Samsung Galaxy Note 3 review

The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 may have been superceded by the excellent Galaxy Note 4, but last year’s top phablet is now cheaper than ever, making it a great value alternative if you don’t want to shell out for its newer, shinier cousin. At time of writing, SIM-free handsets now cost around £350, with contracts starting from around £35 a month with nothing to pay upfront for unlimited calls and texts and 4GB of 4G data. This is  cheaper than the currently £469 SIM-free Note 4, although the gap has narrowed considerably between the two. If you you can push your budget slightly further, the Note 4 is no longer completely out of reach.

Those wanting to save even more money should consider the cheaper HTC Desire 816, but if you’re set on buying a large phone and want the stylus to go with it, the Note 3 is the giant smartphone to buy for anyone looking to keep costs down.

There’s no question that the Galaxy smartphone range has a shared design lineage, but the Note 3 still manages to stand out from the Samsung Galaxy S4 thanks to a more pronounced silver trim and a leather-effect backplate, complete with faux stitching.

It’s still made from polycarbonate plastic, but the art deco-style ribbed chrome edges gives the phone a unique appearance. It’s refreshingly different, unlike the slew of new handsets that are content to play it safe with only the bare minimum of changes. At 8.2mm thick you won’t struggle to slip it in a pocket, despite the huge display.

That screen dominates the front of the phone, with just a Samsung logo above it and home, back and menu buttons below. At 5.7in the Note series continues to grow in screen size, but the slimmer horizontal screen bezels mean it’s practically the same size as the Note 2. We could hold it quite comfortably, but needed to use our other hand to reach the far edges of the screen. You can perform many functions, like making a call or text one-handed, but it’s really designed to be used with both hands at once.

You can find a one-handed mode in the Settings area, too, so if you need a hand free to open doors or carry bags, this mode shrinks the screen down to a more manageable size. Once enabled, all you need to do is swipe in from the edge of the screen to enable it

The 1,920×1,080 resolution AMOLED display is simply gorgeous, with vibrant colours, intense brightness and incredible contrast. At 386 pixels per inch, tiny text looks pin-sharp, even when sat side-by-side with the Galaxy S4 and its 441ppi display. This is despite Samsung’s continuing use of PenTile subpixel arrangements, which use two colours per pixel rather than three, meaning actual resolution is less than an equivalent LCD display. Of course, the followup Galaxy Note 4’s display trumps them all, with a 2,560×1,440 pixel panel that blows most large handsets out of the water. The brand-new Galaxy S6 also has a higher resolution screen in a 5.1in form factor, too. You pay the premium for this extra sharpness, and frankly if you’re looking to save money, the Full HD panel on the Note 3 is still a great piece of kit if you’re upgrading from pretty much any other phone on the market.

The abundance of screen space is an ideal match for the S-Pen, which naturally for a Note device is still a major highlight of using the Note 3. The stylus slips into the bottom of the handset when not in use and an icon appears in the notification bar when it’s removed. There’s also a reminder alert that vibrates if you take more than a few steps without the pen attached, so you shouldn’t misplace it. It still uses digitiser technology from Wacom, meaning it detects varying pressure levels, great for sketching.

Samsung has refined the software from the previous iteration, adding several new features such as Pen Window. With this you can create a window of any size by simply drawing a box on the screen and then choosing an app (from a limited but useful selection) to run within it. The scrapbook tool is much improved too, organising your cut-outs and clippings in a sensible order that’s a lot easier to navigate through. The addition of tags, which can be searched system-wide, means you can categorise your notes into web links, photos, addresses and videos without worrying about losing them to the pile.

You still get plenty of pre-installed apps designed to work with the S-Pen, including S-Note for taking down scribbles and Sketchbook for Galaxy, which is a fairly comprehensive artist’s tool with over a hundred different brushes, pencils and pens to make drawings and designs with. Apps that first appeared on the Galaxy S4, such as the S Health fitness tracker, S Translate, S Voice personal assistant and WatchOn remote control all make appearance too.

The Note 3 is also the first handset to receive Samsung’s Knox security suite, which adds Pentagon-approved levels of security to Android’s notoriously open operating system. It’s designed to support the trend for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) for corporate employees, by keeping your work data (which your IT department can access and control) separate from your personal data on one device. It’s unlikely to prove useful for the majority, but for some it could be a welcome end to lugging round a battered Blackberry too.

As well as containing a host of Samsung-designed improvements, the Galaxy Note 3 is also the first device other than Google’s own Nexus range to run the latest version of Android. 4.3 may not add much in the way of new features, but it does bring support for Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) devices such as Samsung’s own Galaxy Gear smartwatch. Until an update gets released for existing products, the Galaxy Note 3 is one of the only compatible handsets, although you’ll be looking at almost £850 to get both devices without a contract.

Just as it did with the Galaxy S4, Samsung has produced a comprehensive range of official accessories for the Note 3. You finally don’t have to choose between wireless charging and screen protection with the S View Cover Wireless, which costs around £55. We’ve only seen the standard S View cover so far, which completely replaces the back cover with a thicker faux leather face plate and flip-out front cover that protects the front.

It has a much larger viewing window than the Galaxy S4’s S View cover, and you can actually interact with the phone through it with your fingers or the S-Pen to use the camera, change music tracks or take notes without having to open up the phone. The only downside is that it covers the volume buttons on the left side of the phone, meaning you have to flip it open just to turn your music up or down.

This high price is partly due to the top-end components Samsung has opted for. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset runs at a blistering 2.3GHz and is paired with 3GB of RAM, which simply put makes the Galaxy Note 3 one of the fastest Android handsets we’ve ever tested. As well as a blistering score of 966.6 in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, 3DMark Ice Storm refused to even post a score, simply stating the phone had “maxed out” its basic and mid-range tests. Instead we had to use the Ice Storm Ultimate test, in which the Note 3 scored a massive 19093. There’s currently nothing out there that’s as fast as this.

The extra RAM (at least 1GB more than most high-end smartphones) lets the Note 3 perform some impressive multitasking abilities. You can run two apps simultaneously, dragging one on top of the other to split the screen in half. It’s ideal for taking notes while reading a website, or sending a message to one person while keeping a conversation open with another.

Throughout our testing, the Note 3 had incredible longevity. A huge 3,200mAh battery keeps the phone juiced up for an incredible length of time, helping it last an unprecedented 15 hours in our video playback test. It’s the first phone we’ve seen to include a USB3 port, which means faster charging from a PC with USB3 ports and faster data transfers to boot. Thankfully regular Micro USB cables still work fine, although the phone won’t charge quite as rapidly.

We tested the 32GB Note 3, and although there’s also a 64GB version available, Samsung hasn’t made a 16GB model. This means paying more initially for the handset, but should mean you won’t run out of storage space in a hurry. A microSD card slot underneath the rear faceplate is a welcome addition, letting you add up to 64GB at a later date if required.

The Qualcomm chipset has several unique features beyond raw speed. It is able to record 4K video clips using the 13-megapixel rear camera, and play back high-quality 24-bit, 192 KHz audio files. The latter will only appeal to the small group of audiophiles that actually have such high bit rate music, but the former is far more useful if you want to capture a moment at the highest possible detail.

Never mind that there’s very few screens capable of playing back 4K content, that you can only record up to five minutes of footage at a time or that you can’t edit your clips on the phone. The amount of recorded detail is startling at times, but it depends on having well-lit subjects – we noticed some odd banding effects when filming our still life in low light.

Samsung has opted to pair the same 13-megapixel, backside illuminated (BSI) camera sensor found in the Galaxy S4 with the Note 3, along with an LED flash and digital image stabilisation. Several new auto modes have been added, including ones for capture a golf swing and the Google PhotoSphere-mimicking Surround Shot, but the interface is basically the same. You still get a 20-shot burst mode, Dual Shot, which captures your face in a postage stamp-sized window while you’re taking pictures with the rear camera, Animated Photo to create short looping video clips and Sound & Shot, which records seven seconds of audio to accompany your images.

Picture quality is essentially on par with the Galaxy S4, with only slight variations in noise but almost identical colour accuracy between both phones. Outdoors, it coped well with the autumn sunshine, creating realistic colours and capturing plenty of detail. Activating image stabilisation tends to wash out the colours slightly, but it certainly makes for clearer images.

Moving inside to our still life scene, there was plenty of small detail captured from our stuffed animals. Exposures were consistently accurate across the varying light levels, and the high-resolution helps when it comes to cropping down images later without resulting in too much pixilation. However, there’s no dedicated night mode like there was on the S4, meaning you’re forced to use the flash to avoid blurry, noisy images when shooting in very low light.

Samsung typically fills its smartphones with a huge number of features, but it has outdone itself with the Galaxy Note 3. The S-Pen, gesture controls, eye-tracking to keep the screen awake, menus that swipe in from all sides, proper multitasking and a whole host of pre-installed apps arguably mean the Note 3 is brimming over with extras. Most are welcome additions but arguably this may not be the handset for those coming to Android for the first time.

As a piece of hardware, the Galaxy Note 3 not only improves on its predecessor but manages to stand on its own as a top class smartphone. Taking its S-Pen functions into consideration, it could be a digital artists’ best friend, but even without it’s a blazingly fast, long-lasting handset with an above average camera and gorgeous display.

There’s no denying the Galaxy Note 4 is the superior phablet, but now the Note 3’s price has dropped to around £350 SIM-free or £35.50 per month on contract, it’s still a great choice if you’re don’t want to pay for the Note 4’s high contract prices. If you can stump up that much cash per month for the full length of a 24-month contract then this is an outstanding piece of technology. The Note 4, though, has now fallen in price, which makes the decision considerably more difficult. The 2014 model has better specifications is practically every area, and choosing that over the Note 3 will mean your phone is relevant for longer. If not, though, the Note 3 is still an great buy; if you find one second-hand or on a cheap contract, you won’t be making a mistake.