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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doobydoo - Saturday, October 19, 2013 - link
'The chipset IS in fact performing as the benchmark indicates'No, it isn't. The chipset CAN'T reach the same speeds for any non-benchmark application, for reasons such as battery life and heat.
Your argument that bickering about performance is redundant is also stupid, because if it was, Samsung wouldn't feel the need to cheat them.
esterhasz - Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - link
I would be much in favor of standardized qualitative testing. Have a set five people panel use the phone for a day in their normal workflow and use a questionnaire for performance rating. Sure it's subjective, but users are subjects last time I looked.Demigod79 - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Although I too would like to a cheat vs non-cheat result in benchmarks (perhaps mark out cheat results in a different color or something), Anand did state clearly that this was cheating. There was no glossing over this fact, he laid it out explicitly and said that he wanted this practice to stop (for all OEMs that do it).He also mentioned that it's unlikely that OEMs will stop doing this. It's easy for the OEMs to do and makes their products look better (and frankly, it's only technical geeks who care about things like this, and we only represent a tiny segment of smartphone buyers). If it sells more products, then they will do it (although I find it about as frivolous as the Nvidia and then-ATI battle to have the fastest GPU, simply for the sake of wearing the performance crown for a couple of months).
That being said though, this is benchmarks we're talking about here. Benchmarks do not represent real-world usage, and never have. All you have to do is look at 3DMark, which was criticized for some time as being too artificial (CPU speeds hardly mattered, whereas in real life CPU speed matters greatly). Benchmarks are, by nature, highly artificial tests meant to measure performance in a specific area. Although you can complain that cheating in benchmarks give a false impression of performance compared to other devices, you cannot say that such cheating misrepresents real-world usage since it doesn't represent real-world usage in the first place.
DanNeely - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
"The impact is likely small since most of these tests should drive CPU frequencies to their max state regardless (at least on the CPU side), but I'm going to make it a point to call out this behavior whenever I see it from now on."Unfortunately this isn't the case. By decompiling benchmarks and changing package names to disable the cheat function Ars Technica discovered that the GN3 is inflating benchmark scores by 20-50%. Most got a 20% boost; Linpack was an outlier at 50%.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/galaxy-note...
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
This is unfortunately something we've seen on a lot of devices, not just Samsung. Google Experience devices aren't affected, but we've seen it on the SGS4 and HTC One among others.Linpack isn't a very consistent test and it's too short to drive frequencies up consistently, which is why I'm guessing it's an outlier. The 20% end is higher than expected, it's entirely possible that Samsung is lifting a thermal limit as well as driving CPU frequencies up.
I don't like any of it and I do want to see companies stop doing it. I was hoping we would see an end to it with the Note 3 but it looks like that was wishful thinking.
Take care,
Anand
Wojciech - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Have you thought about doing an article about 'fixing' benchmark scores by other OEM's?If you're saying that HTC is doing the same with One then maybe LG is doing something similar and maybe even Sony.
Normal behavior by Google experience devices would explain often lower scores than customized devices running on the same hardware platform.
Don't you think that would be an interesting topic to examine?
Right now I fear that more and more OEM's are going to start doing the same thing and the whole 'benchmark to determine real life performance' will be completely lost.
xype - Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - link
You don't like any of it? But you still put up the graphs and numbers with an "Oh my."? People come here because AnandTech has a reputation of providing in-depth, honest reviews. Most people scan the text and go right to the graphs. Their takeaway will be a marketing lie that you didn't bother to correct because "A lot of companies do that."? Seriously?Spunjji - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
If you skim the text and go to the graphs you will never, EVER get a representative review of anything. People come to Anandtech for analysis and they got that with this review. If they missed that then they might as well have gone to any of the other sites.doobydoo - Saturday, October 19, 2013 - link
Na, most people come to Anandtech because they know the graphics will have been performed in an objective and logical way. I would bet that the vast majority of readers don't read the text associated with such images.And that doesn't mean that they should go to other sites.
Squuiid - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
"It's also interesting to note that the Galaxy Note 3 appears to outperform all other Snapdragon 800 smartphones we've tested thus far. There's a couple of potential explanations here."You missed an explanation: Samsung cheat.
From Ars:
"The two functions applied to this list seem to be "PACKAGES_FOR_BOOST_ALL_ADJUSTMENT" which is no doubt the CPU booster, and "PACKAGES_FOR_LCD_FRAME_RATE_ADJUSTMENT" which makes it sound like they are also changing the display frame rate."