Samsung Galaxy Note Edge review

The Samsung Galaxy Note Edge is easily one of the most bizarre smartphones you’re likely to see this year. While the vast majority of the phone resembles Samsung’s excellent Galaxy Note 4 phablet, the key difference is the titular sloping edge on the right hand side of the handset, adding an extra 160 pixels to its 5.6in 2,560×1,440 resolution display.

It’s certainly a novel and eye-catching piece of design, but those hoping for a more manageable and pocket-friendly phablet over the 5.8in Note 4 will be disappointed, as the extra resolution actually makes the Note Edge closer in width to the palm-hogging Nexus 6. Measuring 151x82x8.3mm, we found reaching over to the other side of the screen was a bit of a stretch when using the phone single-handed, but at least the textured faux leather rear provided more grip than its Google rival.

You’re unlikely to drop it, then, but we’re not convinced the curve adds any real value to the phone’s overall practicality. It makes it easier to swipe through the various side panels on offer – which range from the default app launcher to the day’s weather, stats from Samsung’s S Health app, news headlines, data usage, a Windows-esque task bar and even a burger-stacking game – but none of them use the curve in any meaningful way and we found that shunting everything to one side felt needlessly cramped when we tried tapping each one’s respective icons.

^ The curve houses separate side panels to the main screen which you can scroll through with a swipe of your thumb

Cycling through the side panels backwards was even more frustrating, as we repeatedly caught the edge of the main screen in the same motion, resulting in several unintentional trips to the full-screen Flipboard app that sits to the left of the main home screen.

Still, we never accidentally hit any of the curved app launcher icons when reaching across the side of the screen, regardless of which hand we were using. While the phone has clearly been designed with right-handed users in mind, left-handed users have been catered for here as well, as you can flip the edge panel’s orientation when you rotate the phone 180 degrees.

Naturally, this means the home, back and recent app buttons will be located rather unhelpfully at the top of the handset, but luckily Samsung’s provided onscreen buttons to help counteract this problem. However, you’ll still have to turn the phone the right way up to answer calls, as there’s no microphone at the top of the phone and the lower microphones weren’t good enough to pick up our voice when we tried taking a call with the phone upside down.

The only good thing about the curved edge is the night clock, which shows the time and date for up to 12 hours when the phone’s in sleep mode. This means you can lie the phone flat on your bedside table and immediately see the time without having to reach over and turn it on.

^ The Night Clock is a great feature, but it’s the only one that really uses the curve in any meaningful way

The clock’s brightness is just right, too, so it won’t distract you from getting to sleep. This is a great bit of design which makes clever use of the phone’s unique design, although thew position of the time on the curve means you can’t see the top of each number if you sleep level with or just below your bedside table.

Outside of the main home screens, the curve is completely ignored, as you’re simply presented with a black edge which can be customised with a bit of text. It rather suggests that even Samsung doesn’t know what to do with this strange display, and while the screen’s reflective surface managed to mask the unused screen rather effectively, the single handwritten italicised font is terribly tacky and we think it really detracts from the rest of the phone’s high-end design.

The curve also makes taking pictures rather awkward, as the onscreen shutter button snakes round the top right corner of the screen. We weren’t able to comfortably reach this with our thumb, and trying to do it with our index finger felt cramped and reduced the stability of our grip. The 16-megapixel sensor does have optical image stabilisation built in, but the shutter button was so uncomfortable that we ended up enabling the ‘tap the screen’ option to take photos instead.

^ The shutter button is tricky to reach in the top right corner when you’re trying to hold the camera steady

Onscreen buttons aside, our outdoor shots looked great, showing bright, vibrant colours even in cloudy, overcast weather conditions. Buildings looked visibly sharper and less hazy than those we took on the Note 4 at the same time, and shadows were darker and more pronounced, giving objects a bit more pop compared to the somewhat glazed over effect we saw on the Note 4.

^ The Note Edge produced very detailed shots with rich colours even in overcast weather conditions

^ The sky was a little overexposed in places, but the Note 4 suffered from this as well

The Note Edge’s HDR mode also produced visibly more pleasing shots than the Note 4. Colours looked richer and the higher level of contrast made objects appear that much more defined. However, both phones had a tendency to smooth over areas of detail on HDR mode, making the individual bricks we saw on Auto mode disappear into one mass of colour on the neighbouring buildings, so we’d recommend sticking to Auto for more detailed shots.

^ With HDR mode enabled, photos were a fraction brighter, but didn’t look glazed over like those we took on the Note 4

^ HDR helped correct the exposure problems we had in Auto mode, but smoothed out a lot of the finer detail

The curve may be a bit of a botched experiment, then, but that doesn’t mean the Note Edge is necessarily a bad phone. For instance, we think its 5.6in screen is a fraction better than the Note 4‘s, as it’s not only brighter, measuring 340.08cd/m2, but its whites looked cleaner and more pure, leading to slightly punchier and more striking levels of contrast.

The screen’s pixel density is also higher than the Note 4, standing at 524PPI (pixels per inch) compared to the Note 4’s PPI of 515, although in practical terms the difference is barely noticeable. Text looked equally dark and defined thanks to the screen’s perfect 0.00cd/m2 black levels and desktop sites were just as easy to read on the Note Edge as they were on the Note 4.

As with all Samsung’s Super AMOLED panels, the Note Edge’s colour coverage hit the full 100 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. However, this doesn’t necessarily guarantee accurate colours, as our more detailed measurement report showed that reds and greens were very oversaturated. They were, however, less oversaturated than those on the Note 4, although purists will likely find both screens a little too intense. Still, we prefer the extra vibrancy afforded by the warmer colours and videos in particular look superb and much more pleasing to the eye than they do on colder LCD screens.

S Pen

Elsewhere, though, the Note Edge struggles to stand out from its flat sibling. Like the Note 4, the Note Edge comes with Samsung’s latest S Pen which slots into the bottom of the handset when it’s not in use. Taking it out automatically triggers an action wheel, giving you the option of jotting down a quick memo, selecting something onscreen or sketching out a picture. With 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity at its disposal, it’s a great tool for drawing, although the sloping edge doesn’t give quite as much support to your hand as the flat edge of the Note 4.

^ Multi Window is excellent for multi-tasking with different apps, but it’s a shame the curve is completely neglected

The Note Edge also has Samsung’s Multi Window feature, which lets you use two apps simultaneously. This is great for multitasking as the phone’s huge resolution gives you plenty of space to work with. We particularly like that you can adjust the height of each supported app to your liking.

One-handed Operation

The Note 4’s one-handed operation mode also makes an appearance here. By quickly swiping your thumb from the side of the screen to the middle and back again, the whole screen (side bar included) snaps to either side of the display.

It’s very reminiscent of Apple’s Reachability feature in iOS 8, as it brings every part of the screen within comfortable reaching distance. However, here you can adjust the size of the window to your liking, giving you an effective screen size ranging from 3.5in to 4.5in. This lets you see the entire screen rather than just a small portion of it like Apple’s Reachability, and the gesture worked very reliably when we tried it out for ourselves.

However, it’s clear the feature hasn’t been quite tailor-made to fit in with the Note Edge’s curved screen, as the already tiny footprint of the app launcher bar becomes even smaller here, making it even harder to swipe through the edge panels and tap the app icons accurately.