- The Samsung Galaxy Note is back, times two actually.
What you are looking at here is the Note 10
and the Note 10 Plus.
The Note line has always been about being the biggest
and most powerful, and both of these phones are powerhouses,
but you can get other big, powerful Android phones now.
So, what is Samsung doing this time around
to make this thing feel like, well, a Note?
I've only had a little bit of time with it for a hands on,
but I think you can break it all down into five things.
First, well, the most obvious thing
that makes a Note a Note is the stylus,
the S Pen, and Samsung has two really big updates here.
You can still take notes on the lock screen
right when you pull the S Pen out,
but now Samsung Notes can read those notes.
So it can search for them, it does OCR,
you can even copy it and paste plain text in another app,
or you can export a Word document of your text
if that's what you wanna do.
They've also added an accelerometer and a gyroscope
to the stylus, and so you can use it as a remote control,
kind of like a wand.
So in the camera, you can go left and right,
change between modes and up and down,
and even do a little swirly motion.
It's kinda wild.
They do have an SDK, so other apps could use it,
so maybe in a PowerPoint or something someday,
but that's not available yet.
We'll have to wait to see if more developers
are gonna support it in the future.
The second reason you might be interested
in the Note 10 is DeX.
Now, I know what you're thinking,
nobody uses DeX, Dieter, come on.
But hang on, DeX, if you're not familiar,
is you plug a USB-C cable in
and then you plug it into a monitor
and then you get a, like, Windows version of your phone.
You've got windows you can resize
and you can, you know, drag stuff around and so on.
With the Note 10, what's new is they actually have apps
for the Mac or Windows where it runs DeX right there,
so you can use the computer you already have
and have a little window
for controlling stuff on your phone.
It's also really convenient
if you want to drag and drop stuff,
so you can actually just drag and drop a file or an image
or something from your PC to your phone and vice versa.
It's a totally new thing for DeX
and I'm actually really excited to try it.
The other thing is, Windows 10 has this feature
where it can show your notifications
and some other stuff from your phone
but you have to install an app, but with the Note 10,
Samsung built support for that right in.
Number three, and this is the reason
people usually buy the Note,
it just has every spec you could ask for.
So, both of these phones use a Snapdragon 855 processor
and there's the thinnest ever vapor chamber for cooling it
so it can run at higher clock speeds for longer.
Now, on the Note 10, you've got eight gigs of RAM
and 250 gigs of storage,
which is a pretty darn good default.
On the Note 10 Plus though, you have an option
to get 12 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of storage
and it has a slot for a microSD card
for further storage expansion.
Now, this big phone has a 4,300 milliamp battery,
the little one's 3,500.
Don't know exactly how long that's gonna last
in terms of, like, all day,
but it's gonna be all day, I'm sure it'll be fine.
Also, they both use standard USB PD for charging
and on the Note 10, if you want,
you can get up to like a 45 watt charger.
This thing'll top off in under an hour or about an hour.
It's gonna be really fast.
Number four, it's just a really nice phone.
I mean, it's really good build quality,
it's got this classic 90 degree corner that all Notes have.
There's basically no bezel.
You really have to serach for it to see it
'cause the screen rounds around the corners.
It has a smaller cutout for the selfie camera
than even the Galaxy S10.
It's just, it's super nice.
If I had to complain though, I would complain
that there's no headphone jack.
Samsung says they took it out to make room for the battery
and sure, I guess that's fine but, you know, I'm sad.
The other thing that Samsung has changed
is they moved all the buttons.
They're now on the left-hand side
and there's just three,
two for the volume rocker and one for power
which also can double as a Bixby button.
Now, the S10 comes in four colors.
They're all called Auro 'cause I don't know.
This is the Aura Halo.
There's also black and white
which is gonna be available everywhere
and then there's a Samsung.com
and Best Buy exclusive of Aura Blue.
Number five, and it seems weird to put this last
but the cameras are really good.
It's basically the same camera set up as the Galaxy S10.
It's been tweaked a little bit
but Samsung has added some video features.
So, there's a cute thing where you can do bokeh
and Live Focus a video, that's fine,
but the thing I'm really interested to try
is the microphone focus.
So you can actually zoom in and it does beam forming
on three microphones to only pull sound
from the thing that you're zoomed in on.
Really excited to try that.
There's also a time-of-flight camera
but they're not really using that
for any camera effects just yet.
So those are the five things.
Do they add up to it being a Note?
I don't know.
We'll review it and we'll see.
The little one is gonna come out for $949,
the Note Plus is gonna be $1099,
and a maxed out Note Plus is gonna be $1199
and they're gonna be available on August 23rd.
I will say I think I'm more intrigued
by the smaller Note 10.
It's about the same size as, say, a Galaxy S10.
While the Note 10 Plus is like the true successor
to last years Note 9, it's about the same size.
But it's been a super long time
since we've had a really pocketable phone that had a stylus.
Maybe what the Note needs isn't to be bigger and badder
and more powerful, but actually smaller.
Hey everybody, thanks so much for watching.
Are you interested in either of these Notes?
If so, let me know which one down in the comments below
and we're gonna have more coverage
from Samsung's Live Unpacked event
which is happening right now
and of course reviews when these things come out,
are available, when they're here.
You wanna use that, or?
- Yup. - Yeah, okay, great.