When it comes to the smart phone market, I think we can say that the Samsung Galaxy line launching a new phone makes waves similar to the new iPhone launches. They have a large portion of the Android market. I’ve been lucky enough to have the chance to test and review a good portion of their product line over the years with the most recent being S6. Well about 4 months after the S6 launched Samsung brought out their larger Note 5 and I have been testing it. Today I can finally sit down and talk a little about my experience as well as dig into the phones features and benchmark performance as well. So sit down, relax and let’s take a look at the Galaxy Note 5.

Product Name: Samsung Galaxy Note 5

Review Sample Provided by: Verizon

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Amazon Link: HERE

 

Specifications
Dimension 153.2 x 76.1 x 7.6 mm (171 g)
Display

5.7” Quad HD Super AMOLED

2560 x 1440 (518 ppi)

Camera

Rear : 16MP OIS (F1.9)

Front : 5MP (F1.9)

AP

Exynos 7420 (64-bit, 14nm)

Octa core (2.1GHz Quad + 1.5GHz Quad)

OS Android 5.1 (Lollipop)
Network

LTE Cat.9

LTE Cat.6

* May differ by country and carrier.

Memory

RAM : 4GB RAM (LPDDR4)

STORAGE : 32/64GB (UFS 2.0)

* Storage options may vary by country and carrier.

Connectivity

WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (2.4/5GHz), MIMO, Bluetooth® v 4.2 LE, ANT+, USB 2.0, NFC, Location (GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou)

* BeiDou coverage may be limited.

S pen

Sample rate 240Hz

Pressure level : 2,048

Battery 3,000mAh
Standby Time 12 days
Usage Time 25 hrs
Charging Fast Charging, Fast Wireless Charging
Payment

NFC, MST (US/KOR)

* Available in select countries and accepted payment solutions may vary by country.

Sensors Accelerometer, Proximity, RGB Light, Geo-magnetic, Gyro, Fingerprint, Barometer, Hall, HRM
Audio Format : MP3, M4A, 3GA, AAC, OGG, OGA, WAV, WMA, AMR, AWB, FLAC, MID, MIDI, XMF, MXMF, IMY, RTTTL, RTX, OTA
Video Format : MP4, M4V, 3GP, 3G2, WMV, ASF, AVI, FLV, MKV, WEBM

 


Packaging

The packaging for the Note 5 is exactly the same as what I saw with the Galaxy S6’s. In fact really the only difference is right on the front in the name on the cover. Both phones have the silver box with a clean design. The front has the Samsung logo with the phone model below it in large letters. Then up in the top right corner we can see that our sample has 32 gigs of storage capacity. The back of the box has all of the normal fine print down on the bottom half, beyond that really the only thing interesting here is the list of everything included inside of the box. This is always nice to make sure you aren’t missing anything and to help know what to expect before getting home.

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Inside the phone sits in a tray cut to hold it perfectly. The tray helps display the phone and make sure it is the first thing you see when you open everything up. Below the tray is a small getting to know your phone manual and then in the bottom the AC adapter and USB charging cable sit in their own cutouts as well.

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Photos and Features

One of the things that I find interesting about all of the Galaxy phones is that every time they introduce a new model they always have the same look. Frankly I could sit the Note 5 down and without putting it next to older models most people are going to have a hard time knowing if it is the latest model or the Note 3 or 4. The size of course makes it clear that it’s not an S series phone, but even there they share a lot of styling features. I wish Samsung would be a little more aggressive in the styling changes but to some people there is a lot of comfort in getting your new phone and having it be a lot like your old one.

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The front of the Note 5 gives a very thin bezel on the sides but room up top and on the bottom, like past models. This gives room to include the oval shaped button on the bottom that sits between the hidden menu and back buttons for Android navigation. Up top the bezel space gave room for Samsung to slip in a Samsung logo. Above the logo we have a thin but wide handset speaker with a chrome finish. To the left of it we have an LED status indicator and also sensors for light and also a second to let the phone know when you have the phone close to your head to make sure it turns off the screen so you don’t hit buttons with your ear when talking. To the right the large dot is the front camera. Samsung went with a 5MP camera here for better quality selfies.

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The Note 5 is available in three different colors, black, white, and gold. In my opinion the gold looks more like a champagne. That said our sample came in white. On the front of the phone you can see the color of choice in a few places but it is the back of the phone that the color is most visible. With the phone being 6 inches tall and 3 inches wide, that is a lot of space. Surprisingly Samsung doesn’t go crazy filling that space though. The back of the phone has a Galaxy Note 5 logo down near the bottom in a reflective chrome finish. Then farther up is the Verizon logo along with their 4G LTE logo. But really the only important thing on the back is just a little higher. The back of the Note 5 has a 16MP rear facing camera that sticks out. I’ve commented about this in the past but having the lens sticking out like this is begging for it to get damaged. Next to the camera the Note 5 does have a single LED for flash and tucked in below that is the heartbeat sensor.

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Moving around the sides of the Note 5 starting with the right side there is just a single button. This is the power button that also locks and unlocks the screen. The button is the same as what I saw with the S6, a thin but long chrome plated button that is easy to get at and is in what I would consider to be the standard location for a power button on an android phone rather than on the back or up top like on some devices.

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Up along the top edge we have the sim card holder with its small release hole. To get to the sim card you push the included tool in the hole and the tray will slide out. The other hole here is a microphone hole for ambient sound pickup. The two transparent plastic bits in the outer aluminum ring help absorb some impact should the Note 5 fall.

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The left side of the Note 5 has twice the number of buttons with a total of two. These are the volume controls. They use the same long and thin buttons that the power button has. In the photo below we can also see that the aluminum ring that goes around the phone does have a little radius to it on the back edges along the sides. This helps keep the already large phone gripable.

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Then finally we have the bottom edge of the Note 5. Where the other edges only had one or two things, the bottom edge is basically where everything is hidden. For starters in the middle we have the micro-USB connection for data transfer and charging. It’s weird to me still that Samsung went from USB 3.0 a few models ago back down to USB 2.0. I have to wonder if there were problems or if people didn’t like the change. The other connection down here is the headphone connection where you can hook up headphones or a microphone/headphone combination. There is a set of 10 small holes to the right of the USB connection, these holes are the phones external speaker. I love this location because in a few cases including a few Samsung phones they have put the speaker on the back of the phone. This causes issues when you lay your phone down on a table when on speakerphone. The small pinhole next to the external speaker is the other microphone, namely the microphone that gets used when you use the handset. Then last but not least the oval on the far right is the stylus, the feature that helps give the Note its name.

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The way the stylus works on the Note 5 is the end has a small portion that when pressed extends out. This helps you remove the stylus from the phone. Be warned, if you pull the stylus out and put it back in the phone backwards it can and will get stuck. When you remove the stylus the phone makes a sound similar to someone removing a sword. At the same time the phone automatically opens up a notepad on screen for you to write on. The stylus has a plastic tip and along the side is a small button. It is made of aluminum just like the outer ring of the Note 5 and it has a solid feel to it in hand.

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The most prominent feature of the Galaxy Note 5 is of course the 5.7-inch screen. The large screen is what pushes the Note 5 into the Phablet size category that fits in between a normal phone and a smaller 7-inch tablet. The 5.7-inch size isn’t any different than the Note 4 that the Note 5 replaces. In fact, if we just look at the specifications the screen seems unchanged. It is still a Quad HD Super AMOLED screen and it has a resolution of 2560 x 1440. It is a little weird to me that they didn’t jump to a 4k screen for the Note 5, the smaller S6 has the same resolution in a smaller form factor giving it a better PPI (pixel per inch). The S6 PPI is about 577 where the Note 5 is 518. I will find out in my testing how well the screen works.

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Performance

For my performance testing I started by running through our mobile phone benchmark suite. The suite consists of a range of tests to test different subsystems, situations, as well as a few overall performance benchmarks. Before I get into that I did want to run through what is powering the Note 5 as talking about a CPU or Gpu doesn’t really fit into our photo section where we cover other phone features. The Note 5 has the same Exynos 7420 processor that the S6 has. They both range in clock speed from 2.1 to 1.5 depending on the power mode. For the GPU the Note 5 has a Mali T760MP8 running at 772MHz, again just like the S6. In fact, if we look even deeper both phones have the same 4GB’s of LPDDR4 ram and similar capacities for total memory. With that we should expect to see similar performance numbers in our tests.

The first set of tests are all focused on browser performance. I tested using Googles Octane v2 benchmark, Browsermark 2.1, and SunSpider’s JavaScript benchmark. In Octane the Note 5 tops the charts by a significant amount. As I was just mentioning that the S6 should be similar in performance with browser testing the update often enough that it is possible to say that they have optimized the browser or even the firmware slightly going from when I tested the S6 to now. In Browsermark the result was similar as well. It wasn’t until we got to SunSpider where I found results that were faster than the Note 5, here the now dated Nokia was faster as well as the much larger Shield.

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The next batch of tests were all focused on how well the Note 5 would game. This is especially important to me with the Note 5 because I think its large form factor could be much better to game on than a smaller phone like the S6. Oddly enough here the Note 5 fell behind a little and no that isn’t a typo, I did see higher performance numbers with the Note 4 when I tested it originally. In addition to the 3DMark Ice Storm benchmark I did also test with the new Sling Shot benchmark, but considering our past phones had to be sent back we will have to wait until our next mobile review to get a better idea of where the Note 5 stands on that one. The last gaming benchmark was Basemark X. here the Note 5 performed better than its predecessor but still lower than the S6 Edge that shares the same Gpu and CPU, I guess our Note 5 sample is a little on the weak side.

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Next I wanted to test the read and write performance of the NAND in the Note 5. TO do this I used AndroBench. Here the Note 5 pulled ahead in both the read and write speed performance. The read performance was especially good with a sequential read speed of 389MB/s.

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The next subsystem I wanted to focus on was the CPU. Here I used Vellamo to benchmark the CPU in both single core and multicore situation. In addition, I also slipped in another browser benchmark for good measure. Once again in the browser benchmark the Note 5 dominated. In the single core benchmark the results with the S5 Edge were almost exactly the same but the multicore results show where our slowdown was in the previous tests. The results are still faster than the Note 4, but it’s clear the Note 5 firmware or thermals are holding the CPU back a little more than they did with the S6. 

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To put all of the previous testing together I used two different benchmarks that don’t focus on any one specific thing. Both Basemark OS II and PCMark benchmark the entire device including gaming, cpu and memory performance, and many other tests to get an overall score. In Basemark OS II the Note 5 pulled well ahead of the Note 4 and stayed very close to the S6 Edge in which it shares the same internals with. In PCMark using the word performance test the Note 5 was actually at the top of our charts with the S6 and S6 edge just behind it.

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The last benchmark I ran on the Note 5 is in my opinion the most important benchmark. That is the battery performance benchmark using PCMark. Your device can be the fastest on the market, but if it dies half way into your day none of it matters. Each device tested is set to 50% screen brightness to get a fair result and I turn on airplane mode as well. It would be much nicer to be able to see what the numbers would be with the mobile network on, but sadly it would also be inconsistent. If one phone had a slightly lower signal it might have much worse battery usage. Anyhow, how did the Note 5 do? Well its 3,000mAh battery is a bit larger than the 2600mAh battery in the S6. With that it ran under heavy load for 474 minutes or nearly 8 hours. This translates to a full day and more of moderate to heavy use typically, our battery benchmark keeps the screen on and the CPU and GPU running at full load, normal use is a lot less demanding.

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Beyond benchmarks I spent a lot of time using the Note 5 day to day. This gave me a chance to get a feel for how it performs in factors that can’t be graphed. For example, the audio performance of the Note 5. With the bottom mounted speaker I was surprised at just how many times I would end up covering up the speaker and muffling notification sounds or even music when I would play it. I would love to see Samsung move to a front mounted speaker to avoid those issues, I also think it would make the ringtone louder when it is in your pocket. Currently when you put the phone in your pocket the speaker faces down and you lose a lot of the volume.

For the most part a lot of the Note 5’s features are all shared with the S6. But the larger screen size and the stylus aren’t so I focused a lot on those when testing. Life with the stylus wasn’t exactly game changing. I found myself toying with it here and there when I first got the phone but I quickly stopped once the novelty wore off. I think having a stylus will be better received by people slightly older than me, specifically people who prefer to write over type. The other issue I had with the stylus was the pop out end, all too often It would pop out in my pocket or when I was holding the phone. The stylus wouldn’t fall out of course, but I would always have to make a point to click the thing back down.

The other big feature of the Note 5 is as I previously mentioned its screen size. The OLED screen for the Note 5 was surprisingly bright in nearly every situation. Even in direct sunlight, something I hate, I had no issues with not being able to see the screen. Beyond that the larger screen size made browsing the internet much easier, especially when you find a funny picture or meme and you want to show someone. I do wish Samsung would have gone up to a 4k screen, but at no time did I have any issues with the screen quality. In fact, the overall color reproduction is great and the whites are bright and the blacks are black.

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Given that Verizon sent the Note 5, I should also point out that the Note 5 and Verizon network had good reception everywhere I went with the exception of one small area in my office. This included great hotspot speeds anytime I needed including right now as I write this.

 


Software

The funny thing about performance. The note 5 could be the end all be all in our performance tests but if at the end of the day the software is buggy or hard to use all of the performance will go to waste. Lucky for us Android has leveled out the OS isn’t really different than the Note 4 or the S6. So let’s take a quick look at the OS then see what Samsung included with it for software. The Lollipop OS starts off with the standard home screen. We have five docked apps along the bottom that show on each page and then the rest of the page can be set to any app shortcut or gadget you like. For me I always need to have the time and then from there I just try to include any of the apps I use day to day. In addition to that I always keep a google search bar on my main screen for quick google searches and to use the microphone and find out the name of a song on the radio. The home screen isn’t limited to just the one page, there are a total of four pages you get quick access too.

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The app menu has a similar layout to the homepages. You have five vertical rows and five horizontal rows. To save space Samsung by default includes a few folders to make getting to everything quick. 

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The Note 5 uses the default Android app. From here you can start a call or video call from the main page. Recent received and made calls are just above the number pad. There is a favorites tab as well as a full contact tab as usual. Nothing new or exciting here.

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So what all did Samsung include for exclusive software? Well Surprisingly they kept things thin with just their S Voice version of Siri, messages app, and S Health. S Health is where they add a little value to the Note 5. This app has a huge list of different heath related functions it can track. You can measure things like heart rate, stress, and SpO2 at any point. Beyond that it keeps track of your steps every day. You can also track your food and drink input on multiple levels including tracking how much caffeine you input. What I was surprised about though was the lack of an IR blaster and with that the TV remote app that I have always loved.

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Camera

To test out the 16MP rear facing camera I ran through my standard comparison photos. I first took a shot outside in midday lighting to see how the camera looks in the best possible situations. I took a photo of our tree outside that is in desperate need of a trim. While most of the picture looks good, I felt like parts of the tree that are in direct sunlight are a little to washed out, much more so than it looked in person. Moving inside I normally try to get an action picture of our cat but as you can see the cat was being especially lazy. It did give me a chance to test out the flash on an indoor low light photo. Being mid-day I was worried that the flash would wash things out, especially after the outside photo, but the picture couldn’t have come out much better. The third and fourth photos are of a small palm sized quadcopter. I like to use this for photos because the bright LEDs can sometimes bring out color issues and the size of the device is a good way to check focus in low light as well as with lighting turned on. So what came from the photos? Well the low light photo looked a little darker than in person due to the bright LEDs. In that photo the camera struggled to get a good focus as well. The lit photo is MUCH better on focus. The lighting was again a little brighter in person than it showed in the photo, but overall the shot wasn’t too bad.

Overall the Note 5’s camera performed well but there were large issues with the photos being washed out in outdoor shots and a little darker than they should in indoor shots. Most of that should be able to be tuned out by digging into the camera settings, but don’t expect it to take perfect photos in tough situations. As always the Android camera software was easy to use and with Samsung letting you use a physical button for the camera it makes things even easier.

Outside

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Obligatory lazy cat photo w/Flash

camera 2

No backlighting or flash

camera 3

Inside lighting on

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Overall and Final Verdict

As a bigger guy I have always been a fan of the Galaxy Note series. Not only does the larger size fit my hands better, but typically the larger phone has taken advantage of its size with features like a larger battery capacity. This generation was no different, the battery life of the Note 5 was one of the best tested, even figuring in the extra power that the larger screen pulls. Speaking of the larger screen, I was really impressed with its overall quality. The color reproduction was great and even though the Note 4 shares the same resolution as the S6 with a lower PPI the detail was just as good. Really my only complaint with the screen was that I was really hoping they would jump up to 4K for the Note 5’s screen, but given how much power it would have taken to push that resolution I understand why they didn’t.

Speaking of the phones performance, overall the Note 5 did well in our tests with the exception of a few benchmarks where the phone seemed to throttle back the multicore performance in comparison to the Galaxy S6 that shares the same internals. Even with those slowdowns, the Note 5 was still faster than every other non-Samsung device tested.

As always I felt that it was the Samsung exclusive apps that helped the Note 5 stand out. This time though Samsung only included their S Health app. The app takes advantage of features like the built in heart rate monitor to help track your daily movement, food intake, and other factors. You basically get a free Fitbit. Sadly, Samsung dropped the built in IR Blaster and with that the remote control app that was always my favorite Samsung app this time around. I know that not everyone used the IR Blaster, but it was always a nice feature to have. Especially being able to control all of your household TV’s and other home theater devices with the same device.

Beyond that the Note 5 did have a few other issues that might cause pause for some people. The external speakerphone faces out the bottom of the phone and many times I found myself accidentally covering it up. This caused for lower ring volume when I put the phone in my pocket with it facing down as well. A front facing speaker would be a big step forward. In addition, I ran into a few issues with the rear facing camera washing out in high light.

Overall the pro’s still outweigh the cons and the Note 5 is a good phone. But if high quality photos are at the top of your list of phone features you might need to pass. Even with that issue though the Note 5 has the power, styling, and performance to justify an upgrade from your 1-2 year old phablet. If you are wondering if the larger device is for you, you should be sure to try one in person though. While the size is amazing for me, when my wife used the phone it was much harder for her to hold on to the phone and reach everything on the screen.

fv4recommended

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #37352 02 Dec 2015 20:35
Today I check out the Note 5, it shares a lot of features with the Galaxy S6 but does stand out with its larger size and stylus

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