Samsung’s veritable Galaxy Note series has grown in so many ways over the years, and most of them are good. Ever since launching in 2011, the Galaxy Note has been the pinnacle of large phones, normally dubbed phablets because of their size somewhere in-between a “normal” phone and a small tablet, and paved the way for phones of this size even though it was harshly criticized as “way too big” back on its first release. Samsung has released a really awesome infographic that compares all the important specs between each Galaxy Note phone and what makes them special and different, as well as the visual changes that have undergone the OS that powers it.
Starting from the top we can see the rather extreme visual changes just the lock screen has undergone in the years, going from a functional and certainly not pretty Gingerbread-powered Galaxy Note all the way up to the Galaxy Note 4, which is powered by the far more attractive Android 4.4 KitKat. Besides that the clock font has changed to a much better font and doesn’t resemble Comic Sans so much anymore, as well as the color scheme of each phone carrying a unique weight to the way the phone itself looks.
Sizing of the phone and S-Pen have grown throughout the years, and although the Galaxy Note 4 features the same screen size as the Note 3 did, it’s a little bit taller, but thanks to thinner bezels a little bit less wide. The home button is different on practically every Note device, and this time around Samsung has chosen a much more rounded home button once again, more closely resembling the Note II more than the other models. The S-Pen continues to grow as well, getting more comfortable as it continues to fill up your palm. The screen size is the same as last year, but the resolution has increased fairly significantly, offering more than 50% more pixels than the Note 3, giving you a sharper picture overall.
Samsung has grown the camera resolution as well, coming from 8 megapixels on the original Galaxy Note all the way up to 16 megapixels on the Note 4. While this doesn’t inherently give better pictures as we’ve seen in past Samsung devices, Samsung’s camera software has matured significantly, offering great white balance and HDR processing, among the dozens of other features found in the software. You’ll also find that the processor has increased significantly from last years Galaxy Note 3, now pushing a 2.7GHz Snapdragon 805 CPU with a significantly enhanced Adreno 420 GPU to push the pixels on that screen faster than ever before, ensuring great performance when needed.
This time around Samsung is only offering a 32GB version of the phone, but still lets users expand that storage up to 64GB more with a microSD card, something that’s proven more and more valuable as app sizes grow and 4K video becomes more prominently used. This differs from previous models as there is no choice between 16, 32 and 64GB models as there have been with previous Galaxy Note phones. Last but not least is the battery size, which has generally only received an incremental size increase as a result of trying to keep the weight down. Even though the Galaxy Note 4 features the largest battery of the series as well as a metal frame, the phone is still lighter than all the rest of the Note series except for the Note 3, which at times felt hollow and a little too light anyway.
