I know I'm a little late to the party on this one, but this is my review of the Galaxy Note 3 from Rogers. I've had a full day and a half to play with this device, but I've also owned every Note before this, so I know what to expect in terms of features. So let's get into it shall we?
Physical Design.
The Galaxy Note 3 feels really nice in the hands, yes it's on the big side, but if you've dealt with the Galaxy Note series before, you should feel right at home. The black version as the leather backing, finished with a silver trim around the edges. There's no sharp edges to feel rough on the hands, and the sheer sight of it just dazzles my eyes.
At first glance of the bottom of the phone my first thoughts were, "Oh great, a proprietary charging port..." However, standard Micro USBs work just fine, which was a sigh of relief for me. Rather than placing the speaker at the back of the device as seen on previous version of the Galaxy Note series, Samsung decided to go for the bottom this time. Normally placing the speaker at the bottom is a sign that you're going to muffle the sounds when playing games, but the Galaxy Note 3 is big enough that your hands are not likely to cover it. For the sake of keeping this review short, I'm just going to say everything else is what you'd expect and seen on previous generations. You got your sensors at the top of the screen, buttons at the bottom, and still that big physical home button.
Screen Quality and Size.
Samsung has chosen to go with their Super AMOLED Screen with the Note 3, and it's 5.7 inches, bright and beautiful. I'm one of the few people I know in person that's actually happy Samsung hasn't yet opted for on-screen navigation buttons, I'm all for maximising screen real estate, and this phone really helps with that.
The screen and sensors work great together on the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, offering many pen and finger gestures, hovering for quick view, and other various features. The downside of this is you must live within Samsung's world to make use of many of them. Opting for 3rd party apps, or stock Google apps render many of these sensor related treats useless.
Sound Quality.
Galaxy Note phones have always excelled at sounds quality, mainly due to the fact they have a lot of space to work with. Granted, this probably isn't going to match the sound of the HTC One, it's not going to leave most people begging for more.
Call audio quality is also great on the Galaxy Note 3, accompanied with voice activations like speaking, "Answer" or "Reject" while the phone is ringing, to allow for that hands free option for drivers, or for the multitaskers out there.
Camera Quality.
I've always given Samsung credit for their quality in Camera's, they're one manufacture that keep the rest on their A game if they wish to keep up. Samsung giving the Note 3 a 13MP Camera, however most people will be shooting in the 9.6MP mode for that wide screen goodness
If you've ever used the Galaxy Camera, you'll also notice many of those features have been moved over to the Galaxy Note 3. Samsung also incorporates a very well low light setting that amplifies light for those inside shots without flash. The Galaxy Note coming with 32GB of storage and an optional MicroSD card slot to increase that up to 64GB additional space, you'll never need to worry about running out of space when capturing your life.
Battery Life.
The first question out of anyones face when seeing a new phone is, "How's the battery life?". I'm happy to report the Galaxy Note 3 excelles with battery life, topping any phone I've ever used. On my first day of use, I was able to squeeze just shy of 10 hours of screen-on time. Of course that'll depend on what apps you're using, settings, widgets, etc. I left most things on, and kept the screen as auto-brightness the entire time.
With the Galaxy Note 3, you won't need to worry about coming up short in a days usage.
Power and Performance.
I'm not going to sit here and ramble off tech specs, because that's been done a million times by other blogs already, but what I can tell you is the Note 3 is lag free. Topping the charts of just about every benchmark I've thrown it at, and to date, holds most of the latest powerful hardware available.
Granted benchmarks don't mean everything, but with inhand experience, the Galaxy Note 3 will handle anything you throw at it. Due it it's multi window mode, you can run two of your favorite apps without a single hiccup.
The Mighty Pen!
The pen on the Galaxy Note 3 no longer resembles a Nintendo DS cheap plastic stylus as it did in the past generations, you can tell they put a lot into it. Samsung has made the entire device operable with the pen now, that means the physical buttons can now be activated by the stylus.
Granted a better pen can't make my terrible writing skills better, it'll please the users who actually use their Note 3 as a note pad.
Final Word
I've owned both previous generations of the Galaxy Note series, and it just keeps getting better and better. There's a lot of bloat, but that's to be expected with Samsung. However, most of which can be disabled natively in the Application Manager.
Owning a Nexus 5 and taking on the Galaxy Note 3, I expected a flawless and lagless environment, Samsung delivered. Giving me essentially every option I could ever want due to their crazy amounts of features and sensors they've crammed in here.
This is one phone I'm proud to call my own.
Clearly I've missed some portions of this review, but for the sake of article length I've decided to trim some of the more common things.
If you have a question on something not covered here, feel free to leave a comment down below and I'll try my best to answer them all.
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