Really nice. Samsung has learned a thing or two about how to make an attractive handset since it ditched plastic and removable batteries a year and a half ago, and the Note 7 carries on the good work. Image 2 of 9. The stylus has gone out of fashion since PDAs stopped being a thing, but the S Pen makes an extremely compelling case for them being given a second chance. It has a 0. Even something as typically fiddly as annotating screenshots is a doddle.
Image 8 of 9. Bringing the Note series in line with the S7 means the phablet also gains some of the established features of its flagship stablemate. Most eye-catchingly, this means the Note 7 is more rugged than older versions, despite having to include a hole to keep the S Pen in. The Note 7 gets an IP68 rating, meaning that if you really must, you can give your phablet a bath in 1. Indeed, Samsung was so confident of this at the launch event that they'd installed a handful of devices with a game that involved catching virtual fish by physically dunking your the Note 7 in a large container of cold water.
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I asked, and no, that was just for us and won't be on the finished phone. Sign up for our daily newsletter Newsletter. Secondary menu. Lots of us including yours truly will always prefer stock Android, but Samsung has spent the past few years cleaning up its act, and that's worthy of some praise. Quick recap if you haven't used an S7 Edge: Swiping the tab on the right side by default of the screen brings up panes with shortcuts to your chosen apps, contacts and "tasks" like composing messages and taking selfies.
Samsung's Galaxy Note7 is the best smartphone on the planet, period (Updated)
You can flesh out your list with third-party "edges" for Yahoo Sports and Finance, but we still can't craft macro-like tasks the way we could on a full-blown computer. Once it's set up, the Samsung Pay tab lives at the bottom of the screen too -- a flick upward loads your payment method and preps it for either an NFC or a magnetic "swipe" transaction. The differences will become more apparent as you start digging a little deeper, and you'll wonder why some of these changes haven't been in TouchWiz from the start. Pulling down the notification shade, for instance, reveals a search bar, brightness slider and a distinct lack of circular icons -- Samsung ditched them for a cleaner grid of quick-settings icons.
The app launcher has a search bar sitting up top too, making it easier to find the app you're looking for. That sure beats the clumsy search button on the S7 and S7 Edge.
This streamlined approach carries over into the Note 7's settings page, where Samsung excised the circular icons and trademark teal in favor of a much simpler list of options. Don't worry, the interface is still punctuated with blue here and there, in case you're not great with change. And if you hate those rounded white frames encasing your app icons, you can turn them off. One word: hallelujah.
Samsung Galaxy Note 7
Naturally, there's more going here beyond the Note 7's clean new look. Let's say you're trying to keep your Tinder habits on the down low -- you have the option to download the app directly into Samsung's new secure folder, keeping it perpetually hidden from prying eyes. But what if it's already installed? You can add the app to the secure folder and then uninstall the original instance, leaving an independent, fully functional copy hidden from the rest of the world.
You can lock down this digital storehouse with a PIN, password, a fingerprint or an iris scan, but the latter two require you to set up a password just in case your biometric signature doesn't pass muster. What you use the secure folder for is your business, but regardless, Samsung's implementation is both clever and useful.
Samsung's browser is also more useful thanks to its support for extensions, including a QR-code reader and an "Amazon assistant" that's meant to "get instant product matches while you shop across the web.
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Then there are the updated power-saving modes. In addition to dialing down the screen's brightness and throttling performance, they'll also reduce the Note 7's screen resolution down to as low as p to conserve even more juice. Huawei adopted this trick first, but it's remarkably handy for keeping your Note 7 alive when its battery level gets grim. Thankfully, there aren't a ton of pointlessly preloaded apps. We have the usual slew of Google apps, plus Samsung's email client, browser, file manager and S Health app, along with all the Note-specific stuff, which I'll get to in a second.
My review unit is a T-Mobile model, and Legere's crew thankfully didn't go too crazy with the bloatware. All told, this version of the Note 7 comes with eight carrier apps pre-installed, ranging from the pretty useful SlingTV was handy for following the Olympics on the move to the irritating I can manage my security fine, Lookout, but thanks. Weird as it sounds, the Note 7 is so well put together and pleasant to use that it's sometimes easy to forget there's a stylus hidden inside. This year's S Pen doesn't look dramatically different from the Note 5's but the changes are there if you look closely enough.
As mentioned earlier, the nib is smaller for more fluid writing and sketching, and the S Pen's body is ever so slightly narrower and lighter. You wouldn't think a change this minute would be apparent, but it sort of is -- despite near-identical dimensions, this S Pen feels a little flimsier than the one we got last year. Funny how big a difference this stuff makes. Still, the Note 7's S Pen still has few clear advantages.
For one, it's water-resistant, just like the phone itself. Because the entire package is IPrated, you can actually write things on the Note 7's screen while underwater, though I'm not sure when anyone would ever actually need to. Getting phone numbers at the beach? Who knows. Speaking of the screen, the Note 7's can now recognize up to 4, levels of pressure sensitivity, or double what the Note 5 was capable of. It's one of those differences that's only really noticeable when you have the two devices side by side: Light strokes that didn't register on the Note 5's display showed up just fine on the Note 7, making it a better choice for artsy types who value precision.
If all you're going to do is dash off notes and reminders, though, you probably won't notice the change much. While we're talking about the screen, I'm pleased that one of the Note 5's best features has made it over to the Note 7. Removing the S Pen while the display is off brings up a dark interface for appropriately enough screen-off memos. Here, you can draw or leave yourself a note, and then pin it to the always-on display for easy reference throughout the day.
Navigation menu
The inherent lack of friction in this process means anyone who picks up your phone can pin doodles to your display, which in my case led to lots of juvenile drawings all over my sleeping screen. Thanks, guys. Samsung is all too aware that the S Pen isn't for everyone, so it cooked up a few new Air Command features to make its stylus more versatile. My eyes are pretty terrible, so it was neat being able to magnify anything on the screen up to percent when pinching-to-zoom wasn't an option.
Consistently useful? You can now translate words on-screen from one language to another too, though the translations aren't as elegant as I'd wanted. Here's the thing: The feature only lets you translate one word at a time, rather than sentences or paragraphs. As such, it's handy for picking up bits of a language you don't know, and lousy for interpreting lots of information. And then there are the GIFs. The "smart select" feature has been updated to let you choose parts of the screen with the pen, record them and turn them into GIFs.
I didn't have high hopes for this process because making GIFs on a regular computer is sort of a pain, but it turned out to be surprisingly elegant.
Once the recording is done you can capture up to 15 seconds , it's simple enough to doodle on top of them, change how they loop and share them everywhere. Meanwhile, Samsung's software cleaning spree continues with S Pen stuff: Four! This is where you'll do most of your note-taking and doodling, and it's perfectly serviceable; it's good enough that I didn't miss any of the old standalone S Pen apps.
All of these tweaks are steps in the right direction, but I wonder whether they'll actually change anyone's mind about the S Pen. The fact that Samsung keeps churning these devices out must mean a lot of people out there dig using a stylus, but if you weren't sold before, you probably won't be now. We can keep this part brief: Both of the Note 7's cameras are identical to the ones in the S7 and S7 Edge, and are therefore really damned good. The photos I shot over the course of a week were almost uniformly well-exposed, with lots of detail they really pop on this AMOLED screen and vibrant, accurate colors.
It's damned fast at focusing too, thanks to the camera's DualPixel setup. If you'll pardon the extremely unscientific explanation, every 1. Since every single pixel is used for these focus calculations, the Note 7 is superfast at locking onto whatever's in front of it, even when the subject is a finicky, adorable toddler celebrating her second birthday.
It goes without saying that smartphone cameras tend to suck in the dark, but the Note 7 fares well thanks to the size of the pixels on its sensor. There's surprisingly little noise, even in shots taken outside at night, and the always-there exposure controls help reduce the influence of extra light that could otherwise soften a shot's sharpness. When you tap Double Press Home Key in the Device screen, you see a list of options that includes the default None option. FAQ for Samsung mobile phone. This also happens to coincide with the phone button when you're on a call so.
Galaxy Z Flip review: Samsung's killer feature makes this flip phone shine. To use your default card, double-click the side button. On the galaxy Tab A.