Samsung Galaxy Note Edge review

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