Samsung Galaxy Note 3

The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is the third high-end smartphone in the Galaxy Note series offered by the South Korean smartphone giant. The Galaxy Note series of smartphones are famous for offering large colourful screens, long-lasting batteries, and S Pen capacitive styli. The Galaxy Note 3 features a 5.7-inch Super AMOLED display, Android 5.0 Lollipop, Exynos 5 Octa processor, 3GB RAM, 16GB internal memory, microSD card slot, and a 3,200 mAh battery. A 13MP primary camera and a 2MP secondary camera do all the imaging related tasks, while the S Pen can be used to perform more productive tasks.

The Galaxy Note 3 features a faux-leather and plastic body, for better ergonomics. The front of the device consists of a large touchscreen display, a physical home button, two capacitive buttons, front-facing camera, sensors, Samsung logo, and an earpiece. The side rim of the device has a faux-chrome finish with ridged pattern that you see . The power button that doubles up as a lock/unlock key is present on the right hand side, while the volume rocket is present on the left hand side. The loudspeaker, primary microphone, and the S Pen holder opening are present on the bottom of the device. An IR blaster, secondary microphone, and a headphone jack are present on the top of the Note 3. The removable back, which has a faux-leather finish and faux-stitching pattern on the edges, hides a removable battery, microSD card slot, and a SIM card slot beneath it.

The 5.7-inch Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels results into nearly a screen sharpness of 386 ppi. The pixels are made up of RGBG sub-pixels generally known as PenTile Matrix that are diamond-shaped. Samsung provides various colour profiles so that a user can set it according to their personal preference. It is protected by Gorilla Glass 3 made by Corning that helps in resisting the display from bumps, drops, and scratches. This device has been awarded as the best smartphone display in 2013 by DisplayMate as it offers excellent contrast, good colours, extremely wide viewing angles, good brightness levels, and one of the best sunlight legibility scores.

The Note 3 is equipped with a 13-megapixel primary camera. It has an autofocus lens, 1080p video recording, and is accompanied by a single-LED flash. The front-facing camera has an average 2-megapixel resolution, and even this can record Full HD 1080p videos at 30fps, just like the primary camera can. The camera application offers a lot of scene modes, effects, and settings. It allows simultaneous recording of videos and capturing images. Apart from HDR and Panorama modes, the Galaxy Note 3 offers Beauty Shot, Best Face, Best Photo, Cine Photo, Double Shot, Sound & Shot, and Surround Shot.

The Exynos Octa 5420 SoC ticks underneath the body. It combines a 1.9GHz quad-core Cortex-A15 CPU cluster, a 1.3GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU cluster, and Mali-T628MP6 GPU in one single package. There's 3GB RAM, 16GB internal storage, and a microSD card slot that can accept cards of up to 64GB storage space. There are seven sensors in the Galaxy Note 4 accelerometer, barometer, compass, gesture sensor, gyroscope, humidity sensor, proximity sensor, and a temperature sensor. There's a 3,200 mAh battery is expected to last 420 hours of standby time in 3G and 21 hours of talk-time.

On the software front, the device came with TouchWiz on top of Android 4.3 Jelly Bean operating system. However, Samsung has plans to release TouchWiz UX update with Android 5.0 Lollipop to the device pretty soon. Samsung is also providing 50GB of free Dropbox storage, Air Gesture, The S Pen is the real differentiator from other phablets in the market. It can be used to jot down notes, draw art, play with text, snip images, and to perform gestures. The company's S Note application offers a lot of features using which the S Pen can be used.

Connectivity wise, the device features a micro-SIM card slot that can be used to connect to HSPA networks. There's dual-band Wi-Fi ac/b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi Hotspot, DLNA, Bluetooth 4.0, A-GPS with GLONASS, NFC, IR port, microUSB port, and a headphone jack. The microUSB port can double up as an MHL 2 port for connecting to large TV's or displays.