With a fantastic design and great display, the Galaxy Note 4 remains a solid choice if you’re in the market for a phablet. It features a 5.7 inch Super AMOLED display and stunning 2k resolution, with vivid colours and sharp image resolution. The home key is also an integrated fingerprint sensor.
Earlier Samsung smartphones had been criticized for their flimsy plastic design, but the metal frame gives the Note 4 a sturdy and robust feel. The back cover comes with a sleek, but minimalist faux-leather finish. If you enjoy watching videos during your daily commute, this phablet is the right choice for you – the screen is large enough to make on-the-go video watching a dream, while the phone remains lightweight and an overall manageable size. The device features a 3.5mm audio jack, a 3.7 MP front camera, an LED flash and heartrate monitor.
This phablet is also an excellent multitasker, with a powerful UI that provides a smooth usage experience. Courtesy of the Snapdragon 805 SoC and 3GB RAM, the Note 4 is also capable enough those gaming enthusiasts amongst you. (Not during dinner though – never during dinner.) Total capacity comes at about 32GB, which is nothing to complain about, but the smartphone also features a microSD card slot for a bit of extra storage. The Note 4 also comes with 4G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities, USB with OTG and an IR Blaster port.
The 3220mAh battery performs admirably, giving between one and two days of charge, depending on usage levels. You can extend battery life by using the phone’s integrated power saving mode and the greyscale mode, or go all out there when saving battery is a priority with the ultra-power saving mode.
The 16MP rear camera with an OIS feature offers improved sharpness and fast focusing. The phablet takes accurate photos, with controlled colour reproduction and no shutter delay. The camera app is user-friendly and intuitive, with a range of filters and settings, and there’s even a free editing app for those days when you need a bit of extra-help. The camera performs well in dim lighting, but tone accuracy is not always top-notch! It also features 4k recording capability, producing smooth, fluid videos with crisp sound quality, courtesy of multiple microphones.
Five years down the line, this device is still no slouch in the phablet category, offering excellent performance, productivity and elegant design. The increase in screen-size earned Samsung a fair amount of criticism when the product was first launched, but large screens have since become the norm, which makes the phablet less of an outlier in that regard in 2020. If you like your smartphones on the small-scale, then the Note 4 may still not be the right choice for you. For those out there who don’t mind trading a bit of pocket space for all the benefits of having a larger screen, you won’t regret choosing this classic phablet.