The phone I have been truly waiting for has arrived at last. I know a couple of reviewers have said that Samsung haven’t tried “hard enough”, whatever that means, but I think it’s magnificent that they have actually delivered a beautiful and yet stunningly useful Galaxy Note 10+ 5G
It pretty much ticks all my boxes except one (and I am willing to live with that as it sadly is the way things are going).
The screen is amazing – pretty much the entire front of the phone is screen. The bezels down the sides are virtually not there, and along the top is a little bigger. The bottom chin is slightly larger than the top one.
The central hole punch camera doesn’t actually bother me at all. I thought it would irritate me, but when you compare it to my previous phone, that bit of screen is hardly used. I think I’ve found things behind it just twice so far, and on neither occasion was it an issue.
As for the rest of the device, well the air gestures work well enough to use – although I can’t think of a massive usage case for them right now.
DeX on PC is a huge winner for me – I’m going to install the DeX PC software on the PC at the club and so I can present without having to use the HDMI connection which over a long distance can be flaky. It works fine, although there is noticable lag which I’m hoping Samsung can iron out.
The problem with it, then, apart from nobody actually stocking them – is no 3.5mm jack. It’s sad times that the 3.5 jack on phones is becoming a thing of the past, but as I pointed out to a friend a few days ago – it’s not been a thing on phones for that long anyway. Anyone who owned a pocket PC or Nokia 9500 with Pop Port will know that they didn’t have headphone jacks for the most part either, and were often supplied with special non standard, poor quality, expensive headphones. Mini USB headphones were truly dreadful too.
I’m willing to live with that last point. The only time I ever plug anything in is when I’m at a mixing desk and I’ll just buy a dongle for those rare occasions (remembering I do have a tablet WITH the said jack for such times).