BEST FEATURES I LIKE:
The Note 3 features a 5.7-inch Full HD Super AMOLED display which delivers punchy colours and super deep blacks. The retina-burning colours overpower your senses when you first power it up but this is quickly fixed from the display settings. The panel is super sensitive to even the faintest of touches and the new S Pen’s hover mode works at a much greater distance from the screen making it easier to use without accidentally touching the screen.
The UI remains unchanged from our outing with the S4
The Note 3 launched in India is the N900 variant which packs in the Exynos 5 Octa 5420 SoC. This is a slightly faster variant of the one used in the Galaxy S4. The Cortex-A7 part of the chip runs at 1.3GHz while the Cortex-A15 cluster now runs at 1.9GHz. Despite this speed bump, we still had moments where the phone would lag intermittently; it takes forever to switch between portrait to landscape at times and a couple of times, the phone would just shut down after turning the screen off. These are glitches with the software more than anything else and Samsung needs to roll out a patch real quick.
The features of S Pen have been updated heavily and there are plenty of new gestures available. Some of the important ones are best demonstrated in the video below. Apart from the usual suite of apps that were present in the Galaxy S4, Samsung also bundles along Knox, SketchBook and ScrapBook as new additions. Knox tightens up security when your phone is connected to an enterprise network. It adheres to ARM’s TrustZone-based security measure and features a customisable secure boot. SketchBook is a powerful tool for sketching and is incredibly fun to use.