To begin with the exteriors and the design, the Galaxy Note 3 boasts a different design language with a noticeably thinner and even lighter body. The biggest change is the soft textured stitched-leather back instead of a plastic one as seen on most of the other Samsung smartphones. It also comes with a metallic rim around its edge. On comparing it to the predecessor, while the Galaxy Note II did not have much change to offer in terms of the chassis and looks, the notebook-like back texture of Galaxy Note 3 makes it look far more premium and comfortable to hold than the Galaxy Note II.
Another impressive part about the design of the phone is the bezel around the display, which certainly has gone slimmer at 2.2mm than that on the Galaxy Note II. Talking of display, the Galaxy Note 3 comes with a 5.7-inch full HD Super AMOLED display with 1920×1080 pixels resolution, which will offer a better visual experience than the 5.5-inch HD Super AMOLED display with a 720p resolution on the Galaxy Note II. Despite having a bigger display, the overall footprint of the two devices remain almost the same.
On the hardware front, Samsung has bumped up the processor to 2.3GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor or an eight-core Exynos 5 Octa chipset, depending up on the market of launch. India is likely to get the Exynos 5 Octa variant. The Galaxy Note II, on the other hand, had the previous generation Exynos 4 quad-core processor. So technically, the Galaxy Note 3 has an edge. This new processor is also accompanied by 3GB of RAM than 2GB of RAM offered on the Galaxy Note II. All of which means a much smoother and seamless performance on the new phablet.