Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Review

The Note 4 is the big powerhouse in Samsung's Galaxy phone range and it just keeps getting better with each iteration. This latest model gets a new processor, an even sharper screen and a couple of improved cameras.

The Galaxy Note 4 is on sale now for £629 SIM free.

Screen & Chassis
Samsung recently moved away from its all-plastic aesthetic with the aluminium casing of the Galaxy Alpha, and there are echoes of that with the Galaxy Note 4, which still has an extremely thin plastic back, but which now clips onto a solid metal chassis, giving it a bit more heft and premium-style feel. The silver highlighting around the rim on both sides lends a bit of class too, though the weight has now increased from the Note 3's 168g to 176g.

There's a hard home button beneath the screen flanked by two soft buttons and pressing and holding each of them offers alternative functions -- home gets you Google Now; return pulls the TouchWiz menu up on the side; recent apps allows you to add or remove each of your home pages. On the back, the camera's LED flash doubles up with the Samsung heart rate monitor we've seen on other high-end Galaxy devices. Unfortunately, despite the sturdier casing, there are no grommets covering the power and headphone jack ports, so it's not waterproof like Sony's premium Xperia phones, for instance.

The screen is still a gem though. With 5.7 inches of Super AMOLED loveliness with strong, vibrant colours and sharp contrast, it offers a higher than full HD resolution of 2,560x1,440 pixels -- that's 515ppi, which is just about as sharp as you'll see anywhere this side of the LG G3.

Software & Processor
It's running the latest Android 4.4 KitKat of course, with Samsung's usual TouchWiz tweaks on top. TouchWiz has its fans but it tends to be an interface for aficionados -- very capable, but also very busy and not always intuitive. If anything though, Samsung seems to have scaled it back a little in this incarnation. The My Magazine news and message aggregator now appears as Flipboard (which was behind it anyway) and the S5's Toolbox feature seems to have disappeared altogether. There are still plenty of features to play with, including the shortcut menu that slides in from the right, but they're designed to enhance your experience rather than get in the way -- you don't have to use them. And if it all gets too much, you can always switch to the stripped-down Easy mode.

There's an S Health widget that displays the data garnered from your exercise, heart rate and now blood oxygen level too (the heart rate monitor on the back measures that too).

Helpfully, many of the features and apps that used to come preinstalled whether you wanted them or not, have now been consigned to the Galaxy Apps store, which is where you'll also now find Kids Mode, Dropbox (with 50GB free storage for two years for new users) and Kindle for Samsung.

Good to see that the Multi Window mode is still here, so you can keep your web browser open at the same time as you're reading your emails -- very handy. You can resize the window for each and now you can open little pop-up windows too which you can move around the screen.

Phablets are designed to be used with two hands of course, and the Note 4 wears this fact on its sleeve with its S Pen stylus. The S Pen slips unobtrusively into a slot on the bottom and this latest version is a gem. It's slim and light (but not too much of either) and includes a smart button that allows you to highlight multiple elements within an app, or to drag and drop images between apps.

The new version has over 2,000 levels of sensitivity rather than the Note 3's 1,000 and this shows in the delicacy of your pen strokes. Not such a big deal when you're writing perhaps, but it makes all the difference when you're trying to draw detail. The on-screen menu gives you plenty of options to play with, including colours and nib thicknesses, and there's now a calligraphy nib too that emulates a fountain pen.

The quad-core processor is clocked at 2.7GHz and backed by a full 3GB RAM, which unsurprisingly makes it very fast indeed. Our AnTuTu benchmark test gave it a score of 48,262, which has so far only been beaten by the Galaxy Alpha's octa-core powerhouse.

Photography
The 16-megapixel camera has just about every bell and whistle Samsung can throw at it, from basics like autofocus and the bright LED flash, to a variety of modes including Shot and more -- burst shots with effects -- and Dual camera -- which incorporates shots taken simultaneously with the Note's two cameras. Usefully, you can now choose to hide the modes you never really use in order to slim down the options in the menu. It also has Smart Optical Image Stabilisation, which helps to reduce the tendency to blur when there's motion involved -- especially useful when you're recording 4K video.

There's a 3.7-megapixel snapper on the front for video calls and selfies but for once the rear camera can also manage selfies -- the selfie mode tracks your face (and anyone else nearby for group shots) and beeps a warning when you're all in focus, then takes the snap.

Colours can sometimes appear a little saturated, but generally photos look great, with oodles of detail and exemplary sharpness for a phone camera.

There's 32GB of memory on board plus you can add up to 128GB more via microSD card.

You'd expect a handset with this kind of power and capability to exact a hefty toll on the battery. And it does, but the 3,220mAh power pack seems big enough and powerful enough to handle it -- we got a good day and a half of pretty intense use out of it, which will do for now. Usefully, it charges pretty quickly, and you can get back up to 50 per cent capacity in just half an hour.

Conclusion
The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 has a terrific screen and impressively powerful processor, plus a huge range of useful and clever features. It's expensive compared to similarly specced big-screen rivals, but if you like to use a pen to scribble or doodle on your phablet, it's the best there is right now.