Turing Your Note 10 Into a Computer Reviews

There's a lot going on with the Milky way Note ten+ ($one,099.99 and up), Samsung's biggest phone. There ever is; the Notation line is the prototype of Samsung's engineering. Information technology's where the company piles all of its features in, with toll and size being no object. And I adore it, merely I find it hard to beloved. A lot of this comes down to how many phones Samsung'southward been slinging out this yr with similar features, likewise as my own growing lack of patience with $1,000+ handsets. Ultimately, the Galaxy S10+ ($799.99 and up) and the smaller Galaxy Note 10 ($949.99) are slightly more than affordable ways to get most of what the Annotation 10+ offers, for less.

The Handbuster

The Note 10+ is 6.39 by iii.04 by 0.31 inches (HWD) and 6.91 ounces. It's slightly bigger than the Notation 9 (half dozen.37 by iii.01 past 0.35 inches, vii.09 ounces) and noticeably bigger than the S10+ (6.20 by 2.92 by 0.31 inches, 6.17 ounces).

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It comes in four "aura" colors, pictured below: black, blueish, white, and "glow," which is a shimmery rainbow effect. All of the colors attract fingerprints like crazy—my "glow" review unit looks utterly greasy and apartment-out gross after less than a week. There'southward going to be a theme in this review that you should buy a instance, and this is one reason.

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The Notation 10+ has a sharply curved 6.viii-inch, 19:nine screen, and then the telephone virtually comes to a point on the sides—the edges are sharper than the Note nine. Samsung as well did away with the separate power and Bixby buttons, for a combined power/Bixby key on the left side. Don't worry; you can set information technology to be primarily a power primal, and and so y'all aren't accidentally launching Bixby all the time.

The phone has dual speakers, including a big beefy i on the bottom confront, and a nearly invisible one at the very top edge. Likewise on the bottom, the new S Pen stylus pops out with a impact. Withal plastic, the Wacom-powered South Pen is now "unibody," pregnant it doesn't have the gilded tiptop third the Note ix's pen has. Information technology feels pretty much the same in the hand, though.

And aye, the phone doesn't have a headphone jack. That'southward going to anger a lot of people, especially those who were sucked in past Samsung spending years mocking Apple for doing away with the 3.5mm jack. Samsung includes a pair of USB-C, AKG-branded earbuds, but no dongle; however, the phone works with generic USB-C-to-3.5mm headphone dongles.

I've been using a OnePlus vii Pro for a while, which is nearly the same size equally the Note ten+, yet the Note 10+ feels more than unwieldy. Afterwards a while, I realized why: When I'm reviewing Annotation phones, I'thousand very focused on the Southward Pen, as it'due south the feature that separates a Note from the crowd. And if you're trying to utilise the S Pen, you need to concur the phone securely with your other paw. That can be difficult with a 3.04-inch-broad phone.

The phone's size feels unwieldy when using the camera, too. I feel that way almost the OnePlus seven Pro every bit well, for what it's worth, but gripping the phone between my pollex and forefinger, horizontally, while tapping on the camera UI has always been an issue with Notes, and information technology'south an issue here besides. At present, I have pretty small hands, and I was largely testing the phone with women and teenagers. I know 1 of our analysts at PCMag who has giant paws and swears by phones every bit wide every bit possible. Merely I have to tell you, this affair is at the edge of what a lot of people's hands volition be able to handle.

The device is waterproof, at least, although it's far from rugged. Every bit with whatsoever phone this expensive, I advise getting a case.

Left to right: Milky way Note 10+, Galaxy Annotation 10

A Beautiful View

The screen is a big reason to come to this big telephone. As mentioned, it's a 6.eight-inch, nineteen:ix bezel-less panel with a front-facing camera at elevation center. At 3,040 past 1,440 pixels and 498 pixels per inch, it'due south really lower density than older phones like the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Note 8, merely not to whatever caste that yous can notice.

In full general, the Note 10+ screen behaves a lot like the S10+ screen in terms of brightness, color accuracy, and overall performance. This is practiced news, as the S10+ has an excellent screen.

I tested the telephone'due south color accuracy with a Klein K80 colorimeter attached to Portrait Displays' CalMAN software, and found that its 2 color profiles are very close to the Milky way S10's and to the Note 9's Adaptive and Basic modes. They're all amongst the all-time displays out there, and they don't accept the over-saturated await we used to meet on old Samsung OLEDs.

Ray Soneira at DisplayMate Labs goes into more item with even more advanced lab equipment. Specifically, he says that blue light has been reduced by 37 percent from the Note 9, while the overall colour accurateness hasn't inverse. There'southward also a acme brightness mode, used in bright natural light, which goes to 793 nits, 12 pct meliorate than the Galaxy Note 9 and about the same level as the Galaxy S10+.

That said, there'southward a new wave in screens that I'thousand a lilliputian sorry we're non seeing here. Razer and OnePlus take both gone to 90-hertz screens on their leading devices, a motion that makes scrolling experience smoother and would increase the responsiveness of drawing apps using the S Pen. I wish Samsung had made that move here, as well.

There'south an ultrasonic, in-brandish fingerprint sensor two thirds of the mode down the screen. While information technology's accurate if you go your dry, make clean finger oriented correctly in the correct spot, it suffers from the problems that all the in-display fingerprint sensors practise right now: At that place'southward no physical guide where to put your finger, and it has real trouble with off-bending touches.

A Better Southward Pen

In my listen, the S Pen is why you should really come to the Milky way Notation.

At that place'southward no other phone with a similar feature. The S Pen is an intelligent, active stylus with pressure level and tilt detection. If you want to write or draw on some other kind of phone, you're stuck with a capacitive or Bluetooth stylus. Capacitive styli similar those on the LG Stylo series don't have pressure sensitivity, and Bluetooth stylii sometimes lag. The Southward Pen also tucks into a slot built into the telephone, which makes it much harder to lose than an Apple Pencil.

If you're going to use an S Pen, you want to put your telephone in a case. Ever since the Note eight introduced curved screens, I've had some issues with trying to draw on the screen without touching the edge of the curve. A case really helps.

I had a professional creative person and an experienced Note 8 user, separately, draw with the Due south Pen in Samsung Notes, Adobe Sketch, and Autodesk Sketchbook. The Note 10 pen is definitely more than responsive than the Note 8 pen, with better pressure sensitivity in Samsung Notes. Adobe Sketch developed lag when we added too many layers, though, which is surprising and infuriating on a device with 12GB of RAM and a 2.8GHz processor.

Samsung's "let's throw things at the wall" arroyo to software features has popped upwardly here again. It keeps calculation new ways to use the Southward Pen, trying to come across if they stick, simply they're generally so haphazardly integrated that they fall flat. Two years ago, it was Alive Messages, which permit you draw animated messages. It's cool, but was never integrated into whatsoever pop messaging program, then few people use it. This year, it's AR Doodle. On newspaper, the AR Doodle idea is super absurd. You can describe persistent augmented-reality objects in infinite and take photos and videos that include them, like this:

The problem is that the AR Putter tools are lousy and there'southward no eraser. All of the cartoon options are these worm-like, shiny pipes, and as soon as you make a mistake you take to start over. That gets old fast.

The elevation complaint, though, is that the phone is just so big it'south hard to agree while cartoon. That's part of why I'm excited past the smaller Annotation 10 model, which has the South Pen, simply which you can also meliorate grip with ane hand.

For more writerly types, Samsung Notes also at present tries to auto-recognize handwriting and transfers it into Microsoft Word. This is some other proficient idea that doesn't quite work because you can really only write three or iv words on a line, and so everything comes out squashed to i side of the document.

Even so, the annotation-taking experience on a Note is like that on no other phone, because you lot can scribble rather than having to look at a touch keyboard. If handwriting is still automated to you (which feels like a Gen X proposition), that means you can write while looking at something else, which is a big deal.

The S Pen too now works as a remote control for the phone's camera. If you lot have the phone on a mountain, you tin switch cameras or change zoom past waving the pen around. I found that less useful than merely using the pen'south button as a remote shutter, which lets you concord the phone at more distant or daring angles for selfies. The remote shutter feature is on the Notation 9 and the smaller Annotation x, though, so information technology isn't unique here.

Processor and Performance

Once over again like the Milky way S10+, the Note 10+ uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset running at a maximum of ii.8GHz. On prcessor measures, it benchmarked slightly better than the Galaxy S10 and the OnePlus 7 Pro. Nosotros got 9,843 on PCMark and 11,180 on Geekbench multi-core. The S10+ got 9,682 on PCMark and 11,105 on Geekbench, while the OnePlus got 9,828 on PCMark and 11,012 on Geekbench.

The OnePlus benchmarked meliorate at web browsing, though, at 481.94 on the Basemark Web exam compared with 447.54 for the Note and 304.03 for the S10. OnePlus has e'er been actually good at UI optimization, and that shows on the browser benchmark score. iPhones, alas, beat all Android phones when information technology comes to spider web-browsing efficiency: The iPhone XS Max scores 537.four on Basemark Web.

On GPU benchmarks, the Annotation 10+ over again performed merely like the Galaxy S10+ and OnePlus 7 Pro. One thing to note is that you can improve effective graphics functioning by turning downwardly the screen resolution. Kicking it from QHD to 1080p, for instance, improves the framerate on the GFXBench Car Hunt onscreen test from 23fps to40 fps.

The Note 10+ has a whopping 12GB of RAM, which according to Samsung lets information technology cache up to 12 apps. Compare that with the S10+'south 8GB, or the OnePlus and Notation 9'southward 6GB. That said, I haven't had much of a problem finding applications being forced to reload on 6GB and 8GB phones, and even with 12GB, the Note 10+ had trouble treatment those layers in Adobe Sketch.

The device comes in 256GB and 512GB models, both with a microSD bill of fare slot tucked in by the SIM bill of fare. It's of import to note the smaller Annotation ten doesn't have a microSD slot. Exterior Northward America, the Annotation 10+ uses a Samsung Exynos 9825 processor and Samsung modem; we didn't test that unit of measurement.

4G, Calling, and Wi-Fi

The Annotation ten+ and Note 10 have the same 4G modem and abilities as the Milky way S10. It's based on the Qualcomm X24 modem, with all the 4G frequency bands used in the United states of america and support for Category 20 LTE with 7x carrier assemblage and 4x4 MIMO on 5 carriers.

That ways you'll get amend LTE functioning than on any previous generation of telephone, or whatever iPhone. Performance will be very like to the S10+; we're working with the same modem, the same antennas, the aforementioned software, and pretty much the same body size here. We can use Ookla's Speedtest Intelligence to point out how the S10+ compares with the Note 9 and Note 8, and you can see how adding boosted levels of carrier assemblage will help speeds (note: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com's parent company).

This Samsung generation also brings new Wi-Fi capabilities. The S10 and Notation 10 are among the first mainstream phones to support 802.11ax or Wi-Fi 6, a new standard that improves Wi-Fi speed and range in crowded conditions. To have advantage of that yous'll need an 802.11ax router, and those are expensive right at present. But if you intend to keep your telephone for 3 years, buying an 802.11ax-compatible device is a skilful idea.

At PC Labs we still have 802.11ac, or Wi-Fi 5, which is much more common right now. On both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, I got slightly longer range—by most 15 feet—from the router with the Note 10+ than with a Note nine. This tin hateful the deviation between some connection and no connectedness in a public Wi-Fi hotspot, for instance. Merely once over again, this is generational, not unique to the Note 10+.

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Making phone calls on the Notation 10+ is a corking experience, with one picayune asterisk. The Notation ten+, like all Samsung flagships since the S8, supports high-quality calling with the EVS codec, which actually improves phone call quality. But to achieve the bezel-less screen, the earpiece has been moved to the very top edge of the phone. If yous're used to placing a phone against your ear, relying on the bezel for the location of the earpiece, the feeling of pressing the edge of the Note x+ against your ear might be a little disoncerting, and it doesn't block quite equally much exterior noise.

The Note 10+'s speaker is technically the same book as the Note 9's, at 85dB at six inches while playing the aforementioned song. Merely the Note x+ sounds noticeably louder to me, which is probably an effect of equalization boosting the midrange.

What About 5G?

If you lot're ownership a gigantic, $1,100 smartphone, y'all'd hope that information technology would exist able to have advantage of the latest networks the carriers are laying downwards. Merely I'yard sorry to say, the Note 10+'s 5G situation is a mess.

The Note 10+ 5G will come up to Verizon first, for a $200 premium over the standard Notation 10. That model uses Qualcomm's first-generation X50 modem, the aforementioned every bit nosotros've seen in other offset-gen 5G phones, and it works with Verizon's millimeter-wave 5G network in a small number of central cities right now.

Verizon's 5G service plan has a perpetually suspended $ten surcharge over its 4G program, and information technology includes unlimited 5G information and hotspot use. The biggest concern I have is that all the X50-based phones so far have overheated and dropped to 4G in hot weather. Co-ordinate to experts I've talked to, Verizon could prepare this past slowing down 5G data access on the phones, but it may not want to do that so information technology can continue showing off spectacular speeds.

The Annotation 10+ 5G has a vapor-chamber cooling organisation that the S10 5G doesn't accept—but the LG V50 also has vapor-chamber cooling, and it all the same has overheating problems. I'll examination the Verizon Note ten+ 5G in mid-September to meet if it overheats.

On the other carriers, things are messier. The Notation 10+ 5G won't be able to use the fast 5G T-Mobile has installed in half-dozen cities; instead, it volition utilise a slower, potentially nationwide form of the network that will feel more similar good 4G. Ditto for the AT&T model, where the Notation 10 won't utilise any of the speedy millimeter-wave the carrier has been touting in 19 cities here, but its upcoming slower nationwide network. On Dart, the situation is totally unclear.

This isn't at all what I'd been hoping for. I'd come to understand that the Note 10+ 5G was going to exist the start phone to bring together fast, short-range millimeter-wave 5G and slower, merely better-covering low-band 5G. That'south non the example. That makes the Notation ten+ 5G a miss.

Samsung'south DeX system was designed to plow a phone into a PC by hooking it up to a mouse and keyboard

Your Phone, in Your PC

Who is DeX for? Samsung'southward "desktop feel" was previously a manner to plough your telephone into a PC by attaching a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. It was sold every bit a manner to piece of work anywhere without a laptop. The reason it never took off was that keyboards, mice, and monitors aren't that portable, and there isn't much of a business infrastructure of workstations with peripherals but no PCs.

You tin can nevertheless do that here by attaching a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and a USB-C-to-HDMI cable, but Samsung rejiggered the entire experience this yr. Now DeX is likewise a way to employ your phone as a virtual machine, in a window on your PC or Mac. The obvious utilise for this is elevate-and-driblet file transfer, simply there are two other potential killer apps.

One is in concern: If you have a secure enclave on your telephone protected with Samsung'due south Knox software, y'all can now use that data on your laptop inside the virtual-machine window.

But the other apply could be much broader. It lets you use messaging and social media apps that don't have skillful PC clients, on your PC. I'k constantly getting text letters and Google Hangouts on my phone, and I go along breaking focus from the work I'g doing on my PC to look at the smaller screen. With DeX, that's stock-still.

Hangouts works great on DeX. Snapchat and TikTok work surprisingly well. Instagram works fine, except that you lot can't resize information technology then it's stuck in a pretty pocket-sized subwindow.

There are other ways to manage the dual-screen life, and Samsung offers one hither, too: Link to Windows, a lower-impact feature of Windows 10 that doesn't open up a full virtual machine window, only simply integrates SMS and notifications into your Windows desktop. That's fine, if that's all you lot need.

I've tried various other solutions with diverse other Android phones. Google Messages for web is cool, only has to be freshly logged-in every time you close your browser window. Ditto for the Google Hangouts Chrome extension. There'due south a desktop app for Instagram, but information technology doesn't work well. Popping your whole phone upward in a window seems similar a clean mode of dealing with these issues.

Camera: Nothing's Changed

The Note x+ has four cameras on the dorsum and one on the front end. They are effectively the aforementioned as the ones on the Samsung Milky way S10 5G. On the back, yous have a 12-megapixel chief camera with one.4-micron pixels and a lens that switches between f/ane.v and f/2.4 depending on calorie-free; a 12-megapixel, f/ii.1 "2x zoom" photographic camera; a 16-megpixel, f/2.ii broad-bending camera; and a fourth dimension-of-flying sensor for AR applications. The forepart camera is 10 megapixels.

The S10'south telephoto camera is f/2.four, not f/2.1 The Note 9 doesn't take the broad-angle camera or the time-of-flight sensor.

The fourth dimension-of-flying sensor, and then far, is not terribly useful. Information technology enables an AR measuring app, but that'due south most it. In the future it's supposed to enable a "3D scanner" feature that scans objects so turns them into 3D avatars you tin then put into AR scenes or even make act things out via motion-capture, but that characteristic isn't live still.

The S9, Notation 9, and S10 all accept bang-up-looking pictures in skillful low-cal, and the Note 10 does, besides. I'k especially impressed past how abrupt the broad-angle lens is at the edges; the OnePlus seven Pro'southward wide-angle lens gets really soft in those areas.

I like the images from the wide-angle photographic camera

Samsung'south cameras at this point trail Google and Huawei on depression-lite functioning, and they've made essentially no gains from the S9 to Notation ten generations. As the lights go down, images go blurry and laden with artifacts. I establish that Samsung'south night mode essentially turns the brightness up a fleck, without pulling out many more details.

Low-calorie-free performance isn't the greatest

Samsung has added a bunch of interesting filters and effects to this telephone, although they'll also bubble down to the S10 generation. I specially similar the "color-pop" effect, also bachelor on Motorola phones, which makes the main subject area of an prototype color where the background is blackness-and-white. You lot can utilize color-popular and mistiness filters to videos, too.

The phone does very well at finding the edges of a subject for the color-pop issue, but information technology often has trouble with a too-shallow virtual depth of field for the background blur effect, especially on the front camera. Google's Pixel phones do a bit ameliorate there.

With video recording, in that location's ane more than flagship feature: an "audio zoom" effect that magnifies the sound from a source as you zoom in on it. I tested it zooming in on a conversation in a noisy room, and while it isn't magic, it definitely makes the chat more prominent every bit you zoom in. Is it a spy cam feature? Borderline—I still couldn't be more than than 20 anxiety or and so from the chat, but I could certainly accept used it if I was a private investigator at a restaurant.

Coming from a previous Samsung phone, the wide-angle camera may be the biggest change. I really like broad-bending lenses; they offer a lot of options for composition that yous just can't get with a standard lens. But call back, pretty much the same assortment of cameras is bachelor on the Galaxy S10+ and the smaller Note 10, for less money.

Charge!

The Note 10+ has an excellent four,300mAh battery. I got 12 hours, x minutes of video playback at full brightness on a charge, which is excellent. I've had the phone for a few days now, and information technology's lasted well over a day when I wasn't testing the bombardment. Samsung has boosted its standard charger to 25 watts, which fills upwards the battery very quickly: I timed information technology as nicely filling upwards from 0 to 100 percent in 69 minutes, with the trend looking like this:

A more standard 10w charger (most chargers you lot probably have lying effectually are 10w chargers) takes about 2.5 hours to charge the battery. Y'all can likewise buy a $50, 45-watt charger from Samsung that charges the phone even more than quickly.

But yous pretty much have to utilize Samsung's branded chargers to achieve these speeds. Dan Bader at Android Central explains that Samsung is using an open up, but equally of at present largely unimplemented, standard called USB-C PPS for fast charging. That means most USB-C cables and existing USB-C PD chargers volition not go over 15w when charging this phone. Wireless chargers such as Samsung'southward $79.99 charging pad also go up to 15w.

To get fast charging without the built-in adapter, you need a PPS power adapter and an "east-marked," USB-C 3.1 v2 cablevision; so far, we haven't seen many of those, and you can assume the ones you lot already accept don't meet that standard.

Should Yous Upgrade?

I've never been on lath with the idea of buying a Note only because it'due south a large phone. If you desire a big phone, in that location are less expensive, still fantabulous options out at that place—the Galaxy S10+ and the OnePlus seven Pro, for example. You can become an S10+ for $799.99, which is a $300 divergence from the Notation ten+, and all you lot actually lose is the Due south Pen, the video filters, and the new DeX mode.

But Samsung tends to take absolutely insane trade-in deals to get people to upgrade. In this case, in that location's a $350 trade-in value for a Note 8, which is $200 more than you can get selling 1 on a marketplace like Gazelle (you tin can get closer by using eBay, but information technology takes more effort). And Samsung takes really banged-up phones, as long as they work and aren't croaky. Samsung'due south trade-in deals might make up the differece between the Galaxy S10+ and the Note ten+ for you.

To me, the Annotation series has always been about the S Pen, and well-nigh people who want to use it: artists, doctors, journalists, and other people who write, draw, notate. Samsung made an effort this twelvemonth to make the pen important to photographers, merely I feel similar that's really pushing information technology.

This year, I've been leaning toward the smaller and more than affordable phones in Samsung's flagship lineup. I like the Galaxy S10e more than the S10+, for instance. And while nosotros haven't tested it nonetheless, nosotros know the smaller Notation 10 has a lower-resolution screen, lacks the microSD carte slot, and has somewhat less RAM. But it has the Due south Pen, the same processor, and yet cameras every bit the Note 10+, and it isn't a handbuster.

Nosotros're getting the smaller Note 10 in for review shortly, and will decide which of Samsung's Notes is our Editors' Choice. Merely if you're looking to purchase something correct at present, we recommend saving some coin on whatsoever of the aforementioned smaller models.

Samsung Milky way Note 10+

Pros

The Lesser Line

The Samsung Galaxy Notation ten+ is a big, powerful phone that's proficient for artists and notation-takers.

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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/samsung-galaxy-note-10-plus

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