The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 is a beast of a phone. With a 5.7 inch AMOLED screen and a 2.7 GHz quad core Snapdragon processor, the Note 4 has enough power under the hood and plenty of extras to satisfy those power users looking to get the absolute most out of a device that they can.
The first thing apparent about the Note 4 is its size. While oversized smartphones have been around for a while, the original Note was the first commercially successful phablet on the market.
Lauded by many Note users, the S Pen is a multifunction stylus stored in the body of the phone. Personally, I haven’t had much of a use for it as I much prefer any keyboard to handwriting notes. The S Pen can also be used to take a screenshot of a selection of the screen, but the interface is a little bit clumsy and a full screenshot does the trick nearly all the time anyway.
Other extras I found particularly interesting were the fingerprint scanner and pulse oximeter. The fingerprint scanner is well-done, integrated into the home screen button and is easy to set up and easy to use. The pulse oximeter, located under the main camera, can measure oxygen saturation in the blood and heart rate. No side-by-side comparisons of accuracy against medical-grade pulse oximeters are out there yet, so accuracy may be questionable.
Battery life was always a sore point, and with a huge screen I was a little worried about battery usage.
Happily, this is not an issue at all, battery life is huge, and heavy users can just carry around another battery and swap. For emergency situations, the Note 4 has an “ultra power saving” mode, giving up to two weeks of standby power..
I can’t say enough about the quality of this phone, I would absolutely call it a must-buy for to looking for a phablet in today’s wireless world.