SAMSUNG GALAXY NOTE 3 (EXYNOS 5 OCTA) REVIEW


          
Samsung launched its successor to note series of android smartphone namely Galaxy Note 3 in India which is priced @ 50,499/-. It is available is Black, White & Pink shades.

DESIGN, BUILD QUALITY & DISPLAY
The design of this phone is good. It has corning glass 3 on front and a art leather finish plastic back and feels very good in hands. It is slim at 8.3mm and weighs 168gms. It has 5.7 inch FULL HD Super AMOLED display of resolution 1920 x 1280 with 386 ppi. The viewing angles and sunlight legibility of the display is Excellent. It runs on Touch Wiz User Interface. The display supports 10 multi-touch points and the brightness of the screen is Excellent.

STORAGE, MULTIMEDIA & CONNECTIVITYS
It has 16GB/32GB of internal storage which is further expandable upto 64GB. The device features dedicated multimedia apps like music for songs, a gallery to store all images and videos and a movie player for playing movies respectively which are quite good. FM radio comes pre-installed. Conductivities like 2G, 3G speeds upto 42mbps download & upto 5.76mbps upload, 4G speeds up to 150mbps download & upto 50mbps upload, Wifi a/b/g/n/ac, Wifi dual-band, Wifi direct, Wifi hotsopt, USB OTG as well as Bluetooth 4.0 LE (Low Energy) and NFC as well as IR (Infrared Blaster) port. This is also the first to feature micro usb 3.0 port.

CAMERA & VIDEO RECORDING CAPABILITIES
It has a 13MP rear camera with autofocus and Led flash which features Simultaneous image and video recording, Geo-tagging, Touch focus, Image stabilization, Dual camera, HDR etc. The camera clarity is very good overall. Daytime the images are pretty good and has good amount of details respectively but in the night is where the noise starts to become bit visible visible and to get better details at night HDR mode images with bit of steady hands helps to produce slightly better images still image quality at night is pretty good. It does 4K (Ultra HD) 2160p@30fps and FULL HD 1080p@60fps, 1080p@30fps video recording with video stabilization and stereo sound with HDR having bit-rate of 17mbps for 30fps, 34mbps for 60fps, 47mbps for 4K videos and stores in mp4 format. The video recording clarity is very good overall. Daytime the video clarity is very good and has good amount of details respectively but at night video clarity is pretty acceptable. It also has a 2MP front camera for selfe's with 1080p video recording and clarity is pretty fine.
SOFTWARE, HARDWARE, PERFORMANCE & BENCHMARKS
It runs Android (OS) 4.3 Jellybean out of the box upgradable to 4.4.2 kitkat. It has a Exynos 5 Octa (5420) core processor running a quad core 1.9 GHZ (Cortex-A15) & a quad core 1.3 GHZ (Cortex-A7) with 3GB RAM and Mali T628 MP6 (Hexa core) GPU. The performance is Excellent which provides number of graphic intensive games and multitasking run very well and there is no lag at all. But UI lag is expected at rare occations. This phone also comes with stylus as S-pen which has five initial functions/actions which in depth can be assigned for specific tasks those 5 actions are Action Memo, Scrap Booker, Screen Write, S Finder and Pen Window. It also comes with smart gestures like smart play, smart pause, smart scroll and IR gestures for air gestures. 
QUADRANT : 20260.
ANTUTU : 31656.
NENAMARK 2 : 60.1fps.

BATTERY LIFE PERFORMANCE
It has a removable Li-Ion 3200 mah battery. The battery life is very good which is given below.
BROWSING : upto 9:10H.
VIDEO WATCHING: upto 13:40H.
TALKTIME : upto 20H(2G) / upto 18H(3G).
STANDBY TIME: upto 440 H(2G) / upto 420 H(3G).

PROS
*Good build quality.
*Excellent display and viewing angle.
*Excellent Performance.
*Very good camera and video recording clarity.
*Good loudspeaker.
*Very good battery life.
*IR Blaster, micro usb 3.0 port
*S-pen features air & smart gestures.
*Removable battery.
CONS
*Design is not bad but doesn't feel premium against competitors.
*No OIS (Optical Image Stabalization).
*Difficult for one handed use.
*No dedicated camera key.
*Bit pricy.
*No LTE & 4K UHD video option.
*Mali-T628 GPU might not be fully optimised yet for some games.

OVERALL PRODUCT RATING° : 8.7/10.
°overall product rating refers to all the aspects including the price, performance, overall quality, features, etc., based on individual product.

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