Best phone screen available. Octo-core Samsung Exynos 7420 processor. Excellent battery life. S Pen is still unique among phablets.
The Galaxy Note 5 packs incredible processing power and puts it behind the best display you can get. But this iteration of Samsung's top phablet comes with compromises.
One-and-a-half steps forward, one step back. The Samsung Galaxy Note 5 gives you the best smartphone screen on the market, and it continues to be endlessly productive, thanks to its slick S Pen stylus. But intoxicated by the Galaxy S6's flashy design, Samsung chooses form over function in ways that aren't really necessary on a phablet, and some of the new Note's flagship features are incremental enough that I don't see a big reason for Galaxy Note 4 owners to upgrade.
Design and Physical FeaturesA quick note: Samsung sent us a European model of the phone for review, which has a bit of non-U.S. bloatware and some of the wrong LTE frequency bands for our country, so this is a preview rather than a rated review. We'll add a rating once we receive the U.S. carrier models to test.
Samsung goes for the full S6 treatment with the Galaxy Note 5, encasing it in a sealed glass-and-metal body with gently curved sides. At 6 by 3 by 0.3 inches (HWD) and 6 ounces, it's 0.1 inch narrower than the Note 4, but you lose the memory card slot, the removable battery, and the grippy texture of the Note 4's back. This phone is a lot more slippery; it's not an issue with the smaller Galaxy S6, which can be gripped easily in one hand, but here it's a problem.
The 5.7-inch, 2,560-by-1,440-pixel display is bright, rich, and beautiful. Ray Soneira at DisplayMate Labs analyzed it and found that it's noticeably brighter and more power-efficient than the screen on the Note 4, which is in turn far better than the iPhone 6 Plus display. It's also brighter and less reflective than the LG G4 screen. Samsung has always been a leader in displays, and the Note 5 takes things to the next level.
I am not one of those "removable battery or death" people. I really like the Galaxy S6 and the Motorola Droid Turbo, for instance, two phones with sealed batteries. Shrinking a single-handed phone to the smallest possible size by way of a sealed-in battery makes sense. And the 3,000mAh cell here has plenty of power: We achieved 8 hours and 30 minutes of nonstop video streaming over LTE at maximum volume. That's longer than the Note 4, and pushes twice the battery life of the iPhone 6 Plus. Like the Note 4, the Note 5 uses Qualcomm Quick Charge, which charges the phone in under two hours with a compatible adapter.
But whereas the Note 4 has a microSD card slot to add up to 200GB of storage, the Note 5 is stuck at 32GB or 64GB with no card slot. And there's not even a 128GB option like you can get with the iPhone 6 Plus. This design choice is just unnecessary. With phablets, bigger actually can be better; you're not trying to save millimeters to slim the phone down.
Samsung also moves the single speaker to the bottom of the phone from the back, next to a USB 2.0 port; that's a missed opportunity as well in the new era of fast and reversible USB-C. The signature S Pen stylus now pops out so you don't have to pull it out, and it's flatter and thus easier to hold, with a more attractive two-tone design.
Networking and Battery LifeOur European test unit showed poor reception on T-Mobile's network; we were advised by Samsung that the band layout is all wrong for the U.S., so we're not going to draw conclusions about call quality and LTE speeds from this device.
We were able to test Wi-Fi speeds, though, and they were terrific. Compared with the Note 4, both devices sustained 30Mbps at 25 feet away from a Verizon FiOS router. The Note 5 maintained 18Mbps another 15 feet away, through a wall and a door, while the Note 4 showed 8-12Mbps. Credit that to support for dual-band 802.11ac. The phone also supports GPS, NFC, and Bluetooth 4.1.
Now the other wireless connections get a little arcane.
Like the Galaxy S6, the Note 5 supports Samsung Pay, the company's long-promised payment service which is promised to work with every form of credit card acceptance in the U.S.. The service isn't launching until late September, so it's impossible to say whether it works well. The phone also supports a new form of high-res wireless audio (UHQ-BT, an ultra-high-definition wireless lossless audio codec) that works with exactly one pair of high-end Samsung headphones—the Samsung Level On Wireless Pro—which are not yet available. It also supports Qi and PMA wireless charging, two technologies we've been hearing about for years, but have failed to take off.
Just like with the Note 5's design, I feel like Samsung is adding these extra features just to tout innovation, rather than including them to improve usability.
Processor and PerformanceBuit around one of the fastest smartphone processors available, the Note 5 has the same 2.1GHz octo-core Samsung Exynos 7420 CPU as the Galaxy S6, and it handily bests Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 on multiple benchmarks.
Antutu benchmark scores were between 67k-69k, Geekbench scores were in the 1,450 range, and the Note 5 scored 37 fps in the GFXBench T-Rex test. Among phones currently available today, only the Apple iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, with Apple's A8 processor, scored higher. No other Android device can keep up on processor scores, although the high screen resolution gives the phone a bit of a disadvantage against devices with lower-res screens when it comes to graphics tests.
The Note 5 runs Android 5.1.1, with an update to Android Marshmallow promised in the future. At this level, you expect apps to run smoothly, and they consistently did throughout the test period. Although I'll put a caveat out there: I used the Galaxy S6 as my primary phone for some time, and after about three months, the phone began to slow down due to background cruft. Since I've only been using the Note 5 for a few days, I don't know if that will be the case here too.
Too many words have been spilled about the TouchWiz UI layer, but by now you should know that Samsung's Android, while perfectly functional and compatible with other phones, doesn't look exactly like Google's Android. All the widgets and icons are different, and Samsung has its own replacements for the camera, contacts, gallery, calendar, and such. In some cases these replacements are necessary, so you can use the S Pen. For instance, S Planner is a calendar you can scribble into. In other cases, well, it's just Samsung.
But let me praise the S Pen once again. There is no other stylus for Android that offers the same level of sensitivity and input speed as Samsung's S Pen. And the Note 5 introduces a new mode that launches note-taking as soon as you remove the pen, without unlocking the phone, so you can just start writing even when the screen is off. That, combined with dual-window multitasking, make the Note series the best Android devices for productivity.
Samsung is also playing up its SideSync app, which has been around for a few years but is worth noting. SideSync mirrors your phone's screen on your PC, letting you drag and drop files, send messages, and tether your phone for Internet access very easily. There's a Mac version, but it isn't as functional as the Windows app.
The My Knox app is new this year, although it's also available for the Note 4. Like on the BlackBerry OS, it lets you create separate, protected workspaces for personal and work modes, with different accounts and sets of settings that don't mix. That's another boon for productivity, and it prevents you from sending the wrong messages from the wrong account. Unfortunately, this isn't a dual-SIM phone, so you can't have separate home and work lines. That would be revolutionary on a major U.S. carrier device.
Music and PhotographyThe Note 4 already supports high-res, 24-bit/192kHz audio. The Note 5 purportedly ups the ante by "upscaling" lower-quality audio into a high-res mode. The truth is, this is impossible; you cannot replace what was lost in a lower-quality file. The upscaling effect seems to push vocals back a little in the mix as compared with the same track heard on a Galaxy Note Edge. This isn't what you want with most vocal music.
Also, oddly, the headphone jack delivered less volume than the Galaxy Note Edge I was testing at the same time. Using Bowers & Wilkins P5 headphones in wired mode, I could get the Edge to peak at 102dB; on the same track, the Note 5 could only hit 96dB.
The camera here is considerably better than the Note 4's. It's much more like the Galaxy S6's, which is one of the best smartphone camera on the market. The main, rear camera has the same 16 megapixels, and the front camera has been upgraded from 3.7 megapixels to 5. Autofocus is much faster than on the Note 4, reaching Galaxy S6 or iPhone levels of speed. Low-light performance is dramatically improved as well, with the rear camera delivering sharper, clearer images with no blur. On standard outdoor shots, it was much more difficult to see the difference from older Note models, but the picture-taking experience is still better thanks to the faster focus and faster HDR. The main camera records 4K video at 30 frames per second. The front camera records 1080p video at 30 frames per second. Video quality is good at either setting.
Comparisons and ConclusionsThe new Huawei Nexus phablet may be released in the next two weeks. We're thinking the Apple iPhone 6s Plus (or equivalent) will be announced on September 9. I'm not willing to declare which phablet is best until I've tested them all. There's also the Galaxy S6 edge+ to consider, but it basically trades the Note 5's S Pen for a less-useful curved display.
I'd be less ambivalent if the Galaxy Note 5 was a groundbreaking blockbuster, but it isn't. Prioritizing thin and smooth over capacious and configurable makes sense for a small, one-handed phone, but seems less valuable on a phablet. Otherwise, the faster processor, brighter screen, and improved camera are all real plusses, but not enough to tell Galaxy Note 4 owners to make the jump. It's hard to get excited about Samsung Pay when we still haven't seen it actually work in the wild, and things like high-resolution audio and wireless charging just seem like a random grab bag of features added to build up a checklist.
The Note 5's S Pen is still the single best differentiator I've seen. Writing on your phablet makes perfect sense, and being able to start writing when the screen is turned off makes it even better. But you also get an S Pen with the great-looking Note 4, which is now less expensive and does most of the same things.
This isn't a final review, so I'll give myself another week or two to mull this over as I test the U.S. carrier models. But while I'd recommend the Note 5 if the Note 4 went off the market, it's an incremental improvement, rather than a significant one.
By Sascha Segan Lead Analyst, Mobile PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts...
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Source: Samsung Galaxy Note 5
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