Samsung Galaxy Note Review

Battery Life

The phone will last you an average of about 14 hours of regular use. Our average usage pattern has been roughly an hour or a little more of real call time, while the remaining 9-odd hours of intense computing: e-mail, office productivity, Twitter, Facebook, web browsing, audio-video, and an occasional game. Internet connectivity was always on (either 3G or WiFi, depending on what was available).

Our continuous video-loop test lasted for 9 hours and 15 minutes, which is quite a record. So, the device does have enough battery life to keep you entertained and working for a good working-day. However, there are some issues: despite going into a deep sleep mode, the phone still discharges battery at a steady rate. So if you were at 20 percent charge just before you went to sleep, then phone won’t last till it’s time to ring your morning alarm. It just cannot make the last 10 percent last for even 4-hours in a deep sleep mode. The drain from 30 percent charge to 1 percent can happen in as little as 6-hours, with absolutely no active screen use. Considering the fact that the phone has so much processing power at its disposal, it's worth considering underclocking the phone to 50MHz just before you go to sleep, this kind of active profile and processor management may actually take this phone through a full 24-hour cycle without a recharge.

But once on a full charge, which takes a good two hours or so, the phone will pull along for 14-hours easily, and for now we'll happily take that everyday. 

Verdict

Do yourself a favour and go get the Galaxy Note. It’s a powerful tablet, that’s very thinly disguised as a smartphone. You will invariably spend 80 percent of your time doing things on it that you’d otherwise be doing on a tablet or a computer even. And just consider that it can make and receive calls as an added bonus. Samsung TouchWiz’s calling and general telecommunication functionality leaves a lot to be desired, and isn’t yet anywhere near HTC’s Sense UI, but it’s adequate and there are tweaks and apps available to give you your desired phone or messaging launcher. 

Best of both worlds - tablet and phone

Then, after all that, there's the simple fact that the Galaxy Note won’t give up the ghost easily, its 2500mAh battery ensures that it will keep going for at least a full working day. You can go about using it as a phone-only without looking like a goof, and still have enough left to read a book, watch a movie, play a game, and browse to your heart’s content. 

It is also the fastest around, and it will never stumble or stutter as you move happily between writing an e-mail, watching an episode of Dexter and snapping a quick photograph. All of these taken together are the best arguments possible for having only one device to do it all. This is for real, and not some make believe futuristic device. 

Oh! And lest we forget: as we’ve noted so many times before, great devices rarely ever come cheap, so relatively speaking - and especially when there are phones and tablets that retail for upwards of Rs 40,000! —the Galaxy Note is also a great bargain.