Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it can.The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is a far more imposing specimen than I had expected. Given Samsung’s recent track record I thought we were in for an incremental boost at best. Thankfully, I was dead wrong. The Note 3 is pretty awesome.
Just as the prophecies foretold, the most prominent piece of hardware aboard the Galaxy Note – it’s display – has expanded to a full 5.7-inches. However, the rest of the device hasn’t become much bigger at all, keeping in step with Samsung’s other recent successor models. That means the bezel has become narrower, and that’s always a sharp thing to go for design wise in our book.
The display is still Super AMOLED and with a full HD 1080p resolution, so as with Samsung’s recent crop of smartphones things look really colorful and punchy while in the sharpness stakes things are peachy too. In other words, it’s great to stare into that display for as long as you like.
But what of the build materials? That Achilles heel as far as Samsung devices are concerned in the eyes of KYM. Well, the supposedly debunked rumours about Samsung opting for a new build material are actually true, in a way. No it’s not metal, no it’s not high-grade polycarbonate and no its not Carbon Fibre. Samsung has gone down the whole ‘Notepad’ theme with a faux leather back panel. It’s soft touch and features stitching around the edge. Clearly when Apple threw the skeumorphism out of iOS Samsung found it in the street and put it to use in a whole new way.
But fear not vegans, I’m reliably informed by an attendant that it’s not real leather, it’s synthetic, and apparently wipe clean.It sounds like I’m taking the mick, but actually this is an improvement. I will take this over Samsung’s old slippery plastic any day. And as usual, the actual build quality itself is suitably robust with no flex or give and a solid feel in the hand.
Proportions wise it’s very neat and tidy, as well as being nicely balanced, nicely skinny and Samsung is prepping a wide range of interchangeable coloured back panels, covers and accessories for you to go nuts with. There’s even one with a window.On the performance front it’s business as usual, both in terms of how Samsung has optimised its UI and developed a good knack for implementing Android on Qualcomm chips. Everything’s smooth and silky, as you would hope on a Snapdragon 800 quad-core chip.You can get an insight into the Samsung Galaxy Note 3's performance and features in the eight minute showcase below, as I was lucky enough to get a guided tour of the device from one of Samsung's product experts.
Included in the overview is a look at the Galaxy Note 3's ability to quickly bring up windowed apps, enhanced Multiscreen multitasking and how the device can store, search and bring up information via the scrapbook feature.Another thing I really like is that Air Command feature. Despite having a daft name suggesting remote control of an aircraft carrier, its similar to Air Gesture in that you bring up a radial control wheel for various S-Pen funcions, simply by hovering the pen and tapping the button. It works really well and I’d love to see more features like this in future iterations.
So all round this looks like a winner for Samsung, it has managed to finely distil the cooler things about the Galaxy Note series, improve its build and design and generally put together something much more polished. I'll reserve judgement on finer points such as the camera, S-Pen functions and the like until the full review, but in the meantime colour me happy.
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