Gadgetory

it was just about a year ago then I sat here and told you that the Samsung Galaxy Note seven was the best take on a big smartphone ever made now we all know what happened to the note seven and it wasn't good it basically caught on fire and had to be pulled from the market but because of that Samsung changed the way it makes batteries so we shouldn't have to worry about that problem anymore and now we're here to talk about the new Samsung Galaxy Note 8 which Samsung again hopes is the best big phone ever made you probably already know what a note is and the note 8 has got it all it's got a giant screen that stretches almost to the very edges of the phone's frame it's got Qualcomm's fastest processor lots of RAM a big battery with both fast wired and wireless charging and it's also Samsung's first phone with a dual camera system that lets you do interesting portrait effects that lets you blur the background like an iPhone can do and of course because it's a note it comes with a stylus which has also gained a few new tricks now you're probably thinking to yourself that sounds great this sounds like a monster phone and you know what you're right there's actually very little to complain about with the note 8 aside from perhaps its starting price of nine hundred and thirty dollars but unlike the note seven last year which was head and shoulders above everything else before it's falling from grace the note 8 isn't actually that much different than Samsung's other really good big phone the galaxy s 8 plus still there's a couple of reasons why you might want to pony up a couple extra hundred dollars for a note II instead of a galaxy s 8 plus so let's dive in this is Samsung's biggest premium phone and it comes with a massive 6.3 inch display just like the SA and the s8 plus it's what Samsung calls an infinity display so the screen stretches almost to the very edges of the phone's frame with just a little bit of bezel above and below the screen is everything you expect from the Samsung bright and punchy great to look at and the sheer size of it just sucks you in when you're watching a video the notary's build quality is also just what you'd expect from a high-end Samsung phone it's metal and glass with a premium fit and finish just like the s8 and also just like the SAE it's ip68 water-resistant so you can get it wet without having to worry about it then the note 8 does have a slightly different shape it's more square than the rounded off corners of the SAR si plus which makes it easier to use the S Pen wet but it also makes the Note II feel a lot bigger than the si plus even though the two are almost the same size just like all the note phones before it the note 8 makes no apologies for being a big phone and if you want to compare it to the iPhone 7 plus it's a little bit taller a little bit narrower but has a way bigger screen the nodine's big size also makes it even harder to hit the fingerprint scanner on the back of the phone which is still super clumsy to use and I've been using an SI plus for a couple of months in I've gotten used to the fingerprint scanners placement but you can basically get used to anything it would be a lot easier for everyone if Samsung would just put the scanner below the camera like every other phone does and of course there's a dedicated button to launch Samsung's big speed voice assistant and of course it can't be reprogrammed to do something more useful because Samsung has committed itself to blocking all of the apps that come out to do so now inside the note 8 has qualcomm snapdragon 835 processor and 6 sigma bytes of ram this is the same processor it's found in the s8 but with 2 gigabytes more ram you don't wanna see I haven't seen a noticeable performance difference between the two both are fast and smooth and really performance isn't an issue here likewise the notates 3300 milliamp hour battery is big enough to last most people through a full day without having to recharge in practical terms it gets me about the same battery life as I experienced with the si+ despite its slightly smaller capacity you've probably picked up on a theme here there's not a whole lot different between the note 8 and the s8 plus so let's talk about those two things that are different the first is the notes signature feature the S Pen Stylus the note 8 is basically the only phone on the market that you can buy that comes with a stylus and unless you take notes mark up screenshots doodle or just navigate the software with a finer point than your finger and note diehards love this thing and according to Samsung the stylus is the main reason that no buyers stick with the phone the Galaxy Note 8 has gained a couple of new features it's got a finer point and a little bit more pressure sensitivity than the stylus that's shipped with the note 5 two years ago samsung has also improved the note-taking software and you can now take longer notes on the phone screen without even unlocking it which is pretty cool well my favorite new feature is live messages which lets you draw pictures or write messages and convert them to animated gifs which you can send to people or post to social networks it's kind of like the iMessage handwritten note feature except you can post them anywhere that supports a gift the other big difference of the noé is its new dual camera system has two 12 megapixel cameras both with optical image stabilization this lets you zoom in closer on your subject or more interestingly take pictures with a blurred background like you can do with the DSLR or mirrorless camera the portrait mode is a lot like the iPhone 7 plus outdoors and good light it can produce some interesting effects but indoors aren't poor lighting it looks pretty bad and it never quite fooled me into thinking the picture was taken with a bigger camera it kind of has this cardboard cutout effect and it messes up things like fine detail and hair which is pretty important for a portrait it's basically not any worse nor any better than the iPhone 7 plus as portrait mode both of these feel like first generation attempts at something there's a lot of headroom from in later iterations the one thing that Samsung is doing differently is allowing you to adjust the blur before or after you take the picture so if the blur effect is too strong you can roll it back a little bit I found the best results were when I had the blur effect dial just a tad back from its maximum and since there are two cameras you can actually take both the wide-angle and telephoto images at the same time so if the portrait quality sucks you can always fall back to the wide-angle camera which has a much higher quality sensor and a better lens I feel like this is a little bit of a safety net but honestly I'm glad it's there otherwise the wide-angle camera is exactly the same as the one you get on the SI it's fast focusing as a wide aperture and takes really lovely photos it's one of the best cameras you can get on a phone this year there was once a point in time where if you wanted a big phone the note was the obvious king of the hill it had the biggest screen and the best specs and it didn't really matter if its price was a little bit higher than other phones but now there's a lot of really great big phones on the market including ones made by Samsung itself that offer a lot of the same experience of the note at a lower price so it really comes down to two things if you want the note do you care about the camera and do you care about the S Pen Stylus since I feel like the camera could still use work to truly be great it basically comes down to this little piece of plastic and how much value you get out of it if you're an S Pen diehard go for it you're gonna love the Note II but the rest of us will probably be just as happy with any of the other big flagship phones youtube.com slash The Verge I can't believe it I can't remember it's youtube.com slash merge or slash though that's why I was asking there's your 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