Samsung Galaxy Note 5 review:
Samsung's Galaxy Note 5, the newest addition to the market of extra-large smartphones, and the most elegant alphabet-style device you've ever seen. It's as sleek as any phone with a 5.7-inch display could be, so beautiful you won't want to hide it in some smartphone case.
But it's also a tricky device for which to define an audience, thanks to Samsung's vast collection of devices in 2015, and it removes some of the previous advantages of the Samsung line over that venerable old Apple iPhone. The Note 5 is a phone destined to have fans, and it should be celebrated for its beautiful chassis. But yes, some flaws do lurk.
The good, though, is plenty impressive, not to mention the first thing you notice. The Galaxy Note 5 is an eye-catching phone, the sleekest a Note has ever been. Much like this year's S6 Edge, the Note ditches the usual detachable back on the frame in favor of a unibody design. It maintains a curvature on the unibody, too, but unlike the S6 Edge, the curves sit on the back of the device instead of along the display.
The Note 5 is all soft edges — and very comfortable to hold during phone calls. And while this is a large phone, Samsung keeps its profile light; it weighs six ounces and is just three inches wide and 0.3 inches thick, just small enough that one-handed smartphone users will feel right at home. The S-Pen, the Note's stylus, sits along the bottom right side, with a spring-loaded release that feels gentle and friendly.
The unibody design lends the Note 5 a rigidity that previous Notes didn't have as well. This phone doesn't bend at all, a juxtapose from the Note 4, a well-designed phone that had a touch of give to it if you pressed just hard enough.
But the strengths of the Note 5 design breed their own weaknesses. The once-removable battery of previous Notes is gone now, in favor of a non-detachable battery. You'll get consistent battery life from the 3,000 mAh battery inside, though, and, like most smartphones, you should expect to get nearly a full day out of a charge. The Note 5 is also compatible with Samsung's line of wireless charging devices, so charging is simple. Aside from the fact that, at some point long into the future of an expensive phone, the battery will eventually turn your device into a brick, this is a minor quibble.
The other issue with the design, however, isn't. The strength of Android devices when measured against Apple's phones has long lain in the fact that Android devices offered a level of storage customization; you could almost always expand the memory. Not so with the Note 5.
There's no SD memory card slot here, so the storage capacity that you buy at the start is all you have past cloud storage. There's no way to increase to 128GB of storage for movies and music. Just as frustrating, the Note 5's largest-capacity version is only 64GB. Two years ago, that would have been fine, but with the rise of HD video capture and more and more people watching movies on their films, it's somewhat tiny. Again, cloud storage can mitigate some of that, but, if only to stay right there with Apple, it's critical that Samsung offer a 128GB version of its devices next year.
The internals of the phone are solid, if not stunningly spectacular. We've reached a level in 2015 where plenty of smartphones and tablets seem to be plateauing when it comes to horsepower, but performance is almost never an issue. The Note 5 is powered by an Exynos 7 octacore processor, and it's more than capable of running all your processes, backed by 4GB of RAM.
Just about everything you could want to run on the Note 5 will handle in elegant, snappy fashion. Even games such as Hearthstone, which can test hardware in its most wild moments, exhibit few signs of slowdown. The Exynos 7 is not a drastic step up from last year, but it proves capable of most tasks.
The S-Pen, meanwhile, Samsung's most distinctive improvement to its Note line, takes a drastic step forward. With the rise of the Galaxy Edge Plus, an extra-large phone with a curved screen that offers extra features, the key reason to purchase the flat-screened Note 5 is for its stylus capabilities. And Samsung does everything possible to make that worthwhile.
The spring-loaded release on the S-Pen is a small touch, but it gives the whole stylus experience a slightly more premium feel, setting the tone for that throughout your usage of the S-Pen. The button is now slightly recessed, so the annoying accidental presses of previous years happen far less frequently.
The pen itself seems to write a bit more reliably than it once did, although this still isn't a real pen, and even the finest penmanship can transform into chicken scratch here. You'll get a stronger sense of the "weight" you use when writing here as well; Samsung's quietly improved the S-Pen's ability to sense the pressure with which you aim to write.
The suite of apps here has been redesigned slightly as well. There's a new Instant Memo feature that's accessible as soon as you pull out the pen, essentially letting you write quick notes to yourself more swiftly, making the Galaxy Note 5 feel more like a notebook and less like a phone trying to be a notebook.
And the S-Note app experience opens up more quickly and has more levels of customization. A few years ago, it was at its best for solely taking notes. With the improvements to the pen and some added artistic software, it's now far more capable as an art tool.
And the Note 5 is blossoming into a more elegant, more inviting phone, as long as you can look past its shortcomings. It's no longer a phone for everyone wanting a large smartphone, in large part because there are so many options on the market, headed by the Apple iPhone 6 Plus and Samsung's own Galaxy 6 Edge Plus.
