Galaxy Note 10-Plus – First impressions from an Android App Developer

I’ve been using it for a week now as my personal phone. I have always been a great fan of Galaxy Note phones, and have used Note, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9 and now 10. The Kindle App is my primary library now, and also I read a lot of news stories. I have several investment apps that show charts. I like the larger screen size for that.

Here’s my first week’s impressions:

Size

Not a problem at all – same width and height as Galaxy Note 9-Plus, and slightly thinner. The screen is huge, but the phone itself is the same size.

Moving Apps

Samsung SmartSwitch moved nearly all of my apps and settings. It is really mysterious what it moves and what it does not move. My pictures and documents move fine, and the app icons, and some of the app settings. A couple of my Critical Apps did not come up and I had to reinstall, notably Investing.Com, Fidelity, Worden and Kindle just needed a new login. My morning wake up up alarm moved, but did not turn on or have the right tune – two days to fix that.

Here are instructions to move DejaOffice. It took me less than a minute.

Bloatware

Samsung removed a lot of the bloatware that interfere with Galaxy Note 9. That’s good. But then they added even more. After an OS update the old phone goes through optimizing 144 aps, and the new phone does 265 apps. so it looks like they added 120 background apps. It takes about an hour to turn off and disable things like “Ant” which I guess is a radio, Flipboard, Samsung Pay. The Samsung browser now had bloatware in the browser to tell you to sign up for Samsung Pay. More and more I use the Duck Duck Go security browser on my phone. I’ll do a blog post on that soon.

On-Off Button and Bixby

After forcing Bixby on us in Galaxy Note 9, Samsung is allow you to turn it completely off in Galaxy Note 10. So it’s off for me. Mysteriously Samsung now use the old left-side Bixby button as the on-off button. After 6 years of turning on the phone on the right side, I still think this was a “wrong decision”. The right side button worked great. Why move it? I find many old habits will have to change. When I view the phone in landscape mode in my holder, on/off was on the top and easy to hit. Now it is on the bottom and I have to remove my phone from the holder to turn it off.

Cost

For me cost is a factor, but it is required that we have each of the newest phones i the office for tech support purposes. I pay $41 per month for T-Mobile jump plan, plus $11 per month for insurance, and the Jump cost for this phone was about $250, so figure $75 per month for the newest phone for me.

I do not believe 5g will really change how we use phones, so I would not recommend the cost for 5g, at least not yet. Maybe not ever. I’m a big fan of Mid-Tier phones like Nokia 7.1, OnePlus, and the mid-tier Galaxy line. I think this is a better use of money. A top tier phone is like a new car – the resale drops 40% of your investment in the first six months – so it hovers halfway between luxury and waste of money. But if you want the leading edge of phone design, Galaxy S10-Plus is the best 2019 will have to offer – At least until iPhone 10 comes out.

Special features of DejaOffice:

• Time zone management, so when you land your Calendar doesn’t go wonky
• Calendar Colors that match Outlook
• Templates that save time entering new Appointments and Tasks
• Persistent alarms to be sure I don’t miss anything.
• Recurring tasks compatible with Outlook
• Optional:  Franklin Covey task priorities  A1, B2, C99
• Works same on Android and iPhone, Phones and Tablets.

How to Sync Outlook Contacts with Android: Use CompanionLink for easy and secure sync from Outlook to your Pixel 3a phone. This is a better system than Google, who sells your data, or Microsoft who hosts your data on their exchange server. Here are some setup guides for CompanionLink sync:

• Set up Direct Sync Android to Outlook using a USB Cable
• Set up Encrypted Wi-Fi sync
• Set up Encrypted Bluetooth Sync
• Set up Secure DejaCloud Sync (*Recommended)