Review Date October 01, 2013

Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (T-Mobile)

  • Pros


  • Cons Like all phablets, it's huge. Dizzying array of software enhancements, some of which are dubious.
  • Bottom Line


By Jamie Lendino

It's tough to believe we're already three generations into a device that launched a category few thought would take off. The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 ($199.99 direct) is a shrewd refinement of the company's mainstream phablet—two words I never thought I'd put together—and continues to be an excellent combination of power and practicality in an oversized phone. It's also considerably more powerful than the AT&T Galaxy Mega, despite the latter phone's even-larger 6.3-inch display. The Galaxy Note 3 is the most powerful phablet we've tested and it's our latest Editors' Choice on T-Mobile.

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Design, Display, and Controls
No one will mistake the Galaxy Note 3 for a regular smartphone. It measures 5.95 by 3.12 by 0.33 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.92 ounces, which makes it a little thinner and lighter than last year's model. I really like the new sides of the Galaxy Note 3; it's a flat edge, as opposed to tapered, and there's a plastic chrome band engraved with ridges. It doesn't sound comfy on paper, but it makes holding a super-sized device like this easy. The rest of the comfort comes from the stitched faux leather back panel, which is flat save for a small raised protrusion for the camera sensor and flash. The overall look is classier than the Note 2 and a nice step up from Samsung's usual polycarbonate body.

The 5.7-inch, 1,920-by-1,080-pixel Super AMOLED display is a stunner, with 386ppi, vibrant colors, deep blacks, and wide viewing angles. It's tough to find any fault with it. Typing on the on-screen keyboard is a cinch even in portrait mode, and I love the extra row of number keys at the top. Below the screen are two capacitive Menu and Back buttons, which stay hidden until you push them, and an oversized hardware Home button in the center.

On the left side, there's a Volume rocker, and the Power button is on the right. On top you'll find a 3.5mm headphone jack and infrared sensor. The bottom edge of the phone houses a micro USB 3.0 connector, which charges the phone and transfers data more quickly when connected to a computer, as well as a mono speaker and a small microphone. This being a Note product, you also get a stylus, which parks neatly underneath the bottom right edge of the phone.

The Note 3 is one of two products that works with the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch, the other being the Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition tablet.

Connectivity, Call Quality, and Battery
The Galaxy Note 3 is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), quad-band HSPA+ 42 (850/1700/1900/2100 MHz), and 4G LTE phone. You also get 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, GPS, NFC, and Bluetooth 4.0. In midtown Manhattan, the Note 3 scored 9-10Mbps both down and up whenever I could latch onto T-Mobile's new 4G LTE network. Stepping back to HSPA+ 42 I saw 4Mbps down and just 200Kbps up, with ping times around 150ms instead of under 40ms like on LTE. As with many T-Mobile phones, the Note 3 features Wi-Fi calling, which helps keep you connected in areas with poor cellular signal.

Voice calls sound clear, crisp, and full in the earpiece, and it gets plenty loud. Transmissions through the mic are a little soft, with some hiss around words, and a bit too much external street noise leaks through the mic. Reception seems strong. Calls sound fine through a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset. I had no problem triggering voice activation over Bluetooth, but the phone never recognized my voice dialing commands through the headset. The mono speakerphone sounds clear and loud, and should be no problem to use outdoors.

The massive 3,200mAh battery should help keep the Galaxy Note 3 going even with the super-bright display. We're still conducting battery tests, and will update this review as soon as we have a result, but after two days of moderately heavy usage I still don't have a low-battery warning.

Hardware, OS, and Apps
American-spec Galaxy Note 3s get a quad-core 2.26GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, along with 3GB RAM and Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, which is the latest version of the OS. This is one fast processor; it aced every benchmark test we ran, just like the LG G2. As with all Samsung Galaxy devices, the Galaxy Note 3 is about as far from stock Android as is imaginable. But in day-to-day usage, Samsung seems to have tuned its heavy UI layer better than LG, because the Note 3 always felt fast to me and didn't bog down anywhere.


And then there's S Note, which remains a full-featured note-taking app, packed with voice memo, video, images, illustration tools, a clipboard, the new scrapbook, and Google Maps integration. It's fun to use, and works well for marking up email and cutting out partial screenshots. That said, the form factor isn't really for transcribing lots of notes; it's just too small, just the way a tiny paper notebook of this size would be too small. Instead, it's more for jotting down ideas, or showing someone a quick diagram in a meeting. The stylus writes very accurately, and 1080p seems to be enough resolution that you don't see any pixelation even when writing very small. The stylus is also pressure sensitive; push down a bit harder and your strokes become bolder.


Some of the bloatware is near-useless, though, and continues to undermine the stability of the OS. Samsung Hub exists just to sell you DRMed media that only works on Samsung devices, and is completely redundant with Google's Play Store. S Voice, while good, doesn't really accomplish anything you can't do with Google Now. With just the default apps installed, I saw a couple of process-stop error dialogs while the phone was just sitting on my desk, which wasn't confidence-inspiring. And unfortunately, this is one dialog-box-laden phone; every time I did something new to test it out, Samsung popped up a large dialog with further instructions, and often another EULA to agree to.

Multimedia and Camera
There's a roomy 32GB of internal storage, but Samsung's huge amount of preloaded software knocks over 7GB off the total, leaving 24.9GB available for your own apps and media. My 64GB SanDisk card worked fine in the microSD slot beneath the battery cover. All of our test music tracks played, including FLAC files, and sounded fine through a Plantronics BackBeat Go stereo Bluetooth headset. High-definition 1080p movie files including H.264 and Xvid looked fabulous in full-screen mode, although DivX files wouldn't play.

Samsung bumped the Note 2's autofocus camera sensor up to 13 megapixels, matching the one in the Galaxy S4. This being a Samsung camera, there are many extra features and modes, including a useful Eraser that eliminates a person from a series of photos, Best Face for merging group shots and getting the right expression on each person's face, and Rich Tone (HDR), which intensifies color and improves contrast. There are some less useful modes, too, like Beauty Face and Drama Shot, which don't seem to accomplish much.

In testing, the camera itself was quite fast to focus and fire. Outdoor shots were quite good, but still looked a little soft, and dark areas sometimes lacked detail. Indoors, again focus was soft; noise was kept under control well, but photos were clearly "cell phone camera" and not point-and-shoot camera quality. The front-facing camera takes bright selfies that run a little warm, color-wise, but are very usable. The video side is excellent: Both the front and rear cameras record smooth, sharp 1080p footage at 30 frames per second, and the rear camera's stabilization and detail look really good.

Should you get a phone or a phablet? Samsung isn't making the decision easy, thanks to its sheer number available devices with all manner of screen sizes. For example, the Samsung Galaxy Mega steps up to an even larger 6.3-inch display, but it's lower in resolution, and the Mega's dual-core processor is significantly behind the quad-core, next-gen chip in the Galaxy Note 3. Heading back down in the other direction, the Galaxy S4 still has a substantial 5-inch display, and since it's also 1080p, its pixel density is even tighter. The LG G2 splits the difference, with its 5.2-inch screen, and it has the same processing powerhouse internals, but it's not quite in the same league software-wise.

All told, the Galaxy Note 3 is the best phablet you can buy right now, and it's an easy Editors' Choice. There wasn't much wrong with the Galaxy Note 2 that a spec bump and software refinements couldn't fix, and we basically got them here.

Jamie Lendino
By Jamie Lendino Managing Editor, Consumer Electronics and Mobile


Follow Jamie Lendino Twitter: @jlendino
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