Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review: Samsung reveals cause of explosions

Cause of Samsung Galaxy Note 7 explosions issues revealed

Samsung has finally revealed the cause of those Galaxy Note 7 explosions. Following some pretty high profile fires and explosions, the South Korean manufacturer led an in-depth investigation after production ended on what briefly held the top spot as the king of smartphones. 

You can read a more in-depth analysis on the battery issues here but in short, the two (unnamed) battery suppliers are to blame. These manufacturing defects and design flaws saw the battery manufacturer not supplying enough space in the battery pouch and an improper contact between the positive tab and the negative electrode. In layman’s terms, these issues led to the two recalls, and contributed to the death of the Note 7. 

You can still read our original thoughts on the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 when it was first released below. We hailed it as the best smartphone ever made before these issues came to light, but you’ll just have to imagine how it once was (two days before the recall) as there’s simply now way of acquiring one anymore.

My original Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review continues below. 

Samsung Galaxy Note 7: At a glance

Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 is a superb smartphone – one of the best money can buy, in fact. Given how expensive it is, however, that may not come as a surprise – and you’ll definitely want to consider its pros and cons before rushing down to your local smartphone emporium. To help you make your decision, we’ve drawn up a simple summary of the Note 7’s key features below. If you want to know more, then scroll down to read our in-depth review.

1. It’s big, but not that big You can think of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 as a bigger version of the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, with a 5.7in screen. That said, it doesn’t feel all that big in your hand or your pocket, and if you’re used to 5in phones it’s not much of a leap at all.
2. It looks great Just like the S7 and S7 Edge, the Note 7 is clad in glass front and back, and it also boasts a rather fetching set of curved glass edges. The screen is the also best display Samsung has every produced when it comes to quality and brightness.
3. You can write on the screen  The Note 7 comes with a stylus, which lets you jot notes and sketch onscreen, and carry out other tasks such as capture screenshots. It works really well, and it will even recognise your handwriting and convert it to text.
4. It has iris recognition  Fingerprint unlocking has become commonplace in recent times, but the Note 7 adds another string to its security bow: iris recognition, allowing you to unlock the phone with a glance at the screen.
5. It’s fast The Note 7 we tested has Samsung’s own processor on board – the Exynos 8890 – plus 4GB of RAM and 64GB storage. This is an incredibly quick combination, making the Note 7 one of the fastest phones on the planet. Apple’s iPhone 6S Plus is still marginally quicker in some tests, though.
6. The camera is amazing, but no better than the S7 and S7 Edge Samsung’s smartphone camera are the best on the planet, but the Note 7 won’t give you better results than the cheaper S7 or S7 Edge because it uses exactly the same camera hardware inside.
7. It’s expensive The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is one of the most expensive smartphones you can buy, costing even more than the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. At launch, the phone will cost £730 SIM free, and will cost upwards of £41 per month on contract.

Samsung Galaxy Note 7: Full review

Back in 2011, Samsung looked at the mobile phone landscape and decided everything was too damned fiddly for our massive hands. The result was the Samsung Galaxy Note: a handset that almost single-handedly started the phablet boom, and ensured that today it’s pretty hard to find a top handset that’s smaller than 5in.

The Note 2 followed in 2012, and then predictably the Note 3 in 2013. You can guess when the Note 4 was released if you’ve been paying attention, but that’s where the guessing game gets more tedious. The Note 5 never launched in the UK, and the Note 6 – like Windows 9 – never existed. Good news if you bought a contract Note 4 right at the start: you’ll be due an upgrade right on time.

So we’ve jumped straight to 7, bringing the Note parallel with the S series – at least in name. That makes sense: the Note 7 is every bit the handset the S7 is – in fact, in the literal sense, it’s a fair bit more.

Pre-order the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 now from Amazon

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What was once the Note’s unique sell – its size – is now far more commonplace, but while it’s still a big phone, Samsung has managed to squeeze in a larger display without making it the size of a compact tablet. Impressively, with dimensions of 154 x 74 x 7.9mm, it’s actually smaller overall than the iPhone 6s Plus – a good result when it manages to pack in a larger 5.7in, 2,560 x 1,440 AMOLED screen.

And it looks nice. Really nice. Samsung has learned a thing or two about how to make an attractive handset since it ditched plastic and removable batteries a year and a half ago, and the Note 7 carries on the good work. Barely any space on the front of the handset is wasted, with the curved Gorilla Glass 5 screen wrapping around the front of the phone and the edges of the glossy rear panel also curving up to meet the phone’s slender aluminium frame. You’ll have a choice of two colours: Black Onyx and Blue Coral. Whichever finish you opt for, the phablet is extremely sleek and guaranteed to catch the eye of your fellow commuters/travellers/mates down the pub (delete as appropriate).

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Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review: S Penny for your thoughts

The Samsung Galaxy Note 7’s other key strength – and one not matched by many other smartphones today – is its stylus. Sorry, “S Pen”. The stylus has gone out of fashion since PDAs stopped being a thing, but the S Pen makes an extremely compelling case for them being given a second chance.

I’ve used every Note since the brand was born, and given this is the fourth iteration of the pen since then, it’s no surprise that it’s more of a pleasure to use than ever before. It has a 0.7mm tip (down from 1.6mm in the previous model), and now feels less like you’re dragging plastic across glass, and more like you’re actually writing on a page. Even something as typically fiddly as annotating screenshots is a doddle.

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It’s not just the feel of the S Pen that’s improved. It’s more sensitive than the previous model, with 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity instead of 2,048, and Samsung has added a few more party tricks, too. The most impressive of these is that the Note 7’s software now comes with Google Translate built in, meaning you can get an instant translation just by hovering over a word. More impressively, this even works with photos, so intimidating foreign menus needn’t traumatise you anymore – unless they use a silly font, of course.

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Bringing the Note series in line with the S7 means the phablet also gains some of the established features of its flagship stablemate. Most eye-catchingly, this means the Note 7 is more rugged than older versions, despite having to include a hole to keep the S Pen in. The Note 7 gets an IP68 rating, meaning that if you really must, you can give your phablet a bath in 1.5m of water for half an hour.

Indeed, Samsung was so confident of this at the launch event that they’d installed a handful of devices with a game that involved catching virtual fish by physically dunking your the Note 7 in a large container of cold water. I asked, and no, that was just for us and won’t be on the finished phone. Nonetheless, it does have practical benefits: it means it’ll survive an accidental trip into the washing up bowl, and also that you can still use Google maps or send text messages in the rain. That’s an important consideration for us Brits.

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Elsewhere, security gets a boost. The fingerprint scanner made its debut in the Note 4, but this time, it’s accompanied by an iris scanner. Stare at your phone for a few seconds to set it up, and then it unlocks almost instantaneously when you flash your baby blues at it.

Samsung says contact lenses and glasses could get in the way of this, and I’m not convinced it’s much more convenient than just using your fingerprint, but it’s nice to have, and an impressive party trick if nothing else.

Pre-order the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 now from Amazon

Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review: What’s changed on the inside?

Samsung’s Note phones have, historically, been absolute beasts when it comes to specifications and the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 keeps this trend going. Like the S7, the Note 7 uses the octa-core Exynos 8890 SoC in the UK, which comprises two CPUs, one running at 2.3GHz, the other at 1.6GHz for use when all-out power isn’t required. This is backed up with 4GB of RAM, and it comes with 64GB of storage built in, and yes, you can expand it with a microSD card.

So, to performance. At the launch event, Samsung claimed the Note 7 was around 30% faster than the Note 5, and with 58% better graphical performance. Our testing revealed that to be largely accurate.

In both Geekbench and GFXBench, there’s clear daylight between the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and the Note 5, which shouldn’t surprise you, but hardly any difference between the S7 and Note 7, which also isn’t surprising, given they both have the same processor, RAM allocation and screen resolution.

The Note 7 also tops the charts in the storage performance charts – at least in terms of sequential read performance, which is important as this dictates how quickly apps and games launch, and how fast the phone boots up from cold. The Apple iPhone 6s beats it for write performance, notching up 258MB/sec compared with the Note 7’s 123MB/sec, though.

In short, it’s ultra quick, and will almost certainly remain so for the foreseeable future – at least as long as your two-year contract lasts, at which point you’ll probably want a new phone anyway. I experienced no slowdown or delays indicative of poor software implementation, and everything I did with the phone took place smoothly and instantaneously.

You may have seen reports elsewhere that, despite efforts to slim it down, Touchwiz is still laggy and that in real-world use rival phones – notably the OnePlus 3 – are more responsive in day-to-day use. That’s not something I’ve seen with our review sample, but it’s worth noting that the complaints seem to focus currently on the US model, which has a different processor – the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 – on board. I’ve set the two phones down side-by-side, launched a number of different apps and timed the operations, and both came out roughly the same; if anything, it’s the Note 7 (with the Exynos 8890) that has the edge.

And, don’t forget, responsiveness is only part of the overall story with a smartphone. Sure you want it to launch and switch between apps quickly and without pausing, but just as important is that it has the raw horsepower that will allow it to power through all the apps and games today, and those more demanding that will appear later on. The UK Samsung Galaxy Note 7 certainly has that.

The other important internal specification to take note of, of course, is the battery, and it’s here that the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 pulls ahead. It has a 3,500mAh power cell, which is, surprisingly, slightly smaller than the S7 Edge’s 3,600mAh battery, but a significant bump on the S7’s 3,000mAh.

This leads to (but is not entirely responsible for) a record score in our video rundown battery test: it lasted 21hrs 57mins. That’s an astonishing result and puts the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 way out in front of the competition. In fact, the only rival that gets close is the Galaxy S7 Edge, and even then we’re talking about a result around three hours shorter at 18hrs 42mins.

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Where does this extra performance come from? I’d surmise it’s from the Note 7’s new and improved OLED display, which I’ll discuss further in the next section, since to all intents and purposes, the phone’s core hardware is identical.

Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review: That screen isn’t just big

To look at the specifications, the screen isn’t anything special, at least relative to the rest of the Samsung range. It’s enormous, measuring 5.7in across the diagonal but it’s the same resolution as the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge at 2,560 x 1,440 and it uses the same flexible technology to achieve those lovely curved edges. It also has the same useful always-on screen and edge display.

And yet, behind the headline specifications lies a beast of a screen that moves screen tech on a significant notch. Top of the list is improved automatic brightness. The Note 7 is the first smartphone I’ve come across with dual ambient light sensors, with one sensor at the rear and one at the front, allowing it to set the brightness of the screen more accurately than other phones. You can adjust this yourself if it’s not at the level you’re comfortable with, and the phone will also learn your preferred setting for any given ambient light level – a clever feature that actually seems to work.

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What’s more, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7’s peak brightness is higher than any AMOLED smartphone I’ve ever tested. In my tests it maxed out at 872cd/m2, although note that the screen only reaches such crazy levels when the screen is showing a small patch of white and the ambient light levels are ludicrously high. It only boosts up when you really need it and is used to deliver mobile HDR video content via Amazon Video.

This isn’t the screen’s only big strength, however. The Note 7 is also highly colour accurate, and has perfect contrast, ensuring photos and movies look utterly fabulous.

Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review: Brilliant, just brilliant

Elsewhere, the Note 7 is less innovative, but still very, very good. The rear camera module is exactly the same one as you get on the Samsung Galaxy S7, and it takes amazingly good photographs with impressive reliability.

It’s a touch surprising that Samsung hasn’t seen fit to tweak it in some small way. After all, that’s the way the firm has slowly but surely inched its way to the top of the smartphone market over the past five years or so. However, the camera on the S7 is so good, I can understand why Samsung might have been a little more laissez-faire this time around.

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Just to remind you of the specifications, the Note 7’s rear camera is a 12-megapixel affair with an aperture of f/1.7. It has dual-pixel phase-detect autofocus, meaning every pixel on the sensor can be used to sense focus, not just a handful. There’s optical image stabilisation, a dual-LED flash and the sensor itself is a large 1/2.5in with pixels μ1.4 in size.

As I wrote in my S7 review, the quality of the photos and video (up to 4K in resolution) this phone can produce is nothing short of stunning. Samsung is currently leading the way in the smartphone camera stakes and the Note 7 does nothing to derail this progress.

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Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review: Connectivity

The final point of difference between the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and its stablemates, is that this time Samsung has made the jump to USB Type-C, while the S7 stuck resolutely to micro-USB.

How you feel about this will chiefly depend on how many spare cables you have lying around, but in any case, there’s support for Samsung’s brand of fast charging and wireless charging support for when you’ve misplaced your solitary Type-C cable.

It does mean the Note 7 requires another version of the Gear VR, however, with existing models only including a micro-USB port. Pre-order the phone with certain retailers and you’ll get the updated model free, though.

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Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review: Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 was always going to be a brilliant smartphone, but just how good is it? Well, it’s £100 more expensive than the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge (SIM free price) – and that gets you the stylus, 0.2in extra screen real estate, iris recognition and a better battery and screen. Is it £100-worth of goodies better?

Not if you look at what handsets such as the OnePlus 3 and Nexus 6P have to offer. There’s really no need to spend more on a smartphone. These phones are fantastic and they’re far cheaper. In fact, you could buy two OnePlus 3s for the price of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and still have £80 left over.

Does that mean you shouldn’t buy the Samsung Galaxy Note 7? Absolutely not. If you want the best of the best, you absolutely should consider buying one, especially if you’re already thinking of paying £639 or around £40-per-month for a Galaxy S7 Edge. The Note improves on the Edge in a handful of important ways, and that makes it, by a gnat’s whisker, the best smartphone you can buy right now. If you’re going to spend a lot of money on your phone, why not get the best?

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Samsung Galaxy Note 7 specifications
Processor	Octa-core 2.3GHz Samsung Exynos 8890
RAM	4GB
Screen size	5.7in
Screen resolution	2,560x1,440
Screen type	Super AMOLED
Front camera	5 megapixels
Rear camera	12 megapixels
Flash	LED
GPS	Yes
Compass	Yes
Storage (free)	64GB (52.8GB)
Memory card slot (supplied)	microSD
Wi-Fi	802.11ac
Bluetooth	Bluetooth 4.2
NFC	Yes
Wireless data	3G, 4G
Dimensions	154 x 7.9 x 74mm
Weight	169g
Operating system	Android 6.0.1
Battery size	3,500mAh