Samsung Galaxy Note10+ long-term review

Display is awesome

The Galaxy Note10+ has one of the best display in the business, possibly the best if a high refresh rate doesn't tickle your fancy. It's super bright when the ambient light calls for it, and it goes dim when you want it to.

Samsung's new-found way to set up the color rendition with just Vivid and Natural modes makes for a simpler choice to the user. Natural is the mode that delivers subdued colors overall and an accurate representation of the sRGB color space.

We don't like our colors subdued though, and Vivid mode has been set on all the Note10s that we've used as daily drivers around headquarters. The phone will adjust its rendition depending on the encoding of the displayed content, though you get little control over that.

You have zero control over the fact that all Samsung flagships now come with curved edge displays, and that entails some color shifts and potentially odd reflections at the extremes. These 'issues' on the Note10+ are among the least dramatic ones we've seen, in no small part to Samsung's tendency towards smaller curved sections. Even so it's there and if you're bothered by minor imperfections, you'll probably be seeing the edge color shifts long after most people will have learned to ignore them.

The Note10+ comes out of the box with its UI resolution set at 1080p, despite the panel having a 1440p resolution. We're still not sure how to feel about it as the all-out flagship should be set to deliver all-out display quality with the option to lower being a bonus. Even so, the setting is easily accessible.

Anecdotal data points to some battery life advantages if you go for the lower resolution, which we've historically been unable to prove in objective testing. As for the sharpness, some of us insist they can spot the difference and are bothered by it, others are in the '1080p is good enough' camp. It seems like we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.

Battery life

Battery life is one of the aspects of a phone's behavior that is most difficult to quantify in an objective manner, because it's simply awfully specific to each user's patterns. More battery is generally better, all things being equal, and the Note10+ has a confidence-inspiring 4,300mAh power pack on board, which is puts to good use.

One account of a typical Note10+ day goes like this. With the phone set at 1080p display resolution and the power mode in its default Optimized state, it gets off the charger at 7:30 in the morning. Approaching the end of a workday around 5pm, the phone's been through about an hour of Spotify over Bluetooth and another 30 to 40 minutes of YouTube videos, all of it over Wi-Fi, and the battery indicator stands at 65% percent. Going to bed around midnight, after having clocked another hour on YouTube in the meantime, the phone is at about 50%.

On another day, four and a half hours of screen-on time later and 16 hours after unplugging the charger, the Note10+ was showing 35%, so it could easily squeeze another 2 hours with the display on. On a more intense day outside with the brightness in auto (effectively at full blast any time the screen is on), the phone was at 30% after a four-hour hike with dozens of photos and videos taken throughout.

The Note10+ turned out to be a decidedly superior experience to the Note10 when it came to battery life, despite the seemingly proportional relation between cell capacities and display sizes. In the real world, the small Note10 had us worried it would abandon us on longer days, where the Plus left an overall feeling of confidence.

The Galaxy Note10+ comes with a 25W charger in the box, which gets it from zero to full in a little over an hour. We were looking at 64% at the 30-minute mark, which is among the better numbers in out charging speed chart short of the 50W and 65W VOOC implementations. While it is a USB PowerDelivery adapter, it's the PPS capabilities (PPS stands for Programmable Power Supply) that let you get the high wattage and if you want to match that speed with a third-party unit, you should look for a PPS one.

The Note10+ also supports 45W charging with an adapter Samsung will happily sell you separately. Early reviews unanimously clocked charging times to 100% equal to what the bundled 25W adapter gets, and marginal improvements at the intermediate points - we figured those $50 weren't justified. We went in more detail on the charging specifics of the Note10+ in this article over here.

Wireless charging is also supported on the Note10+ and it works both ways - you can charge the phone on every Qi compatible pad and you can charge compatible devices off the handset too. It's another one of those capabilities that half the people use and can't live without, while the other half couldn't care less.