Samsung Galaxy Note10+ long-term review

Software and performance

We're unanimous in our appreciation for Samsung's One UI in a way we weren't with the previous Samsung Experience, much less the Touch Wiz of the olden days. The mostly very coherent latest implementation of Samsung's in-house Android overlay delivers trouble-free interaction with the phone and brings ideas that Google hasn't yet thought to implement, but likely will - the bottom half.

Bear in mind that Android 10 only started rolling out to the Galaxy Note10+ and the Note10 in the very last couple of days, so this write-up is based almost entirely on our use of the Note running Android 9 Pie with OneUI 1.0 to 1.5.

First of all, gesture navigation. Samsung's default way of going about this is by replacing the nav bar buttons with swipe-up actions from their respective areas. Some of us used that for a while and had issues with certain cases that had a lip on the bottom sticking out above the display and interfering with the actions. Other cases that left the bottom of the phone bare did not cause such issues. Others couldn't be bothered with the half-baked sort-of gestures and stuck to the nav bar until a better solution presented itself.

That materialized in the form of One Hand Operation + - a Samsung-made app that offers a ton of control over gestures. It enables long and diagonal swipes from either side and you can associate all sorts of actions to go with the gestures, including the coveted quick switch back and forth between the two last used apps.

Being a solution bolted on top of another solution - you still have to have one of the two system-level navigation options enabled - OHO+ isn't flawless. In the Gallery app, for example, no matter how close to the edge of the screen you initiate the swipe, you'd still switch to the next or previous image as opposed to get the Back action triggered. Similarly, in the Camera, two out of three times you'd switch modes and not go Back. Or when trying to crop a photo in the editor, you'd pull on the OHO+' handles. We're only now starting to get a glimpse of the real gestures on Android 10 with One UI 2.0, we'll see how that goes.

Another thing that we used extensively on the Note10+ before its 'official' release in Android 10 was Night mode. It turns the UI black and also skins Samsung's apps in a similar fashion. It doesn't quite work across all apps, notably Google's own, which we do happen to use plenty often (hence no Mate 30 Pros around the office, sigh).

While some of them have had their own dark theme for a while, others don't and it does somewhat break the continuity. Then there's the matter that some apps, particularly some messengers, you're just used to seeing in their original color scheme and not in their newly developed dark one. All of this adds up to explain why we weren't all convinced by Night mode and some kept it off.

During the talks in preparation for this article, one surprising revelation came to light - people actually do use Edge panels. Not all of us, obviously, but it turned out that the side panes of shortcuts are more than the turn-off-from-the-get-go type of option that a few reviewers had them pegged to be.

Speaking of options, the Settings menu is brimming with them. In typical Samsung fashion, you can control all sorts of obscure things and a lot of them you wouldn't even think were up to you to decide. Which you don't really have to, but if you're a true Galaxy user you'll explore those menus wide and deep and customize that Note10+ to your specific tastes.

All this software customization was part of the reason why older Samsungs had a tendency to slow down with use. We can confidently say that our Note10+ units are running as fluidly as they did when we pulled them out of their retail boxes. Those 12GB of RAM and 256GB of UFS3.0 storage aren't just numbers, it would seem. Having said that, the Note10+ still doesn't feel as fast as some competitors - apparently, Samsung prefers a more relaxed pace.