ColdFusion - Note 4 Review: Virtual Reality, Using as Computer, Performance, Build and Style.

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 is one of the best all-round devices available today. It's a welcome change from all the previous Samsung devices. Check out the official ColdfusTion full review of the device after 2 months of use. It goes through, PC use, VR, Performance, Build and Style, S-Pen, Screen Quality and more. Enjoy! USB Game Controller: http://bit.ly/1tCd75Z Camera testing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0tu90DeY60 Soundtrack: - Zeds Dead - Collapse (feat. Memorecks) - DV8 - Egotrip - Synkro & Indigo - Guidance - After Hours - Waterfalls (3 A.M. Mix) - Owen - Use Your Words - EMERSE - Clouds - Tourist - Your Girl - The Underground Solution - Luv Dancin » Google + | http://www.google.com/+coldfustion » Facebook | http://www.facebook.com/coldfustion » My music | http://burnwater.bandcamp.com or » http://www.soundcloud.com/burnwater » Collection of music used in videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOrJJKW31OA Editing website: www.cfnstudios.com ColdfusTion Android Launcher: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nqr.coldfustion.com&hl=en » Twitter | @Coldfustion --- ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You are watching Colfusion. It's really amazing when you think about the fact that full web browsing-capable app-based smartphones have only been around for seven years, and just look how they've changed the world. The 7th year, 2014, is drawing till close, and we've witnessed one of the most dynamic roller coaster rides we've seen in the mobile industry thus far.

We've had the rise of China as a smartphone manufacturing superpower, we've had Apple step into the phone tablet game, we've had Google change its strategy in the Nexus'Cy, going bigger and more expensive than the floor price position that we're used to. And lastly we've had the final gasp of breath from Nokia. It seems as if 2013 was a completely different landscape. In this video, we'll be taking a look at the Note 4 in terms of performance, camera, design, unique multitasking ability, S-pen abilities, PC style use, and a bit of a look at the future into virtual reality.

Alright, so let's get straight into it, starting with the build and the design. The Note series has always had one Achilles heel, the build quality. And as discussed in the initial review, the build quality has been drastically improved now. It now has an echo of elegance about it. It feels very unlike Samsung. The chamfered metallic edges really make the difference, and you still get to keep that removable back, which is a bonus. As small as it sounds, the improvements in the response and travel of the volume and power

buttons really makes a world of difference, simply just because you use them so often. Some of the negative aspects would be the speaker placement has returned to the back of the phone and the audio output itself is lacking a bit of fullness. I've also noticed that it's kind of easy to get micro scratches on the screen so you might want to be careful with that as well. So summing it all up, basically the Samsung cheapness is gone. I'm going to give this an 8.5 out of 10 for build and design. Alright so let's move on to the display.

As mentioned in other videos, the screen is probably the most important part of a modern day smartphone and without it, you're severely limited. So it's important to take a look at the display of this device. device. It's a 5.7 inch quad HD super Amelad display with a pixel density of 515 pixels per square inch. That makes it about 22% sharper than the iPhone 6 plus's display and about 25% sharper than the Note 3's display, purely from a pixel point of view, of course. The screen is very bright, has very nice viewing angles, and you'll struggle to see the pixels. The screen does look noticeably sharper than the 1080p panel on the Note 3, and you can notice this

most when we're browsing. The screen is 2.5d, which means it's slightly curved, and you'll curves at the edges. This kind of gives you a sense of tactile feedback so your fingers kind of of know when the edge of the screen is going to come because it slightly tapers down a little bit. So this helps in making swiping from the edges of the screen just feel more natural to the user. So in summary, it's actually a surprisingly brilliant screen, but some people actually may find the colours a little bit strong and the saturation a bit too much for their liking. That is actually adjustable in the settings, but it really is up to your preference. Okay, so let's move onto the software.

So when this phone was released, it was running Android KitKat 4.4.4.4. And lollipop literally is pretty much here. It's just around the corner. But unfortunately, it is TouchWars laid on top of Android still. On the bright side, Samsung has turned down the cartoonishness of TouchWis just that little bit. So it's not just jarring on the eye, but that's actually looking at the UI in general. When we actually come back to the Home screen, it seems like the TouchWiz launcher can just never be fixed. You'll probably be wise to replace all their home screen replacement such as the

Nova launcher or the Voxus launcher from myself or just any other home screen replacement that just really does your phone wonders. There's also been a bit of attention paid to detail as well. Now the dialog boxes have fade transitions and in general the animations are now smoother. There's either just a straight fade in or there is a sense of motion physics to the animations and they have some weight to it instead of just popping out from nowhere like they used to. So there's a couple of main things that set this phone apart from just any other regular phone and one of those would be multitasking.

Now multitasking actually really makes sense for a phone with such a large screen and I just have no idea why other manufacturers don't take the initiative and actually integrate this into their phone software and not just in a subtle sense but actually taking advantage of that large screen format that a lot of phones nowadays have. It really is just a huge waste to just have a big screen and that's it, just nothing else. So with that being said, let's move on to the multitasking. I actually use this feature each and every day. I don't see how I would be able to get as much stuff done on this phone with, with

without multitasking. Sometimes I like to do multiple things at once so I'd like to stream music while web browsing so I'd get the desktop YouTube player open in a windowed format and the surprising thing is it's real multitasking so the music still plays and keeps on playing even though the window has been minimized. So with the multitasking there's a few ways to do it. You can choose from a list of apps and these are predetermined so it's not just any app that will actually work with this but there are quite a few apps and you can get most stuff done

that you need with the selection of apps provided. So multitasking this time round is quite interesting. This time you get three ways of actually doing it. The first way is just the regular split screen window, so just two apps side by side. And another way is dragging in from the corner, either while split screened or just by a single app. And this creates a smaller size adjustable window

that you can move around. And the third way is just by clicking on any app from the multitasking area, and that just gives you a floating window as well. So you can have multiple floating windows for all the multitasking you wish. So you kind of find yourself not having to wait for things anymore. So when something's loading, you can just whip up a quick Google search or maybe just check some emails or just do something else.

And then when that thing's done, you just minimise the window, close it, and then just get back to whatever you're doing. So it's just really a next level of phone usage. One of the cool thing is that now phone calls themselves are actually floating. So when you get a phone call, the phone actually doesn't just rip you out of what you were doing and just throw you into the phone dial. And now it's actually just floating on top so you can actually still do stuff while the phone call is going. going. That's kind of handy as well actually. So that's not all. The windows are actually interactive so you can actually drag and drop different elements from window to window if you so need and that kind of thing which is kind of cool. And all of this even makes more sense when

you start to use this as a PC but we'll get to that in a little bit. So in total I give the software a 7.5 out of 10. Now you might be thinking that's a little bit low. I would give it a straight 10 out of 10 if it was made by someone else so say like hTC with htc sense and just had that form of elegance and flow that a basic UI is supposed to but it just seems that Samsung just everything isn't just quite right it just doesn't look quite right and that's just their design language I don't know why they do that so by all means it's not a bad functioning set of software it's just some of the executional quirks that's all okay so let's move on to something that sets this phone apart from pretty much

everything else on the market at the moment and that is the S-pen now physically the S-pen is pretty much the same as it was last time round except that now it has twice the sensitivity, so that's 2,000 levels of pressure sensitivity versus 1,000 on the note 3. So what you get with that is just increased responsiveness and it doesn't seem to have this slight lag that it did before and it's just slightly better to write with, basically. So just quickly running through some of the S-Pen features, if you take out the S-Pen and you click over it, you get this thing called Air Command, and really all it is is just a hub of different features that you can quickly access with the S-pen. So starting with the left, there's action

memo and what this basically does is just puts up a quick memo sheet on top of whatever you're doing and you can obviously freely move it around and that kind of thing or you can minimize it if you like and if you wish by clicking the bottom right hand corner you can expand that into s note by clicking on the icon to the right of the eraser the software will recognize what you've written if it's a phone number call someone or or message that to someone or email someone or you know search a direction or that kind of thing so there's just a whole bunch of options there and it's pretty cool to have that So next up we have Smart Select and this basically just allows you to take snapshots by cropping So you just selects your area that you want and you can use this to put in a scrapbook or to send to someone

Or to actually just convert it into text And next we have image clip this allows you to freehand outline whatever image you're looking to capture And use it in a scrapbook or send it to an individual or really just Manipulate it in a variety of different ways and lastly we have screenwriting and this is just to take a screenshot of your phone and then you can annotate the different things and obviously send it out and edit it and that kind of thing. So most of these S-Pen features are for content creation on the device

through things like the internet and various media that you can get on your device directly. So it's quite interesting and I'm sure a lot of people out there would find uses for this kind of thing. And one more cool thing is if you've got a whole bunch of text to select, you can just literally press the S-Pen down and it will start highlighting and then you can press the action button and drag diagonally and it will select text just as a mouse would do it.

Quite interesting for PC use. Okay, so we're just over halfway through the review. Let's take a quick break and then we'll be back with performance and PCUs and all that cool stuff. The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 is one of the flagship phones of this year, so it's bound to have some pretty good performance. Let's take a look at that right now. So the source of power from this device stems from three processes. at 32-bit quad-core snapdragon 805 or a 32 and 64-bit version of an 8-core exonis 543. No matter which version you pick up you're still going to get fast frame rates in both gaming and UI navigation,

but that's not the whole story. There's actually an unexplainable delay when hitting the multitasking button. It's only for about just under a second, but it's noticeable, and I've had some pauses here and there at times, for no reason really. Now don't get me wrong, this doesn't happen often and the pauses are usually for about a second, But really for a phone with this kind of caliber of specifications, I can't, it still is really a mystery to me. But on the bright side, the famous Samsung lock screen delay has gone. And now the screen fades in and out when you lock and unlock the device for just that extra bit of polish.

Overall, I'd say it's a very quick device and you should have no problems with performance. Well, I'm giving the performance a solid 9 out of 10. But what about using it as a PC? Let's take a bit of a look at that. So when I was using this device as a PC, I used a regular Logitech mouse. and an Apple keyboard. With this enhanced multitasking, you can do things a lot easier. One thing I'm fond of is that web applications like the desktop version of YouTube actually

work fine. This comes in handy when some videos are blocked for mobile use and that kind of thing. There's now zero typing delay and it feels pretty natural and all of that extra screen resolution over last year's model does provide the few benefits. Now the floating window text is readable and it actually looks pretty decent. Unfortunately some elements of the UI are still a little bit too large. the floating windows themselves for example. On the negative side, performance also does take a slight hit when displaying natively at 2K resolution and externally at 1080p

simultaneously. 3 gigabytes of RAM should be enough for that so I'm assuming that the bottleneck is at the CPU or GPU level. I was once again impressed by using the device in this way and I do see some potential in something like a Chrome OS and Ubuntu combined system setup for something like this. If someone does it right, this could really be something. Of course I'm going to go into more detail in the PC style use in a separate video, but as for now you can know it works well. Okay, so let's take a quick look at the camera. Before I get talking on this, it's probably worth mentioning that I've already done a

quick camera sample shot video. So you can take a look at that in the description below. It's quite interesting. It's got a few macro shots which aren't regularly seen on phone, so the depth of field is actually really good for a mobile device. So you can check that out if you want. This camera is a 16 megapixel shooter and it does shoot at 4K. But the thing that sets it apart is it does have optical image stabilization and this is the first in any Samsung Galaxy phone apart from the Zoom series

So overall it takes really good photos and videos, but some people may notice that it's a bit oversharpened Now it's not the end of the world, but you may find that some photos don't look 100% natural Videography is also quite fun with the optical image stabilization making it easier to get some nice steady looking shots And of course slow motion video makes a return with the ability to shoot at 240 frames per second at 720p. So as you can see here this was just something randomly happening at my shopping center down the road and yeah as you can see it turns out pretty interesting and you can just see all the details that happen so quickly in real life and it's just kind of fun. So overall I give the camera about an 8.5 out of 10, few points deducted for the oversharpening and fairly

poor low-light performance. It has improved over last year's Galaxy Note 3 but it's still not the best in the world. And here's an example of that. This is just some random low-light shots that I took and as you can see some of the footage is just a little bit grainy. Okay, so that covers most things and we're almost done with the review but before we finish off and we wrap this up let's just go over a couple of quick things. Firstly the battery life. So in here you're getting a 3,220m hour battery and it can quickly charge from zero to 50 percent in about 30 minutes which is very very handy and I really like the battery in this device. You're looking at about five to six hours a screen on time and you should

be able to get through a full day with moderate to use. And once again it does depend on which version of the phone you pick up. Some people have said that they've had not as good battery life but for me personally and this phone that I've had battery life has been quite good. I wouldn't say you would have to worry about carrying a second battery or something like that. And finally, something that's a bit different that no other phone manufacturer has done actually and that is virtual reality and this is going to be coming to the note series quite soon. So for those of you that don't know virtual reality is a technology that has existed for the

better part of three decades now, but it has never really been realized until earlier last year when a company called Oculus released a virtual reality headset and it was spearheaded by a man called John Carmack and this was the guy that basically invented side-scrolling for PC before it was only a console thing back in the early 90s and also created basically 3D gaming with his home-built game engine for games such as Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. So he is a big big player in the game industry and so he worked on this virtual reality headset yes just since then the virtual reality community has started to take off and now Samsung has teamed up with Oculus and John Carmack and together

have released this virtual reality headset system for the Galaxy Note 4 so virtual reality is a thing that is hard to demonstrate but really it is what it sounds like it is an entire world where you put on these goggles and there's an entire world that you can explore and feel like you're totally immersed within this other realm. So it's an interesting technology and Samsung is spearheading this at the very forefront of the mobile version of this with the Note 4. So the way it works is the Note 4 will act as the virtual reality screen and then there'll be a system called the Gear VR which will act as the goals and basically the rest of the virtual reality system. So

all you have to do is slot your phone into the front of the Gear VR and then you have a virtual reality system where you can play games or just watch movies inside of virtual reality cinema so basically you can turn around and see the seats behind you or that kind of thing so yeah a whole bunch of stuff happening with virtual reality and it's gonna be interesting to see what Samsung does in the future with that and as a side point me and a friend are working on a virtual reality app for the gear system so we'll see how that goes so on that note I think it is time to conclude this review so what have we learned so far the Galaxy Note 4 is a great all-round

phone that does a bit of everything and does it all fairly well so with a industry that's getting more and more crowded and phone tablets making the transformation of being laughed at to being the global trend, the Note 4 is in a good position right now. To sum it up succinctly in one sentence, the Note 4 is the Note series realized and done right. All the little improvements over last year's model really created a pleasing synergy that was a major improvement over every note or any previous Samsung device for that matter. So what is the overall score? Well, this phone receives an 85% which is a very solid score and with all the other

the additional features, some of which I didn't even go through. The value is much greater than most of the competition out there. So if you're looking for a premium device and you just want to go out there and get the very best, I'd say this phone is definitely one you should look at. Anyway, this has been Cole Fuston. Thank you for sitting down and choosing to click on this video right here on YouTube. And as usual, don't forget to rate comment and subscribe and if you like this video and think that someone would benefit from what I've said, feel free to send a link across so you

can share it. And yeah, until next time, I'll catch you. you again soon for the next video and enjoy the rest of your day guys have a good one cheers new thinking