Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7378/samsung-galaxy-note-101-2014-edition-review
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Edition) Review
by Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on October 1, 2013 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Samsung
- Mobile
- Tablets
- Galaxy Note 10.1
Ever since the arrival of the Nexus 10, it’s been hard recommending other, lower resolution 10-inch Android tablets. Although not the knock out success that the Nexus 7 became, the Nexus 10 did offer a good alternative to the iPad at a lower price. Given that Samsung made the aforementioned 10-inch Nexus, complete with 2560 x 1600 display, we wondered when a similar panel might grace Samsung’s own tablet lineup. A few weeks ago we got the answer we’ve been waiting almost a year for.
The latest iteration of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1, aptly named the 2014 Edition, ships with the firm’s own 10.1-inch 2560 x 1600 display. It’s not display alone that Samsung hopes to sell its latest Note 10.1 on, the rest of the package is similarly specced to the max.
Unlike the Galaxy Note 3 where the majority of devices sold will likely use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800, the new Note 10.1 uses Samsung’s own Exynos 5420 SoC for all WiFi models. It’s only the LTE versions that will leverage Qualcomm silicon, but WiFi tablets still sell extremely well. All of this makes the 2014 Edition the first Samsung Android device to ship with its own Cortex A15 silicon in the US since the Nexus 10.
Add 3GB of RAM, tick the 802.11ac box and all you’re missing is USB 3.0 from the Galaxy Note 3. The result is Samsung’s first truly high end 10.1-inch Android tablet since the Nexus 10, and as its name implies, it comes with an S Pen. The entire bundle comes at a $150 premium to the much lower specced Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 and to the Galaxy Note 8.0:
Specifications | |||||||||
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Edition) | Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 | Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 | |||||||
Dimensions | 243.1 x 171.4 x 7.9mm | 210.8 x 135.6 x 7.95mm | 210.8 x 135.6 x 7.95mm | ||||||
Display | 10.1-inch 2560 x 1600 Super Clear LCD | 10.1-inch 1280 x 800 LCD | 8.0-inch 1280 x 800 LCD | ||||||
Weight | 535g (WiFi) | 510g (WiFi) | 338g (WiFi) | ||||||
Processor | 1.8GHz Samsung Exynos 5420 (4 x Cortex A15/4 x Cortex A7, Mali-T628MP6) |
1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2560 (2 x Atom , PowerVR SGX544MP2) |
1.6GHz Samsung Exynos 4412 (4 x Cortex A9, Mali 400MP4) |
||||||
Connectivity | WiFi , Optional 3G/4G LTE | WiFi , Optional 3G/4G LTE | WiFi , Optional 3G/4G LTE | ||||||
Memory | 3GB | 1GB | 2GB | ||||||
Storage | 16GB—64GB + microSD | 16GB/32GB + microSD | 16GB/32GB + microSD | ||||||
Battery | 31Wh | 25.84Wh | ~17Wh | ||||||
Starting Price | $549 | $399 | $399 |
Design
Balancing a desire to make tons of sweet cash with criticisms about material quality, Samsung revamped its 2014 Note family with a new design. Rather than the smooth glossy plastic back we’ve seen with the previous generation of Notes, the Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition inherits the same back cover finished in faux leather from the Galaxy Note 3.
I’ve already gone into detail on the improvement this is over the previous slick plastic in our Galaxy Note 3 review, but in short it’s a good step forward. There’s a difference in finish between the white and black versions (the latter has more of a grip laden rubbery texture), but both are better than the previous generation. We’re still talking about injection molded plastic and not real leather, but it’s a big step forward and honestly feels quite good in hand. The fake stitching is a bit much for me personally, though those looking for a more organic feel might appreciate it.
The new Note 10.1 maintains roughly the same dimensions as the new Galaxy Tab 3 10.1, although with far better internals and display.
The usual design staples are all here. There’s a microSD card slot on the right hand side as well as stowage for the new S Pen. Up top you’ll find the power/lock switch and volume rocker. There’s a physical home button front and center, flanked by capacitive menu and back buttons. The design is distinctly Samsung.
Software & OS
The 2014 Edition of the Galaxy Note ships with Android 4.3, as well as the typical set of S Pen, multi-window and other productivity enhancements you’d expect from a Samsung Note device. I’ve already gone through these in our Galaxy Note 3 review as well as in our Galaxy Note 8.0 review, so I’ll point you there for more details. In short, the S Pen is an interesting productivity addition to a tablet. It does a reasonable job of approximating a pen and paper experience, although understandably with more lag than you're used to (along with some other quirks).
CPU & Performance
The 5420 is Samsung’s second Exynos 5 Octa SoC, pairing a quad-core Cortex A15 cluster with a quad-core Cortex A7 cluster. The Note 10.1’s implementation still only supports cluster migration, with either the Cortex A15 or Cortex A7 cluster being active at once, effectively making the chip a quad-core SoC in the eyes of the user and OS. The point of having both A15 and A7 clusters on board is to be able to switch between the two depending on workload demands. If you need performance, a quad-core Cortex A15 is at your disposal, running at up to 1.8GHz (up from 1.6GHz in the previous Exynos 5410). If you need battery life however, the Cortex A7 cluster takes over running at up to 1.3GHz in the 5420 (up from 1.2GHz). Switching between the two is seamless as far as the OS is concerned, and for the first time the two clusters have a functioning cache coherent interconnect between the two (although it's not leveraged in the Note 10.1's implementation). Ideally Samsung’s implementation would go one step further and feature a cache shared between both clusters (rather than a 2MB L2 for the A15 cluster and 512KB L2 for the A7 cluster), but we’re still in the early days of big.LITTLE.
The 5420 performs understandably quite well. In lightly threaded tests the Note 10.1 pulls ahead of the old Nexus 10, but in those that exploit the tablet’s four A15 cores we see a significant jump forward. Samsung was able to deliver a relatively good experience with four Cortex A9 cores in their Galaxy Note 8, the new Note 10.1’s underlying hardware just does an even better job.
The four A15s are generally quicker then Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800/Krait 400s, but typically fall short of Intel's Atom Z3770 under Android as well as Apple's Cyclone cores in the A7.
GPU & Performance
Although Exynos 5420 fixes the big underlying issue with Samsung’s silicon on the CPU front, it’s actually the GPU that sees the most dramatic change. ARM once again wins Samsung’s GPU business and equipped the Exynos 5420 with a 6-core Mali-T628, replacing the PowerVR SGX544MP3 from the previous Exynos 5410. Overall performance takes a huge step forward. Looking at T-Rex HD (offscreen) we see the best example of where the Mali-T628MP6 lands: about 11% slower than Adreno 330 and 8% behind IMG’s PowerVR G6430 in the iPhone 5s. It’s definitely a competitive GPU with the latest and greatest from IMG and Qualcomm, but not faster than either. It’s incredible to think of just how far we’ve come. It wasn’t too long ago that we were complaining about non-Apple SoCs not taking GPU performance seriously, but here we are talking about competitive performance across the big three ARM vendors.
NAND Performance
We've been tracking storage performance on these devices for a little while now and have noticed forward progress over the generations. The new Note 10.1 does reasonably well in our IO tests, with its strengths being sequential read and random write performance (arguably the two more important metrics). Since the tablet ships with Android 4.3 it should feature FSTRIM support (something we're still verifying on the 2014 Edition), which will help keep NAND performance high as long as you don't fill up all of your storage (remember: try to keep ~20% of the internal NAND free at all times).
Display
The 2014 Edition features a 10.1-inch 2560 x 1600 Super LCD display. Looking at the subpixel structure of the panel we get an idea for exactly what Super LCD means: RB,GW.
Instead of a standard RGB stripe we get a combination of red, green, blue and white subpixels for each pixel. The white subpixel helps increase light throughput, an obvious problem with these ultra high resolution displays. The downside is that you get a lower subpixel density than a traditional RGB stripe. At these ultra high pixel densities however, the theory is that you wouldn’t notice the difference - hopefully making the power savings by having better light transmission, particularly when displaying lots of white (e.g. web pages), worth it.
In practice the display looks pretty good, although a carefully trained eye will be able to recognize that this isn’t a standard RGB stripe. I quickly realized something was different about the display, something I later verified when looking at the subpixel structure.
Color accuracy is pretty decent on the Note 10.1’s display. As always I’m reporting color data using Samsung’s Movie mode, which remains the most accurate setting of those offered. Grayscale performance is excellent, but our GMB and saturations tests put the Note 10.1 on par with the original Nexus 7. It’s definitely a better calibrated display than any other Samsung Galaxy Note tablet we’ve reviewed. Not quite on par with the new Nexus 7, but getting very close.
Camera
The 2014 Edition features a rear facing 8MP camera with AF and LED flash and a 2MP front facing camera. Image quality out of the rear camera was pretty good for a tablet. I took some photos using the tablet and tossed them in the gallery below, as well as embedded a sample 1080p video recorded using the tablet.
Battery Life & Charging
The Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Edition) ships with an integrated (non-removable) 31Wh battery, that’s substantially smaller than the iPad 4’s 42.5Wh battery - helping it maintain a more svelte figure. The question is how power efficient the combination of RB,GW panel and Exynos 5420 are in combination with one another.
We’ll start with our typical WiFi web browsing battery life test. Here we see a good combination of regular spikes in CPU usage with idle time, hopefully simulating constant, reasonably paced usage.
The 2014 Edition does a bit better than the Nexus 10, but clearly worse than the original Note 10.1 (and obviously worse than the much smaller Nexus 7). There’s not much you can do here other than to point out that we’re talking about an extremely high resolution panel, with an extremely power hungry SoC. The fact that we’re talking about more cores running at a higher frequency than the Exynos 5250 used in the Nexus 10 is good news, but Exynos 5420 also enjoys the benefits of being on Samsung’s 28nm LP process as well.
The video playback story is much better however. With the power hungry Cortex A15 cores able to power down (and hopefully remain there), we’re really testing the display and video decode engines here:
The Note 10.1 beats the new Nexus 7 and is only 10% behind the iPad 4, despite having a much smaller battery.
Like the Nexus 10, the Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Edition) takes an incredible amount of time to charge with the bundled 2A charger. A full charge from 0 to 100% took just over 7 hours.
Final Words
Starting from the inside out, the new Galaxy Note is better in pretty much every way. The industrial design is much improved compared to its predecessors. The new Exynos 5420 is quite fast on both CPU and GPU fronts. Battery life is ok for normal usage but great for video playback (just behind the big iPad). You get tons of RAM (3GB) and super fast WiFi. Then there’s the display. The 2560 x 1600 panel is easily the best Samsung has shipped in a tablet. Although not the best in the industry, it’s in a different league compared to Samsung tablet displays of years past. Even compared to the Galaxy Tab 3.0 lineup, the 2014 Note 10.1’s display is so much better.
With a relatively good story across the board in terms of hardware, the only difficulty in this conclusion boils down to a discussion of price vs. functionality.
The Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Edition) arrives at an interesting time for the 10-inch tablet market. It’s definitely the high-end offering we’ve always hoped to see from Samsung in their 10-inch family, but the world seems to be moving toward smaller tablets for consumption, while toying with the idea of a 2-in-1 for productivity. Samsung attempts to straddle both lines with the inclusion of the S Pen, something we found surprisingly useful in our review of the Galaxy Note 8.0, but a feature that comes at a steep price.
There are really two key tablet price points/devices that you have to compete with in this world: the 2013 Nexus 7 at $229, and iPad at $499. The Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Edition) continues Samsung’s trend of charging a premium for the S Pen/Note experience and shows up at $549 for a 16GB WiFi-only model. That is a healthy premium over the non-Note model, but easily worth the adder given what you get (assuming you're limiting yourself to shopping exclusively in Samsung's tablet lineup). What I'd really like to see is a 2014 Edition of the Galaxy Note 8, with the same sort of hardware but at a much lower price point.
At the end of the day, the new Note’s pricing paints it into a niche just like the rest of the big Note lineup. If you love the S Pen experience and want it on some of the best 10-inch tablet hardware available, the new Note 10.1 is perfect. It's arguably the best 10-inch tablet Samsung has ever built, but it's also priced as such. If you're not married to the S Pen, there are definitely cheaper options out there.