[Galaxy Note 3 General] NZtechfreak:
Hi everyone,

I got a good few hours with the Galaxy Note 3 over the weekend, so I thought I might drop a line about my experiences with the phone :)

This was the S800 version, and it had the AB binning of that SoC :)

[UPDATE]

Actually I looked into the bin situation some more after some of the enquiries here. The network guy I was in contact with said it was the AB binning as it was clocked at 2.3Ghz. I took that as read and hence posted that information here, however it looks as if even at the 2.3Ghz clockspeed there are two binnings for the GPU speed. Bottom line I can't categorically state this is AB bin, my apologies for the lack of clarity there everyone.

Here is what the Voodoo Report says, as you can see it depends on whether the 0007 revision corresponds to the AB bin:

Hardware	: Qualcomm MSM 8974 (Flattened Device Tree)

Revision	: 0007

Firstly, while its very subjective I really loved the faux-leather back. I like that there is now no 'correct' orientation for inserting the S-Pen, and that the S-Pen works with the capacitive buttons. The screen was set to the Film mode and was very good, no complaints whatsoever about pixel density, seemed a fair amount brighter than my S4 when out taking shots with it. It flew with the S800 of course, hardly surprising given it wasn't loaded with apps and has that much power at its disposal. Finally going to the widgets section didn't lag like crazy as per previous versions of TW. Although there were only a handful of contacts loaded, which may have made a difference, I did revel in seeing no lag whatsoever launching the contacts app (finally!). Running PPSSPP as a graphics stress test it managed ~23fps on Tekken Dark Resurrection, which is starting to get up into the playable realm (my Octa S4 for reference manages only ~11fps). On less demanding games results even better - Disgaia Afternoon of Darkness was basically perfect running full speed with sound and with frameskipping turned off (which makes me extremely happy). The S800 still isn't up to playing 1080p 10-bit video, which was to be expected. It did manage it slightly better than older SoCs though, so perhaps in the next 1-2 generations of SoCs we'll see this become doable. My time with it was too short to make any sensible comment about battery life, sorry.

Here is the RAM situation, seems the Exynos version has about 300Mb more free RAM going off Sammobiles, but here is a screen from the S800 version:

Free storage ~25Gb, a pleasant surprise as I expected less:

I was really surprised (and pleased) to find rapidly accessible defaults management is available:

It let's you choose the colour of the screen visible in the S-View cover:

The have further expanded one-handed use settings, in this slightly strange one you can run everything in a little window with onscreen buttons if you wanted (!):

I made a camera comparison and the shots are up at Flickr here. Included with the Note 3 are the Xperia Z1 I also had and an S4 and Pureview 808. Methods: All shots on auto, all shots taken at same time in same position, lens cloth used to wipe lens covers clean prior to every shot, several shots captured on each phone and best selected for the comparison (if you take one shot only and get one with a completely aberrant focus/white balance etc, in other words a poor outlier not reflecting the cams usual quality, then that isn't especially useful for a comparison like this). Caveats: In all likelihood neither the Z1 or Note 3 on release firmwares, the light in the outdoors scene a bit variable due to moving cloud cover. I have my own thoughts on the photos, but if you haven't seen those on Twitter already better to let you draw your own conclusions before I say a word.

I took a 31s 4K video and was quite impressed at how smoothly it handled fairly quick panning, that 31s cost 177Mb in storage and was recorded at 48Mbps (see mediainfo screen below). The Note 3 was having quite a bit of trouble playing this video back it is worth noting, probably also worth noting that my laptop would not play it AT ALL!

The following information I put in a dedicated thread in the accessories forum, but probably of interest to folks here too:

A few findings of mine from the weekend:

External drives work, but unfortunately NTFS formatted drives still don't work on stock ROMs. It had the power to spin up a 1TB Seagate drive! Unfortunately the drive was NTFS formatted so couldn't do more to see how well it was working, but definitely was powered with a solid indicator light. Promising.

The Smart Dock works with the Note 3

The S3/Note 2 MHL adapters definitely work

The Samsung MHL 2.0 adapter works without needing a charging input plugged in and IS outputting at 60Hz

USB audio working, I tried several DACs. The ones that worked were the HiFimeDIY, Tiny-M, HeadAmp Pico. Unfortunately Apex Glacier did not work (did not work on the S4 either).

USB keyboards/mice working as they did with the older Samsungs

PS3 controller working over USB OTG

Ditto for the Xbox 360 for Microsoft controller (which required an app on older Samsungs in order to work)

Logitech F310 controller works too

Ditto the Logitech F710

It also worked with a cheapie gamepad from Ebay (like $6), although button mappings seemed limited and did not have time to try it in emulators etc to see whether all could be mapped.

BT keyboard and mouse working, as expected

IR blaster via the inbuilt app works great with my LG TV

MHL and USB OTG do not work together using the Samsung MHL 2.0 adapter

Moga Pro gamepad working well

Tried several ethernet adapters, none work.

Unfortunately the one I had did not have the USB 3.0 cable/charger, so could not benchmark read/write speeds or charging speeds using that connectivity.

The Z1 seemed quite large in comparison given the disparity in display sizes: