Gadgetory

this is the no date I think it's impossible to talk about and review the no date without looking back a little bit talk about the note seven we know what happens to battery in their recalls we've 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 eight that I found am I 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 V 30 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 SI or the SI 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 six point three 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 S a plus but that point one inches makes a difference this phone is not the most organized feeling it looks like an SI 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 boxy er 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 SI plus 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 ass where it's a lot of ways to unlock your device surrounding 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 cure it's 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 IP 68 just like the phone does and it works really well on 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's 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 si+ 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's actually two gigabytes of RAM in here versus the SI in the SI plus so there's six gigs as opposed to four and things are fast whether you're multitasking using molting window playing games and any 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 Allah 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 SATA si+ support the technology as well I'm a software front it's pretty familiar from the s8 and si plus it's version 8.5 a 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 a 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 si+ is the camera so now I 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 under what that means actually 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 thirty three hundred million power battery in here as opposed to thirty five hundred on the SA plus and samsung claims is smaller because of the ten nanometer technology in the Snapdragon 835 which the same processor in the galaxy s 8 NS a plus but haven't any battery issues so again I was coming from a galaxy s feet 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 to even be improved but you can get through a full day easily if you want to charge the battery of course it's USB see 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 shaft 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 Bigsby button yeah I mean I've talked about Bigsby at length for me it's unnecessary Google assistance here which has been plenty good enough but if you want to use it victory vision Bixby voice are both here and they do what nixb does if you decide to set it up or or not remap the button it so does it 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 SI and si 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 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 if 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 John R Ettinger and TechnoBuffalo you