Samsung Galaxy Note10+ long-term review

Biometrics

Ah, that fingerprint reader again. Samsung introduced its ultrasonic sensor on the Galaxy S10 and it got off to a rocky start for a good reason. It offered frustrating user experience as a result of a combination of factors including the specifics of the technology and Samsung's UI implementation. Software updates helped somewhat with the latter, but the fingerprint reader on the Galaxy S10 or S10+ never managed to match the speed of optical units from pretty much all competitors.

We'd like to say the Note10+ offers a markedly better experience, but that's really not the case. Between the three people using Note10s in the office, we've got two that straight up hate it, and one that says it's usable.

Part of that also has to do with the frustrating early days of using the phone when you don't yet have the muscle memory where the sensor is, and the software hasn't had the chance to build a detailed enough picture of your digits. That'll easily discourage you from using it and will leave the 'it's no good' impression firmly imprinted.

Now, if you do persist, you could end up in a usable state where the sensor will unlock for you on, say, 9 out of 10 tries. Even then, the speed of the whole procedure isn't very 2019 - whether it's down to Samsung's animations, or they only mask the inherent relative slowness of the process, we can't tell, but competing optical readers are faster, every time.

It's worth noting that you can set up the always on display to constantly show a drawing of where the sensor is, so you don't have to guess. That can help in the early days of using it, and we can't see why you wouldn't have it enabled if you do use the AOD. On the other hand, if you're not a fan of the AOD's way of draining your battery that extra bit faster, you can compromise for a couple of weeks to develop the muscle memory to use the sensor 'in the dark'.

There's another option too, of course. Face unlock is available on the Note10+ and it only uses the front facing camera, so it's not as secure as the fingerprint reader, or a proper depth mapping implementation like you'd find on an iPhone or a Mate 30 Pro. Even so, for general use we found face scanning to work perfectly fine in well-lit environment and it's super fast.

S Pen

The Galaxy Note series' defining feature is the S Pen, remove that and you basically have an S10+. Or is that so? Well, not quite, and here's why we think so. Between us three Note users, the S Pen rarely makes it out of its silo, yet none of us is willing to part with it.

It does get used on occasion - when you don't want to just crop that screenshot, but also write on it, or when you lack the social skills to ask someone to take a photo of you so you prop the phone somewhere and use the S Pen as a remote, or when you want to remind yourself what it was back in the day when people actually wrote and take handwritten notes. Specific use cases, admittedly, but there nonetheless.

The brand new Air actions that debuted on this generation - those we can't say we've used once in the real world after trying them out for the regular review. Wielding the S Pen as a baton to control the Note sounds nice, but in all those months we simply didn't encounter a situation where it's genuinely useful to swing the stylus around. It's just that the phone and the S Pen are usually so close together that it's so much more intuitive to just interface with the screen as opposed to the pen.