this is the Note 8 I think it's impossible to talk about and review the
Note 8 without looking back a little bit talk about the note 7 we know
what happens to battery ant their recalls Would have been easy for Samsung here I think
to play a totally safe and release a phone with minimal upgrades to make sure
there weren't any issues and a lot of ways they did that but there's still a
lot of innovation in the note 8 that I found in my about four and a half days
of testing with it so the story with the note has always been the s-pen and the
screen and that sort of sits above at the very top of Samsung's hierarchy of
phones above the galaxy s line and the screen here is gorgeous albeit gigantic
it's 6.3 inches and this thing is absolutely beautiful as you'd expect
from Samsung Super AMOLED technology in fact I would have said this is the most
beautiful screen I'd ever seen until I saw the OLED panel on the V30 so this
takes the cake as the second-best screen that I've seen and the reason I'm saying
second best over what the S8 or the S8 plus has this thing is actually 22%
brighter than the s8 screen which is a huge amount and it makes a difference
when you're in direct sunlight if you turn the brightness all the way up while
you're in a darker room you're going to burn your eyeballs out the screen here
gets incredibly bright which is really nice to see so a 6.3-inch
phone this is the same size as Samsung's like old-school Galaxy mega it's only
0.1 inches bigger than the Galaxy S8+ but that point one inches makes a
difference this phone is not the most ergonomic feeling it looks like an S8
plus kind of with the infinity display but the design isn't as aesthetically
pleasing as it is on those phones it feels a little boxier doesn't feel as
thin as those devices so it's bit tough ergonomically and especially makes it
tough with a fingerprint reader which is still in the same spot that it was on
the s8 and the S8+ next to the camera and there are two camera sensors
we'll talk a lot about those but on a bigger device it's even harder to find
in fact the buttons almost flush they can get doubly hard to find and if you
are left-handed don't even bother trying to use a fingerprint reader the other
stuff from the s8 line of phones are still here you still have the iris
scanning face unlock and of course you can use a pin
or a swipe password it's a lot of ways to unlock your device rounding out
the screen it's bright it's beautiful it's probably one of the best displays
on the market as you'd expect from Samsung's
the aspect ratio is the same eighteen and a half by nine but you get used to
HDR plus if you can watch HDR content on Netflix if you're streaming it if you're
carrier is not gonna downgrade the quality looks incredible here on the
device so screen aside the biggest reason I think people get the note is
the s-pen it's here you can't put it in backwards it's got a IP68 just like the
phone does and it works really well and Samsung's updated what it can do via
software so it lives in the bottom right hand corner you pop it out you can start
writing right on the screen like you could with the note 7 except now you've
got multiple pages so you can just sort of keep writing page down keep writing
and page down and it works really well I've had very minimal latency it's a
great palm rejection it's an awesome way to sort of take notes to jot notes down
does a lot more than that it'll do live translation now I'll do it by sentences
whether or not you like the S pen is gonna depend on how much you're gonna
use it I use it mostly to draw pictures of trains with my son it's nice for
editing screenshots and stuff it's not necessary for me I know a lot of you
folks really want to have it and if you're debating whether or not you want
to get this or the s8+ having the option to always have the s-pen it's certainly
a nice benefit so performance used to be a category I talked a lot about when it
comes to flagships nowadays they're all plenty fast there an extra two
gigabytes of RAM in here versus the S8 and the S8+ so there's six gigs as
opposed to four and things are fast whether you're multitasking using
multi window playing games editing pictures whatever the phone's gonna be
fast with no slowdown whatsoever 64 gigs of internal storage but of
course you can use the micro SD card I'm putting as much storage as you can find
that's available I believe it will support up to 2 terabytes which I don't think
even exist yet other thing is that no dates can be aware of that maybe you
didn't know it's got support for gigabit LTE which is going to be the fallback
for when 5g hits so t-mobile Verizon AT&T and Sprint
have all started rolling out gigabit LTE or going through the near future and
when you get access to it it will be really fast if you're on your phone it's
gonna be a little more future-proof note 8 even the S8 and S8+
support the technology as well on the software front it's pretty familiar from
the s8 and s8 plus it's version 8.5 of Samsung's user experience which is
what they used to call TouchWiz there are few notable additions so first in
the edge panel you've got something called app pairing so Samsung uses multi
window so you can have one app on top one app on bottom but now you can
actually put both of those apps into a single icon on the edge panel so for me
if I'm watching video and using email I can set that up so when I hit a button
it'll automatically launch it the way I want a lot of apps you can do that with
it just makes it a lot easier so now I'm sort of dragged apps around and I think
that means that people knew what the window was there but rarely use it so
Samsung's trying to put that in front of you and make it way easier to do so I
started using the Galaxy Note 8 from a galaxy s 8 so things here we're very
familiar the Samsung user experience they used to call it TouchWiz is 8.5
it's a newer version and things look really good here I've become a huge fan
of Samsung software I know a lot of folks give Samsung a lot of grief and I
used to as well but starting with the s7 things got really good here and actually
prefer Samsung's take on Android almost over anything else there used to be the
rule that Samsung phones slowed down over time and that was true I think from
the galaxy s5 and older generations of phones but haven't tried the same thing
device since then that's no longer the case
I use my Galaxy s8 for about five months no issues I had an s7 before that no
slowdown at all if you have that me preconceived notion not an issue here
with the note 8 so one of the other big upgrades from the Galaxy s8 and s8+ is
the camera so now you have two sensors here it's got a wide-angle and a
telephoto it's really nice you can do two times optical zoom ten times digital
you just hit a button we've seen that UI before where I think Samsung hit a
homerun though is with the live focus so if you don't know what that means you
can create kind of a blurred effect behind a subject and does it all with
software now we've seen that before we've had at portrait mode on iOS the
oneplus 5 has it built in Samsung did a couple cool things so first if you use
the Samsung gallery app you can edit it after the fact it looks almost DSLR
quality before you started zooming it so other sort of camera niceties shots in
low light will actually look surprisingly good in direct sunlight
typical Samsung fashion a little bit overexposed but the pictures look really
bright and vibrant both the sensors here of optical image
stabilization so if you have a shaky hand you're taking
pictures on a bus for example they look really good so I imagine that Samsung
was a little gun-shy and overly cautious when it came to battery we've got a
3300 mAh power battery in here as opposed to
3500 on the S8 plus and samsung claims is smaller because of the ten
nanometer technology in the Snapdragon 835 which the same processor in the
galaxy s8 and S8+ but haven't any battery issues so again I was coming
from a galaxy s8 by the end of my day I was generally yet maybe twenty
five thirty percent and I was about the same here with the no date with the
exact same usage so it appears that they've done a really nice job with
software managing battery and at some point in the future when Oreo makes its
way to notate battery life should even be improved but you can get through a full
day easily if you want to charge the battery of course it's USB-C it's got
fast charging and it's got wireless fast charging as well and of course other
stuff you'd expect like ip68 so but not always perfect in the note
world even when you've got volume all the way up on a phone call the speaker
up to your ear was not that loud it was quieter for me than it was on the s8 no
DAC built in the speaker using speakerphone it was seen the music is
not overly loud either so I probably recommend either a good pair of
bluetooth headphones or if you want to plug in headphones you can do it no DAC
again but it does have a 3.5 millimeter headset jack built-in and a big knock on
the phone it's really the phone itself it's the color choices I don't know why
Samsung does this they release other colors and different regions just
release all the colors for everyone the u.s. kind of got shafted in the color
Department we've got black and Orchard gray ordered gray looks nice but the
rest of the countries got a gorgeous-looking deep sea blue there's a
maple Gold you have to kind of wait for those colors to make their way out here
and they eventually will but if you want to buy a phone at launch you're kind of
limited Samsung sent us the black version and this is a fingerprint magnet
it's the same sort of shiny black we had on the s8 or the si+ so I recommend
putting a skin on it you've got a deep brand skin on ours a link to them down
below and also Bixby's here with its Bixby button yeah I mean I've talked
about Bixby at length for me it's unnecessary Google assistance here which
has been plenty good enough but if you want to use it bixby vision Bixby
voice are both here and they do what bixb does if you
decide to set it up or or not remap the button it so as you'd expect it's not a
cheap phone depending on where you buy it between nine hundred and thirty nine
hundred fifty bucks but it's tough talk about price because Samsung does ton of
sales it's gonna be an expensive phone regardless if you have an S8 and s8 plus
it's probably not worth the upgrade you're coming from a note five earlier
device we're going to really want to consider what Samsung has done here with
the note eight it's an incredible bit of hardware it is a big phone though and for a
lot of people that might be a turn off I recommend feeling it in your hand before
you go ahead and buying it if you wear tight pants or shorts with shallow
pockets it's going to fall out or feel really unwieldy for you what do I think
about the note eight is it the phone you've been waiting for you skipping for
maybe what Apple has to come next if you've already pre-ordered one I wanna
know what you guys think if you liked the review please give it a thumbs up we
always appreciate it certainly helps until next time I'm Jon Rettinger from
TechnoBuffalo
you