I could feel the sweat on the Fedex guy, "Are you Mike?"
"Yup!"
"Sign here." I scribbled my name on the brick of a tablet and handed it back to the driver. He ran off without giving a second look.
And with that I got my Samsung Note 10+ and fast wireless charger from Fedex this afternoon, through Ingram Micro distribution. The other accessories will have to wait, as I pre-ordered late and some of the bonus items were out of stock.
Doesn't matter. The phone came first, and I was ready to use it. My iPhone has been giving me trouble with phone calls lately. Probably my fault for updating to iOS 13 beta way too early.
Since I'm moving, I used my bed sheets as a makeshift studio backdrop as I unbox the phone. For the unbox, I used my Samsung NX-1 mirrorless camera to record the deed. Right hand balancing the camera, and left hand wriggling the phone out of the box.
I've already seen a few unboxings on Youtube, so I kind of knew what to expect. The difference in doing it yourself, and also with a completely different color than what all the reviewers got made it worthwhile to me, and maybe to some of you.
I went white for my last iPhone - the X. And since I'm going to the Dark side, I went with Black. I confess it was the only option for a 512 GB model a day before official launch, and I knew even with the expandable memory I'd want some extra room to stretch for multimedia, 4k 60P videos, etc.
Black Magic.
Here's where some of the magic comes in:
Fast charging like no other phone before it. 45 Watts means it can go from ZERO to HERO in one hour. (You need this specific charger though, because its so new you can't just use any 45+ Watt charger.) By Hero, I mean FULL or All Day battery life. We'll see about that...
Black Magic was charged and fully ready to go in 15 minutes with the included cable and charger. The cable felt pretty flimsy, but clearly it did its job.
S-Pen. I'm a fan of these digitized pens on my Samsung notebook, my iPad pro, my Wacom tablet, the Sony e-reader, and just pens in general. This one has some new tricks up its sleeve which I might not use, but should be fun the first few times.
The AMOLED screen. Its simply amazing. Not as high resolution as the S10, but I doubt I can tell much of a difference up close. Its bigger, brighter, and simply impressive. Pictures don't do it justice. To be fair, my iPhone screen is no slouch either since its an OLED by Samsung (I think). But still, this looks and feels futuristic. More so when put side-by-side with my iPhone X.
Not so magical are the fingerprints. Wow. It almost makes one feel unworthy of touching a phone when all you do is smudge it. Maybe white might have been a better choice, if it were an option - it wasn't at the time.
And then the Pen. OK, so it doesn't feel that much different than what I expected. So I'll have to play around with it some more, gestures, features, applications, and use-cases.
Next, I tried the Switch app. The one that will transfer. No, supposed to transfer my data over, even from my iPhone. Long story short, it didn't happen. Maybe its my iOS 13 beta is at fault.
But in the meantime, I unboxed the fast wireless charger 2. It gives an impressive 15 Watts!! wirelessly. No its not as fast as the 45 watt charger coming in September, but wow its three times the speed of the wired charger system that Apple provides with their iPhones.
OK, so back to the failed transfer attempt. It appears as though nothing has happened.
So ground zero it was.
I spend the next hour downloading apps I normally use, adding accounts, passwords, security settings, configuring. It wasn't fun.
Before long what was one hour became two.
I played with the AR features in between adding apps when I got around to adding VSCO, snapseed, etc. Turns out there is a Samsung version of VSCO (by the way) which adds 4 free exclusive to Samsung filters.
Then the wife came home. My mother-in-law got in a small accident in the parking lot and they needed me to provide some information for the insurance adjuster. Perfect, I can do the AR doodle thingy.
That was genuinely useful. Things like this is what just might make it worthwhile for a consultant like me going to do an onsite physical audit. This might be good for my Youtube channel, but we'll see. Its not 100% accurate, more like 70% the way there.
The AR Scan is kind of fun, but I don't see a practical use for it until more apps come out or I get my hands on a good 3d Printer.
Finally I also played with creating my own Avatar. Its pretty limited but has a function that can replicate your body gestures for your Avatar for purposes of creating a GIF or a post that isn't readily available complete with face gestures as well.
I finished up my first day with the phone by shooting some video and photos. Unfortunately, the wide angle lens seems to be only fully wide when shooting photos and not videos.
The above picture wasn't taken from my first day, but it gives you a good example of the wide angle of coverage the Note 10 affords.
After my first day, its very clear to me that there's a lot that I have yet to discover, a lot of gestures, shortcuts I still need to get used to coming from the iOS ecosystem.
For now, I'll be two fistin' phones. iPhone X and the new note 10+. Stay tunes for new updates.
