Samsung has recently unveiled its high-end phablet device from the Note series, Samsung Galaxy Note 10. The device, although has been received particularly good by the critics given the spectacular display and massive RAM options, there are some fronts on the smartphone which could have been improved.
Samsung released the Note 10 smartphone in two variants at an event yesterday. The bigger sibling of the line, Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, uses a 6.8-inch Dynamic AMOLED display while the normal Note 10 unit comes with a 6.3-inch panel of the same quality but slightly lesser screen resolution. Both of the smartphones are powered by Snapdragon 855 chipset but differ in the RAM and internal storage compartment. The Note 10 unit comes with 8GB of RAM option while the Note 10+ unit comes with 12GB of RAM option. More details about the newly unveiled smartphones could be read on our dedicated story.
Now that you have a gist of the two smartphones, let us now resort to the areas where the South Korean giant could have improved its high-end smartphone.
1. A dedicated 3.5 mm headphone jack:
As most of you might have already guessed, the first point to have made to this list is the absence of a dedicated headphone jack. With the latest Note 10 device, Samsung has taken this daring step to remove the 3.5 mm jack in a bid to move away from the 3.5 mm headphone regime. Now, the reader’s reviews could be very subjective on this point but given the widespread popularity and universality which the standard 3.5 mm offer at this time, this is a step Samsung could have done without. Moreover, Samsung has sort of developed a name for retaining the dedicated headphone jack for its users, attracting specifically the users who prefer it. The step to remove the 3.5 mm jack seems to be a daring step towards a 3.5 mm jack-less era, but for someone who prefers 3.5 mm jack over others, this could be a big turn-off.
2. Better hardware and software improvements:
Keeping in mind that the Note 10 devices are, so far, the best offering from the smartphone giant, people expect absolutely the best software and hardware components which the industry has to offer. To some extent, the consumers are also ready to pay the price for these premium offerings and keeping the price point low is rarely a point of importance in this category.
As far as the latest smartphone from Samsung is concerned, these smartphones don’t see a radical change on the software front and as well as on the hardware. Note 10 uses One UI 1.5, which features just the incremental software changes over the previous UI 1.1. There are some new features like AR Doodle in camera and better capabilities on DeX.
Similarly, the hardware on the Note 10 device, particularly the camera section, also doesn’t show radical improvement over its predecessor. The phablet uses a similar sensor setup as we saw on S10, which itself was quite similar to the setup we saw on Note 9. If Samsung wants to compete with the other top-of-the-line smartphones like Google Pixel 3 and Huawei P30 Pro, Samsung would have to up its camera game. Similarly, instead of using Snapdragon 855 that we previously saw on S10, Samsung could have resorted to its better version Snapdragon 855+ for the Note 10 devices.
3. No expandable storage
Another hardware-related option which is missing from the ‘high-end’ smartphone from Samsung is the option of MicroSD card from the regular Note 10 smartphone. The absence of 3.5 mm jack could somewhat be justified by Type-C dongle fans as it points towards a future where the smartphones would have one standard port for both the charger points and headphones; the absence of expandable storage in a high-end smartphone doesn’t make much sense. Although, the two smartphones come with 256 GBs of internal storage, having an extra memory card slot always helps in case a user runs out of the internal storage. The Note 10+ features a hybrid slot for a memory card with the dual SIM option, Samsung could have kept this option as a standard rather than a premium offering. With a top-of-the-line camera and hardware internals, many enthusiasts will surely turn to gaming and mobile photography on this smartphone. Presence of expandable memory option would have saved them an unnecessary nuisance.
Samsung has seemingly done quite good with the Note 10 device especially from the design point of view, but there are certain avenues which could have been brushed up more. As Samsung delves into offering a variety of size options in its flagship S and Note series, people have started to expect considerable improvements in one smartphone over the other. In this case, the improvements, especially between S10+ and regular Note 10 need to be more calling.
