Gadgetory

we're coming up on the final stretch of the year and some of the biggest releases are coming to light including the latest from Samsung and the newest entry into the high-end smartphone market in one corner we have a phone that's trying to put quite literally everything into one package and in the other corner we have a phone that tries to offer the fundamentals while redefining what a smartphone user really requires it's Joshua Vergara what's going on everybody and we're taking a quick look at the brand new Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and the essential phone just a couple of years ago you would be hard-pressed to find large screens in devices that are kind of artfully compact the Galaxy Note 8 brings its AMOLED display that is about as large as the galaxy s 8 plus over six inches with curved sides and nearly non-existent bezels dubbed the infinity display the screen comes with a ton of different features including the edge UX where you can have a bunch of panels that give you a lot of different capabilities and there's always the always-on display thanks to its AMOLED nature parts of the display can be used to always show you some information and to clearly show you your notifications a lot of this is not the case with the essential phone whose screen is still pretty large at 5.7 inches but it's body overall is a little bit more compact it also has an IPS display at quad HD resolution with a 19 by 10 aspect ratio the display gets a little bit cut by the centered front-facing camera a small area dips down from the top and actually adds a break in the display all the elements still stretch up to the very top though and the mixture of the two makes for a very unique looking device the screens dictate the sizes of these phones but it's the no 8 that manages to still be decent despite its larger size but overall we have to give the handling to the essential just because it's a little bit smaller and also it has the flat sides that make it very easy to grip and on the other hand you have the Galaxy Note 8 which continues the good design and the good build that we come to expect from Samsung devices in the last couple of years the specifications are all on par with the snapdragon 835 found throughout Samsung has stepped their game up however with 6 gigabytes of RAM in all note 8 phones while essential keeps the 4 gigabytes of RAM but make sure that 128 gigabytes of internal storage makes up for their lack of SD card expansion in terms of audio you might get a little bit of that argument about what is exactly essential because the essential phone lacks a headphone jack and requires a USBC adapter that is of course not the case with the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 which still has the headphone jack and the larger battery to compensate for its larger display at 3300 milliamp hours the 3040 million Bauer unit in the essential is likely to be proportionate to its 5.7 inch display we will do more battery testing between these phones and see which one lasts longer so when we're talking about hardware we can bring up the s-pen the hardware Edition that has always defined the note the essential cannot boast any such included accessory and for people that really need productivity tools or even just a little bit of extra fun the s-pen continues to be one of the most well thought out companions to any smartphone the S Pen gains the ability to have screen off memo edit up to a hundred pages and a live message feature that makes an animated gif out of one's written words the s-pen might go unused for some users but anyone that gives it a shot might find some of the best added features that you can't find anywhere else now the essential comes with its own companion accessories even if they are sold separately and are modular in nature more will come soon including a charging dock essential promises that those connector pins next to the camera will come in future devices and will take any and all accessories in their ecosystem what is undeniably essential is a good software experience and there are two very different takes on that philosophy here Samsung continues to refine and streamline that software as much as it can and aside from new S Pen features the main addition comes to multitasking as app pair make shortcuts that open up to applications into multi window automatically this is great for multitaskers but the general software experience is still as streamlined as it has ever been but it still suffers from the redundancies of having Google and Samsung equivalent applications in one device which is not the case with the essential thumb as it is basically Android at its purest with very few applications added on top of what is already included in the stock build that means there isn't too much to actually talk about here but it is one of the most reliable and smoothest experiences we've had regarding Android in recent phones but that doesn't really include the camera app before we get to the big story here Samsung going dual camera we see essential make good on its promise to bring dual lenses to their phone it's a combo of RGB and monochrome sensors and it's something that we've seen in other phones mainly by Huawei it comes to the essential to hopefully bring easy and high quad photography however up until the recording of this video we got to OTA updates that have added HDR to the mix and have tried to improve the camera application which is probably the main issue here the camera app is a little bit slow and it can crash from time to time but we hope that updates are going to make it and the picture quality even better the monochrome photos have a lot of detail in them and it's really fun to use however we will do more testing to make sure that the colored photos are still up to par and even then the camera app is lacking in a lot of modes even a manual mode it's a little bit too basic for our taste and then you have the Samsung version of a camera which has pretty much everything you can think of but the main big addition to Samsung's camera is a new lens a 12 megapixel 2 X optical zoom lens that complements the other 12 megapixel regular sensor they bring back the live focus feature for depth of field shooting which is great for portraits and both lenses have optical image stabilization which will really help for those zoom shots and then after that there are all of the different modes you're probably familiar with from past Samsung devices overall Samsung finally finds itself among the rest of the dual cameras in the Android space so we will be testing the zoom capabilities and report back all results in our full reviews the essential is on pre-order now for the price of 699 dollars either unlocked or via Sprint while the Galaxy Note 8 will go on pre-order on August 28th which shipments starting on September 15 and so there you have it a look at the differences between the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and the essential phone there are two fundamentally different philosophies at play here with Samsung still continuing to provide a stacked but overall reliable experience in their phones and the essential trying to give users the best possible experience with what they deem essential the note 8 might end up having the dreaded galaxy syndrome where features go unused after day one and the essential needs more work on mainly its cameras to be considered worthy by serious smart phone shutter bugs there's always going to be a caveat or a misstep with other phone but we will continue to explore them in our full reviews coming soon keep you tuned to and row 30 for that and even more on both the essential phone and the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 subscribe to the channel if you haven't already to keep up with all of that and then stick around and head on over to Android or decom for even more because we are your source for all things Android