Samsung Galaxy Note 4 vs. Galaxy Note 5: Making sacrifices in the name of style

By Ryan Whitwam

Samsung was roundly mocked when the original Galaxy note was announced, but what at first seemed like a crazy idea has become one of the most anticipated phones of the year. It’s also pushed the market to adopt larger and larger form factors as consumers decide that, yes, they do want giant phones. The fifth incarnation of the Note has just been announced, and in some ways it’s a major departure from the Note 4, but some specs aren’t changing at all. Let’s see how they compare.

Design

The Note 4 was one of the first Samsung devices to signal a change in direction from the company. After the lackluster performance of the Galaxy S5, Samsung added some metal to the frame of the Note 4. However, the Note 5 is based heavily on the very successful design of the Galaxy S6.

The Note 5 is all metal and glass, but whereas the back of the GS6 is flat, Samsung used a slightly curved glass panel on the rear of the Note 5. This makes it easier to hold in one hand despite its large size. That same shape was used on the plastic back of the Note 4 to make it easier to grasp. Overall, the Note 5 measures 153.2 x 761 x7.6mm. That is slightly thinner and narrower than the Note 4 at 153.5 x 78.6 x 8.5mm. The Note 5 also has wireless charging built-in, and the wireless charging back for the Note 4 added several millimeters of girth.

That glass back panel is not removable by the user, and that means the battery is sealed-in. The Note 5 actually takes a step

down

in battery capacity compared with the Note 4. It ships with a 3000mAh battery, but the Note 4 had a 3220mAh cell. Some people loved the Note specifically because it had a big removable battery, so there will surely be some complaints here.

Another core component of the Note series is the S Pen inductive stylus. If you need a built-in stylus, the S Pen has always been the best, however it’s always felt pretty cheap and not very comfortable. The Note 5’s S Pen is a bit more sturdy and can be ejected from its slot on the bottom of the phone with a push.

Display and Internals

The Note 4 has the best screen available on a smartphone before the Galaxy S6 launched (QHD at 5.7-inches), and the Note 5 is probably going to reclaim that crown for the Note series. Samsung is still using a 5.7-inch QHD (2560×1440) Super AMOLED panel on the Note 5, but it’s a slightly newer version of the technology.

Samsung is making iterative improvements with each new version of its AMOLED panels, and they really look amazing these days with excellent colors, brightness, and viewing angles. You might not notice a huge difference between the Note 4 and Note 5, but technically it’s there.

The Note 4 ran atop the Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 (most SKUs), a very fast 32-bit ARM system-on-a-chip (SoC). This year Qualcomm and Samsung are not on the best of terms. Heat issues with the Snapdragon 810 led Samsung to use its own Exynos chips in all 2015 flagships. The Note 5 has a 64-bit Exynos 7420, an octa-core chip with four fast Cortex-A57 cores at 2.1GHz and four efficient Cortex-A53 cores at 1.5GHz. The manufacturing process has been stepped down to 14nm compared with 28nm in the SD805 in the Note 4.

The Note 5 will blow the Note 4 out of the water when it comes to raw processing power, but the user experience will be more affected by software optimization. You have to wonder how that SoC will handle with the smaller 3000mAh battery, though.

Samsung offered the Note 4 in 16GB and 32GB versions (16GB only in some markets), but the Note 5 comes in either 32GB of 64GB. That’s all you get, though. Samsung has ditched the microSD card slot on the Note 5 just like it did on the GS6 a few months ago. So that’s going to be a bummer for some users, but the built-in storage is UFS 2.0 instead of the eMMC 5.0 used in the Note 4. What does that mean? The storage in the Note 5 is stupidly fast.

The Note 5 steps up to 4GB of RAM compared to the 3GB that shipped with the Note 4. The extra RAM is nice, but not really necessary. The bigger deal is that Samsung is using faster LPDDR4 in the Note 5 instead of LPDDR3.

Software and Everything Else

The Note series always has a few software tweaks to make the S Pen a more useful accessory, but Samsung doesn’t appear to have made many improvements this year. You can still pull up the Air Command menu with a click of the S Pen button. That gives you quick access to several of Samsung’s note taking and search features. S Note can be used in full-screen on the Note 5, which is nice, and you can take notes on the screen from a resting state (i.e. the system UI doesn’t have to start up first).

You’ll get Android 5.1 out of the box with the Note 5, but most versions of the Note 4 have already been updated. Although, Samsung tends not to dramatically alter the UI or features with OS updates. That means the Note 5 will have a more modern Lollipop interface and some extras like the Samsung theme store that you won’t get on the Note 4. The Note 5 will also be on Android M much sooner than the Note 4 (not that either one will be all that quick). 

The fingerprint sensor on the Note 5 is the touch variety used in the Galaxy S6. It will be a vast improvement over the swipe sensor used in the Note 4. 

The IR blaster from the Note 4 is also gone from the Note 5. 

Samsung has chosen to stick with a 16MP f/1.9 main camera in the Note 5 — the same as the Note 4. The only real differences here are better software processing of HDR and faster launch times.

Another unchanging truth about the Note series is that they’re expensive devices. You’ll pay over $700 for the 32GB version of the Note 5 unsubsidized. Most carriers will probably let it go for $250-300 on-contract or around $30 per month with a payment plan. Pre-orders are live now and it ships August 21st in the US.