 No company has bet more and more often on big phones than Samsung. Lots of people have said Samsung was crazy, including me, but the Note sold millions. But now everyone makes big phones. So here's Samsung's answer to all the copycats, its attempt to level up again now that big is the new normal. This is the Samsung Galaxy Note 4. The Note 4 is all about restraint, actually, which is a strange thing to say about a phone with a 5.7-inch screen. But it's true. It's about doing a few things really well and worrying a little less about the rest. The first of those things is the hardware, which Samsung completely overhauled for this device. There's a sharp, chamfered metal frame rather than the rounded plastic or odd faux leather of past models. Like the Galaxy Alpha, it's a huge improvement. It's sharp and square, more like the iPhone 5s than the rounded iPhone 6 Plus, which makes it not quite as comfortable to hold, but it looks and feels great. The cheap plastic era might finally be over. The Note 4, in case you forgot what a Galaxy Note is, is huge. Huge enough to be basically unusable in one hand. A couple of software tweaks make it a little easier to wield in one hand, like a mode that just shrinks the whole screen into the bottom corner or the clever side key panel that makes finding the home button easier. But no matter what you do, this phone is still gigantic. Big phone means big screen, though, and Samsung delivers as always. Here it's a 5.7-inch 2560 by 1440 screen, which is about the densest and richest screen you'll find on any smartphone on Earth. OLED displays like this one have come a long way, even in the last year or so. This screen has accurate and clear colors, not like the overly vivid and saturated Note 3. The screen still pops, but this time because it's so bright and so crisp, everything just looks great. There are some oddities with the viewing angles, like when white turns a bit to pink if you look at it from the side, but the Note 4's screen is generally as good as it could be. For all its hardware improvements, though, the Note 4's greatest achievement is that it is massively powerful and totally customizable, but for the most part doesn't feel overwhelming or confusing. When you pull the S Pen stylus out of the bottom right corner, you get a few options for what you can do. Take a note, draw on a screenshot, and so on. And it's more sensitive and better for those things. But you can also use the pen to just navigate around the device, to highlight text or manipulate Samsung's really handy multi-window multitasking. Samsung is ever so slowly learning how to remove and hide features, how to make something complicated feel simple. A lot of menu options are hidden now, so you can find them if you want, but they won't get in the way for everyone else. Some of the less used features are hidden behind those three dotted menus, and everything just feels much cleaner. But the phone still bloops and makes weird water sounds all the time, and there are still so many settings that Samsung needs four tabs to display them all. Just still too much going on all the time. Samsung really is thinking along the right lines here, and it's made real progress, but it has work left to do. The best implementation of all this so far is in the 16 megapixel camera. The app has been radically simplified, so you only see a couple of buttons at a time, but there's still a lot you can do here. You can, for instance, tap your finger on the heart rate monitor and take a selfie. Or you can take a wide angle selfie. Or you can yell cheese and it'll take a selfie. Or you can take a selfie with the rear camera. But if you just want to point your phone at your face and take a picture, there's nothing getting in your way. It takes great pictures and shoots great video up to 4K or in 240 frames per second slow motion or in fast motion or in whatever else you can think of. The Note always gets Samsung's latest and greatest hardware, and it shows here. The Note 4 is incredibly fast, smooth, and easy to use. I had basically zero performance issues. And even with that fast processor and such an insanely high-res screen, the battery is pretty great. I got two days of light use or a day and a half of heavy use. I could stream music and podcasts, tweet and take pictures, and browse the web and tool around with the S Pen, and it would still last 36 hours. And if you're in a pinch, there's the ultra power saving mode, which basically turns off everything except texting, phone calls, and email. You basically have a phone from 2002, but it turns 10% of battery into hours and hours of battery life. The Note 4 is, in almost every way, a huge step in the right direction for Samsung. It's nice looking, it's well built, it's fast and powerful, and maybe most importantly, it's a phone almost anyone will be able to figure out how to use. But this is still, to some extent, a niche device. The S Pen isn't for everyone, neither is the sheer size of this thing, and neither Android nor TouchWiz is intuitive enough to really challenge the iPhone 6 Plus as the big phone that's the easiest to figure out. The Note 4 is the most capable big phone on the planet, but it's not the most usable yet. But the Note's always been for power users. This is the best Note ever, and it's just a really excellent smartphone. But it makes me wonder about the Galaxy S6, or whatever it'll be called. If that can be the everyman device to the Note 4's productivity powerhouse, Samsung's going to end up with a line of metallic, powerful, simple smartphones that is really hard to beat, as long as they get those water sounds figured out.