Display

Display quality is an area in which Samsung consistently outdoes itself, and the Note 10+ is just the latest proof of that. We have this big, bright, and vivid 6.8-inch display on the Note 10+, which features excellent color accuracy and viewing angles. In the meantime, the Note 9 has an 6.4-inch display that isn’t interrupted by any notches or punch holes but is simply dwarfed by the Note 10+. Sure, that one has the selfie camera punch-hole, but it doesn’t really get into the way that much, and after a while you might stop noticing it altogether.

When it comes to real-life usage, the Note 10+ has a pretty big ace up its sleeve – it can get much brighter under direct sunlight conditions, and could also hit a slightly lower minimum brightness in pitch-black darkness. This much greater brightness spread makes the Note 10+ a more useful device than the Note 9 if you often find yourself using your phone in such diverse lighting conditions.

Interface & functionality

One UI can be found on both Notes, and we are pretty warm towards Samsung’s latest interface. It is both modern and feature rich, arguably making it the best interface Samsung has come forward with. There’s a dedicated dark mode, gesture navigation, theme support, an always-on display, and so much more, making One UI one of our favorite Android skins. For the most part, the interface of the Note 10+ and Note 9 is largely similar to the one you’d find on a Galaxy S10+, for example, with the exception of having some exclusive features tied to the S Pen stylus.

The Note 10+ has some other unique features of its own, like the AR Doodle camera mode that lets you apply AR scribbles on people or yourself and snap a quick video to post on your Instagram stories. It’s a fun feature, but not something we’d see ourselves using more than once or twice.

The Note 10+ allows you to use the S Pen and interact with the camera interface. Holding the button on the S Pen and flicking the stylus around allows you to switch between the front and rear cameras, change camera modes, and even zoom in or out with gestures, but it’s largely a hit-or-miss affair.

From a purely performance standpoint, you might encounter subtle interface jitters and animations janks here and there on both devices. This is certainly a software optimization issue still prevalent in One UI and not a hardware problem, as both devices are definitely powerful enough.

Fingerprint and Face Unlock

Another area in which the Note 10+ doesn’t feel particularly great is the in-display fingerprint scanner. It works as expected, but is neither fast, nor particularly reliable. Meanwhile, the traditional fingerprint scanner on the Galaxy Note 9 might look a bit outdated in comparison, but it’s faster and more reliable.

Face Unlock can be found on both devices, and while it is very fast, I don’t recommend using this one as your go-to biometric security solution. Since it only uses a picture of your face, Samsung’s Face Unlock is way less secure than depth-sensing solutions like Apple’s Face ID.

As a reminder, the Galaxy Note 9 also comes with iris scanning which is more secure than the standard Face Unlock feature but it can be clunky to use.

Performance & memory

In the US, both the Note 9 and the Note 10+ are powered by Snapdragon chipsets – Snapdragon 845 and 855, respectively. International versions of the phone are powered by Samsung’s own Exynos line of chips – the Exynos 9810 goes in the Note 9, while the Note 10+ gets powered by the Exynos 9825. There’s plenty of RAM on the Note 10+: a whole lot of 12GB will meet all of your multitasking needs. The Note 9 is available with 6 or 8GB of RAM.

In terms of performance, both phones perform admirably. Whatever you do, there’s always the feeling of having tons of spare performance at hand. Of course, the Note 10+ has the pretty obvious advantage of being newer and more future proof, not to mention that it’s flaunting a faster chipset of the Snapdragon series, but the Note 9 isn’t lagging behind at all. It is in benchmarks, naturally, but when it comes to real-world usage, the Note 9 definitely isn’t much slower than the Galaxy Note 10+.

One area in which the Note 10+ is vastly superior are read/write storage speeds – thanks to the new UFS 3.0 memory on deck, the Note 10+ performs much better in heavier tasks and would load apps noticeably faster than the Note 9.

On the topic of memory, the Galaxy Note 10+ offers much more from the get-go – the base version of the phone comes with 256GB of storage, while the more generous version would let you have 512GB of storage at your disposal. The Note 9 comes with either 128GB or 512GB of storage. Both the Note 9 and Note 10+ have microSD card slots for further storage expansion.

Camera

The Galaxy Note 10+ really takes things up a notch when it comes to cameras. In addition to the regular and telephoto cameras that the two phones have in common, the Note 10+ also scores a ultra-wide snapper and a ToF sensor for depth perception and is mostly used to improve the Live Focus portrait mode.

Let me start by saying that the additional wide-angle camera makes the Note 10+ that much more versatile in comparison with the Note 9 – the additional angle of view is literally liberating in certain situations.

Image quality

Daytime regular photo