The Galaxy Note 10 Plus is Samsung’s very sleek, very expensive new Note. It’s the kind of device that does a triple-double flip when all you asked for was a couple of cartwheels. It’s also a phone of a thousand niches, meaning that whether or not it’s worth the money depends very much on what you need.
Samsung says this phone is aimed at creators, which means precisely nothing these days. But, for instance, if you are someone who leans more into fun photography or you enjoy the art of handwriting with an S Pen stylus or well, you have quite big hands, then this is the phone for you. If you don’t fit into one of the many (many) niches the Note 10 Plus caters for, though, there’s plenty of 2019 phones that could offer better value than this.
When we first encountered the Note 10 Plus, we noted that it makes the six-month-old Galaxy S10 series out of date already and if you want the very best Samsung tech – the Note 10 Plus has three mics to enable the well-executed Zoom In Mic video feature versus the S10’s two, say – this is now the Galaxy to get. The main differences, though, are what has always been different: the Note 10 Plus is bigger and blockier than the Galaxy S10 and it has the redesigned S Pen as a bonus.
A lot of the work Samsung has been finishing up between the S10 launch and now is focused around the S Pen and the camera features. Let’s start with the S Pen; it’s been retooled as a unibody stylus that’s slightly shorter but still very enjoyable to use to prod the screen. Samsung has used the fact it now includes a Bluetooth antenna to plant the seed of the S Pen as a remote control.
So with ‘Air gestures’ you can press the button and wave the stylus around to scroll through Gallery pictures, remote shutter or play, pause or skip YouTube videos. Samsung has opened up an SDK for developers to come up with ideas on how to use these but in use, it didn’t really come together. The button presses are fine but the gestures don’t register every time and this is coupled with the fact that if you’re using S Pen gestures, this means you’re holding the (big) phone with one hand without the stability of the S Pen hand leaning on it to scribble.
We actually found that after some time away from the Note, the basics of handwriting – which is still a bit fiddly to get just right but exports as Microsoft Word files now – and prodding the screen as a finger replacement are still what works best here. The ability to write on the calendar is neat, as is the magnify feature. We even played Monument Valley 2 with the stylus; it quickly gets addictive. The battery is good for ten hours, making it a non-issue.
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