Great screen, useful side panel, fast processor, fine camera, expandable memory, loads of useful smaller features
Not a huge improvement on the Note 4, not waterproof, not cheap
Now here's something a bit different. A high-end phablet with a curved side screen. It ticks the boxes for style and wow factor, but does it justify the high price?
The Note Edge is a large, thin phablet very much in the Note 4 style. It has a terrific-looking 5.6-inch Quad HD+ Super AMOLED screen with a higher-than-HD resolution of 2,560x1,440 pixels (524ppi). It's a similar size and weight to the
Galaxy Note 4 -- a little longer, but also a little thinner and a couple of grams lighter.
It also has the Note 4's fingerprint ID sensor, heart sensor and of course the increasingly fine S-Pen, which tucks itself away in the same slot on the side. Still not waterproof though, which is becoming a bit of a let-down on expensive high-end phones.
Screen & Chassis So far, so here we go again, but there's something a bit different. The right-hand side of the screen curves around the side of the phone, but this isn't an extension of the main screen, it's actually a second screen for additional menus and alerts. It has a resolution of 2,,560x160 pixels and defaults to the right-hand side, making it best for right-handers, though you can turn the device upside down to swap it to the left.
You can customise the information it features, from customisable shortcuts to weather, health info, Twitter feeds and more that you can reveal by swiping to the left. One of the menus offers some handy extras too, like a ruler, stopwatch, microphone and torch.
You can also set it to show a clock while the lock screen's on -- very handy if you use it as an alarm clock next to your bed, since you don't have to lift the phone to see the time. It actually is a useful little panel, and it's certainly eye-catching but is it essential? Nah.
Software & Processor Otherwise, it's business as usual (in a good way) with a quad-core 2.7GHz processor backed by a hefty 3GB RAM, which keeps things moving along very nippily indeed.
It's a little bit of a surprise to see Android 4.4.4 KitKat on a premium device like this, rather than the latest 5.0 Lollipop, but there are plans for an upgrade.
Photography
The 16-megapixel camera on the back is much the same as the Note 4's, with a feast of features like fast autofocus, live HDR and Smart Optical Image Stabilisation. Picture quality is very good indeed, with high levels of detail and good colour balance. The 3.7-megapixel camera on the front is no slouch either, and comes with standard selfie and wide selfie (120 degrees) modes for those larger group shots.
There's 32MB of memory on board but you can add up to 128GB via microSD card and while the battery is a little bit smaller than the one on the Note 4, it's still a sizeable 3,000mAh and you can expect to get a full day and more out of it.
Conclusion The Samsung Galaxy Note Edge offers little improvement over the already rather superb Galaxy Note 4 but it does have that eye-catching curved alerts panel on the side. It is genuinely useful, though certainly not essential, but if that floats your boat it's well worth a look.
Software: Android 4.4.4 KitKat
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
