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
Conclusions
The Note 3 is an iterative product, that’s absolutely true, but the improvements in the Note 3 are pretty dramatic. It really does feel better, thinner, lighter all while having a bigger, more usable display. The silicon inside is incredibly quick, easily the fastest in the Android camp. It's also good to see Samsung on the forefront of RF technology here, implementing an envelope power tracker alongside Qualcomm's 3rd generation LTE modem. The combination results in a fairly robust, very high-end platform that is modern on both compute and modem/RF fronts. Given my affinity for the latter, I'm happy.
Battery life benefits from the large chassis and associated battery, as well as Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 platform which seems to manage power a lot better than the outgoing Snapdragon 600. I was also impressed by the Galaxy Note 3's IO performance. Although it didn't beat the Moto X in random write IO performance, it came extremely close and absolutely destroyed everything else in sequential write speed. Samsung clearly went all out with the Note 3 and pretty much tried to win all of our tests. The beauty of that approach is it should lend itself to an awesome user experience.
The S Pen experience continues to improve and I don't really have any major complaints about it on the Note 3. It's a novel addition that I can see resonating very well with the right type of user. Approximating pen/paper is tough and no one has really done a perfect job there, but the S Pen can be good enough in the right situations. The good news is that even if you don't use the S Pen much, it hides away quite unobtrusively and you can go about using the Note 3 just like a large Android device.
There are only three issues I'd like to see addressed with the Note 3. The move to USB 3.0 is interesting and could be a big benefit when it comes to getting large files off of the device (the NAND/eMMC isn't quick enough to make USB 3 any faster at putting data on the phone), but the hardware or software implementation of USB 3 on the Note 3 doesn't actually deliver any performance advantage (Update: In OS X, in Windows you can actually get USB 3.0 working). For whatever reason 802.11ac performance on the Note 3 wasn't as good as it was on the SGS4 or other 802.11ac devices we've tested. It's not a huge deal but for an otherwise very well executed device I don't like to see regressions. And finally, I would like to see Android OEMs stop with manual DVFS control upon benchmark detect, but that seems to be an industry wide problem at this point and not something exclusive to the Galaxy Note 3.
Whereas previous Notes felt like a strange alternative to the Galaxy S line, the Galaxy Note 3 feels more like Samsung's actual flagship. It equals the Galaxy S 4 in camera performance, but exceeds it pretty much everywhere else. There's a better SoC, better cellular/RF and even better industrial design. I suppose next year we'll see the Galaxy S 5 play catch up in these areas, but until then it's clear that the Note 3 is the new flagship from Samsung. Although you could argue that the improvements within are incremental, the Note 3 really defines what incremental should be.
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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?