality cheats of ATI and NVIDIA, it is just a quick hack to make sure the CPU runs at its top frequency while a particular test is running, because this way you can get clear idea of the actual performance when not obstructed by power-saving features.This hack doesn't make the CPU appear faster than it is. This is just as much cheating if you go to your bios and disable power saving features and run a benchmark. No test result database rejects results obtained by such means.
klagermkii - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
People minded it a lot less on desktop benchmarks because an average user could legitimately turn those power saving options off for their everyday PC usage, and enjoy that same speedup across all applications. The Samsung cheat only applies to benchmarks.Spunjji - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
I thought benchmarks didn't matter?