We actually welcome Samsung’s decision to put a 1080p display on the smaller Note 10, as the display’s pixel density and sharpness to the eye of the beholder will be enough, all the while 1080p phones last 20-30% more than 1440p phones on a charge when normalized for the battery capacity. Thus, the Note 10 has smilar to the 10+ battery life despite the smaller pack, and we can redirect our attention to the finer points of the design.

How about ? To put the raw 5.94 x 2.83 x 0.31 inches (151 x 71.8 x 7.9 mm) dimension numbers in perspective, Note 10 will be the most compact flagship out there. What, 1080p phones can’t be true flagships you say? Our cold, hard calculations return 91% screen-to-body ratio which is a record among brand-name phones in our database. It turns out that all those rumors how Samsung has managed to significantly shrink the top bezel were true. The Note 10 is, in fact, smaller than the already compact LG G8, all the while it has a larger display.

Here we arrive at the kicker – the Galaxy Note 10 will be negligibly larger than the Galaxy S10 yet has a larger display, increasingly blurring the range of what’s possible in “all-screen” designs. What’s even better, this most humble for the screen diagonal footprint comes courtesy of a narrow body, in addition to the shaved-off top bezel, so the Note 10 is shaping up to be the perfect fit in your hand, as far as 6+ inchers go. 

It does, however, omit the microSD card slot that its larger sibling, the Note 10+, has in its hybrid SIM tray, has no 512GB version, and Samsung could have put a larger battery in there to make it last as much as Chinese juggernauts with 1080p panels like the P30 Pro. This is why we wanted to ask which of the two new Notes you picked up from your carrier – the souped-up Note 10+ or the novel compact entry in the Note line of S-Pen-laden Samsung handsets.