 Corsair's Raptor line of quality gaming peripherals has the features you need to win at a price you'll like. Click now to learn more. I'm no phone expert so this is more just going to be an overview of the Note 3 and a comparison of my experiences with the Note 3 compared to my Galaxy S3. I think this is fairly applicable because I think a lot of people that have S3s might be kind of looking into new phones now, not necessarily upgrading yet but just kind of looking at what's out there because they've had their phone for a little while. The first thing you start noticing when using a Note 3 is the fact that it has a 5.7 inch 1080p AMOLED display. It looks beautiful and it's huge. This phone when compared to size is about 6 hard drives tall in the body and about an SSD thick in the body as well and that body houses some serious power with 3 gigs of RAM a 2.3 GHz quad core processor, 32 or 64 GB of memory depending on what model you get, Android 4.0 Jelly Bean, a 3200 mAh battery, a micro SD slot which is actually nice because a lot of phones nowadays are coming without micro SD slots because of influence from say Google or other sources, a 13 megapixel camera which happens to be able to take 4K video although it doesn't have image stabilization and it's a phone so it's not exactly going to look as good as if you took 4K video with a big professional camera and USB 3.0 on the bottom which is backwards compatible to USB 2.0 which is quite handy if you do happen to lose that USB 3.0 cable. Coming from an S3 when I heard the rumors about a Note 3 one of the features I was most excited about was the leather back and then I figured out that it wasn't a leather back. It was definitely still a plastic back. It is a plastic back that is made to look like it feels like a leather back and it is still definitely a plastic back. It does have a more grainy texture than an S3's smooth back has and it has that fake threading although you don't really feel it. Now as many of you are aware, lately Samsung has been kind of cheating on benchmarks a little bit. When it detects a benchmark being run it will kind of ramp up its CPU power and doesn't make a realistic score so we won't be providing benchmarks for you guys now. What we'll be doing is just talking about experience in games. Now I haven't been a huge mobile gamer but lately I've been jumping on the humble Android bundles and I've been playing quite a bit on my S3. When I moved to the Note 3 to test it out, unfortunately I don't get to keep it, it was a massive improvement. The increased screen size was amazing and I don't have any problems with it because I do have larger hands and have no problem utilizing the phone. In playing Raiden the increased screen size was just perfect because that game seems to be more designed for a larger screen size in general so having a larger phone made a really big improvement and not only that but the Note 3 was much faster and was very noticeably smoother than my S3. Moving to Balloons TD5, I noticed way later in the game when there was a lot of balloons on the screen, it made a big difference being on the Note 3 because it was a much smoother gameplay experience and I noticed my S3 chopping quite a bit and in both of these games and in everything else I've actually checked out, the screen on the Note 3 was much more vibrant and looked a lot better. Before the Note 3 I've never had extensive experience using a pen on a phone before. I started with the Nexus S and then I moved to a Samsung S3. So the main thing I noticed was Air Command, it was a nice really easy to use system because right when you take your phone out it's right there and if you don't want to use it you press anywhere else on the screen and it just goes away. And my favorite feature within Air Command was Pen Window, I thought this was absolutely fantastic because you just draw a square or whatever kind of shape you want wherever, select what application you want to be in that shape and it will just work, it will be right there. So the main two things I noticed that it was useful for was if I'm browsing the web and I just kind of want to have a song up or whatever I can open up YouTube in a little square, just very easily manipulate it, move it around, shove it out of the way, make it small, make it big, whatever I want and then it's, I find it easier than multitasking because it's much more easy to manipulate. Now the other thing that I found really nice was say you're reading an email, that email has a whole bunch of different numbers in it and you need to manipulate it in some way so you need to add a whole bunch of stuff up. You can just Pen Window a calculator onto your screen, make it as big or as small as you want and then that's a super easy and simple way to do it. There's a bunch of other functionality in Air Command that might be useful to you as well but my favorite one was Pen Window. Next up we have the camera and as quite a few of you know I'm not exactly the best cameraman so I had B-roll or Brandon take the photos and video for me. What I noticed is that in video and photo the Note 3 definitely has much more sharpening than the S3. Now if that's something you want or don't want I'm not entirely sure and that's more of a preference thing so you might like that idea or dislike that idea that that is definitely something I've noticed and I've noticed in other people's test shots as well. S-Voice left a little bit to be desired especially when Google Now is sitting there on its own pedestal. It was not nearly as responsive and not nearly as helpful and didn't have some of the features that I really like. One of my favorite things about Google Now is that it will respond to you when you try to ask it a question so you can do it basically hands-free and without looking at it. With S-Voice you can talk to it but you still have to look at the screen to figure out what's actually going on which is not really that intuitive in my opinion. Personally I find the build quality on Samsung phones never really to be quite as high as other phones say like Nexus devices or an HTC One but comparing to an S3 I did find it to be a little bit better. I like the silver band around the outside I like feeling that it seems a little bit solid and it's better than the kind of rounded curvature that there is on an S3 and I like the back. It seemed a lot more solid it seemed a lot more clipped on. I found with an S3 it would just kind of fly off. This one I have to pry it off a little bit and I do actually like that. While my screen was the favorite feature the battery life on this thing was monstrous and one of my biggest pet peeves in phones is extremely short battery life that I find on most of them and this actually got away from that. I played a considerable amount of games on it during the day then had light to medium usage on it throughout the day and it still had a fair amount of charge left at the end of the day so that if I had forgotten to charge it overnight I would have been able to use it at least for the first bit of the next day which is actually pretty impressive. If you're not scared of the very large form factor and don't mind using it possibly with two hands the Note 3 is definitely a phone to look for if you're looking to upgrade. In the comments below are you looking for a phone that has very large screen real estate and a really large battery like a Note 3 or are you looking for something that fits into your hand better and it's just more adaptable like some other phone like say a Nexus 5? And like the video if you liked the video, dislike the video if you disliked the video and as always please subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.