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Thanks to a series of unfortunate fires , millions of Samsung Galaxy Note 7 owners need to return their phones immediately. In some cases, for the second time. Since the Galaxy Note 7 is officially out of circulation, never to return, you may be wondering what would best fill that smartphone-sized hole in your heart. Non-incendiary options. Credit: Google. The Nexus 6P is a year old, but it has the distinct advantage of being available right now.
But the iPhone 7 Plus is the absolute best big smartphone available, especially with the Galaxy Note 7 out of commission. Another thing the Note 7 has taken from the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge is their cameras. In a nutshell, the Note 7 shoots stunning photos and spectacular 4K video.
Every picture you snap will be sharp and beautifully colorful, with great contrast and color accuracy. And thanks to that wider aperture, even low-light performance is impressive. Thanks to insanely fast autofocus, you can home in on your subject in a fraction of a second. Samsung has made some nice improvements to its camera app for the Note 7.
Simple swipe gestures give you access to the various shooting modes and filters available; handy toggles in the viewfinder let you adjust settings like HDR and flash. On a couple of days, I had to top up before bedtime arrived. These were the days when I used the Note 7 more than I normally would, mostly to test features and functions for this review. One of the reasons many Note fans keep returning to the series is the excellent S Pen.
With the Note 7, the S Pen is vastly improved. Taking notes with the S Pen is fun.
Doing sketches to pass the time is even better. The S Pen can also be used to translate text now. It also offers advantages on a device like the Note 7. With an iris scanner, you can unlock the Note 7 simple by looking at it. You wake your device, swipe the screen to activate the scanner, then line up the on-screen guides with your eyes. The only viewfinder elements that are still out of reach for one hand are the deeper settings which probably should already be setup to 4k video recording and Quad HD for the front facing camera, for example and HDR which could be on Auto already, anyway.
Anyone familiar with the Galaxy S7 and its top-notch camera quality will know what to expect from the Note 7. It is still capable of some of the better batches of photos in good lighting, providing good saturation and good colors bordering on almost oversaturated.
Details are captured quite well, with only some softness showing up when zooming into these photos — small text is still legible in some of these photos that have it.
Self portraits are still not the super high quality that some might be expecting, especially in indoor conditions where lighting is less than the power of the sun. As we generally find the case to be in low light, the color temperature tends to get quite warm — and a steady hand can be required from time to time as shutter speeds have to get much slower to expose darker scenes. With more resolution, there was quite literally a little more room to work with in terms of editing and quality. That same feature comes on the Note 7 — and coupled with the high onboard storage and the potential GB microSD card storage added on top, the Note 7 can be a powerful tool for videographers.
Overall, the user interface has been given some unified colors in order to make everything feel more coherent. Lighter colors are abound, with only the important bits and buttons providing the splashes of color. The notification shade and the settings page are the best places to see this; and even then, the settings page has been simplified so that things are easier to navigate. Sections of the settings page are consolidated in categories that include some main examples of what users might expect to find after going deeper, and this hopefully will make the usually daunting Samsung UI easier to navigate.
Indeed, Samsung wants to guide the users more than ever without the pesky dialog boxes that used to appear out of nowhere and incessantly, which was more annoying than helpful in the past.
Instead, there are little texts for just about every setting and there are arrows in the notification shade showing that pressing the text of an option will provide a little more information. Of course, there are still all of the main tropes of the Samsung interface, including the rather cartoonish and rounded icons and folders, but the round backgrounds for non-Samsung apps can be removed.
Briefing is still the news aggregator found to the left of the homescreens, but that can also be disabled. And all of this can be themed through the Themes area of the settings, which provides quite a few different options for changing the look of the interface without tampering with function.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is a discontinued Android-based phablet designed, developed, The Note 7 uses a USB Type-C port—marking Samsung's first mobile phone The Galaxy Note 7 introduces a security feature known as "Secure Folder"; "Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review: Sleeker, simpler, better than ever". But it's interesting to explore why the Note 7 is the best big phone ever. Samsung has more experience with big phones than any other.
Given that this is a curved display phone, the Edge UX makes an appearance and is largely the same as the one found on the Galaxy S7 Edge. Sliding from either the left or right side will bring up the Edges, a number of different panels that are able to house either contacts for quick dialing, icons for quick launching, or tickers for various forms of information like CNN News or a compass. The other addition focuses on security — the Secure Folder. Used as a sort of triage area for apps and accounts, the Secure Folder can best be described as a clean slate area.
Files, apps, and content put into it are locked under any of the same security measures that are used to unlock the device yes, including Iris. It is basically like putting a second copy of an app on your phone — for example, when putting Instagram in the Secure Folder, opening it brought up the initial login page, so that I could feasibly put in a personal or work account there depending on what configuration I wanted.
But, of course, the crux of the Note 7 is the S Pen — and there is a mixture of streamlining and adding to the formula to make this iteration probably the most practical one yet. Hovering the pen tip over the screen can still provide previews into various parts of the UI and selecting multiple items is still simple with the mouse-like nature of the S Pen and its button.
While these shortcuts can be edited to open up pretty much any application, the main ones for the S Pen still include a straight note creation, Smart Select for some more creative captures, and Screen Write for capturing what the screen is currently showing or scrolling, if one is currently on a scrollable page for writing and editing and sharing. Smart Select got one of the bigger and probably funner additions, Animation select.
A frame of any size the user chooses appears and can be put over any part of the screen to record a 15 second GIF, making GIF creation just about as easy as GIF searching. Or, if you ever have that GIF you can never find, now you have the method to save it. The Smart Select Animation can quite literally capture anything, like video content from Instagram or YouTube for easy sharing in only the easy way the S Pen does it — just hit share and it goes straight to the place of your choice.
The other additions to the S Pen software family are not quite as deep, but they are useful in their own rights. Glance is an interesting one that shrinks any app to a small square snapped to corners of the screen — hovering the S Pen over the square makes it large again for easy checking or for continued regular usage. And finally there is Translate, perhaps the feature that we really want to see evolve. Though would like to see full sentences and phrase become a part of Translate, we applaud Samsung for included it in this new version of the Note.
Removing the S Pen while the screen is off brings up a black screen where one can quickly jot down a scribble. Returning the S Pen to its slot puts the memo into the Notes app, just like any other note.
However, now the memo can be pinned to the Screen Off Memo so that it is always within view. All of these notes are now put into one singular Notes application, which consolidates all of the different methods and abilities the S Pen used to have splashed across the UI — Action Memo and S Note, for example. By putting everything under one roof, the Notes application is now one of the most robust apps for notation and will eventually be made available for even the Galaxy S devices.
While the small but noticeable changes to the Android experience on the Note 7 are already welcome, it seems that this year Samsung really wants users to start pulling the S Pen out more. After all, plenty of users report that they never use the S Pen or its myriad of features and instead just look at the Note as a standalone device with a lot of power. Will these features make that change?
That remains to be seen, but there seems to be a lot of thought put into the S Pen this year and the effort is not lost on us here at Android Authority. And, indeed, that effort permeates throughout the phone, where a number of different aspects have been either refined or straight up upgraded.