The Galaxy Note 8 is just what we expected. That's great news. Samsung's pen-enabled, high-end flagship phone fills the shoes of the dearly departed Note 7 elegantly. It's basically a Galaxy S8+ with an S Pen and dual cameras on the back. And considering the S8 is our favorite phone of the year so far, the Note 8 looks very promising. We got a chance to spend some time with the phone ahead of Samsung's launch event and have some first impressions.
Design
The Galaxy Note 8 feels like a slightly bigger Galaxy S8+, as you'd expect. It's 2.94 inches wide, which is pretty narrow for something with a 6.3-inch screen. It's a little bit too wide for me to use one-handed, but Galaxy Notes have never traditionally been one-handed phones. The screen has the very narrow bezels of the Galaxy S8, with slight sloping on the back reminiscent of the Galaxy Note 5. The S Pen pops out of a slot at the lower right of the phone. The SIM card slot doubles as a microSD slot.
The phone is waterproof, with or without the S Pen installed. Its all-glass construction makes me worry about breakability, as much as I worry about it with the Galaxy S8; you'll probably want to get a case. It will come in black and gray in the US, and also blue and gold elsewhere. The gold is a bit garish, but the blue is gorgeous, and I wish we were getting it.
The phone has both a USB-C port and a headphone jack. It's compatible with Samsung's Dex desktop dock that essentially turns the phone into a desktop PC. But it's too big to work with the current Gear VR headset if you want to do VR. Samsung has a compatible model that will be available starting September 15 for $129.99.
Battery
The Galaxy Note 7's biggest problem, of course, wasn't revealed in reviews. The phone's problem was that it exploded. Samsung seems to have genuinely moved on past that, though. Back in March, we took a trip to Korea to see the company's newly rigorous battery-testing procedure. According to Samsung reps, the company has further enhanced its testing by putting the Note 8's batteries through a new UL regime invented for this device.
Battery conservatism might also be why the Note 8 has a smaller battery than you'd otherwise expect—a non-removable 3,300mAh cell. That's smaller than the Galaxy S8+'s 3,500mAh battery, and the S8+ is a smaller phone. The difference, Samsung pointed out, is that the Note 8 has to fit an S Pen into its narrow body. Samsung promises "all-day" battery life, but we'll have to see about that.
Processor and Performance
The phone runs Android 7.1.1 on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, and Samsung told us we should expect pretty much the exact same CPU and modem performance as on the Galaxy S8. (There is also a Samsung Exynos version, but it will not be sold in the US). In practice, the phone felt fast and smooth, just like the S8 still does after six months. There will be an Android O upgrade eventually, but Samsung isn't promising a specific date.
One neat new feature in Samsung's Android skin helps take advantage of the big screen. "App pairings" are groupings of two apps that you can preset to launch together, by swiping in from the edge of the screen. Those apps will then launch in dual-window mode, one on each half of the screen. That way, you can pull up your phone dialer and your calendar with a conference call code at the same time, for instance. Other Samsung phones that support dual window and edge swiping may get this feature in the future, Samsung said.
Modem-wise, the Note 8 joins the Galaxy S8 with gigabit LTE support and all the trimmings. The Note 8 can hit potential gigabit speeds on AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. It only lacks T-Mobile's new Band 71 for extended rural coverage, which is coming in a potential future Samsung smartphone and, presumably, in the LG V30.
The US version of the phone will have 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage; there will be other versions with more storage in other countries.
Cameras
The biggest new feature here comes in the form of dual 12-megapixel cameras. Samsung decided to go for 1x and 2x telephoto, like on the Apple iPhone 7 Plus, as opposed to a different two-camera setup. Both cameras have optical image stabilization to compensate for shaky hands; the 1x camera is f/1.7 for low-light performance, and the 2x camera is f/2.4.
The phone switches between the 1x and 2x modes very quickly. The camera app can also create great-looking bokeh effects, and you can even tweak the bokeh focus after the fact, creating new JPG versions of the image with different focal depth.
The camera app now has a dramatic full-screen option, with a floating shutter button, that fills the screen with your viewfinder image. It looks great. And as the Galaxy S8 is currently our top camera phone, we have high expectation for the Note 8.
S Pen
Galaxy Note lovers come for the S Pen. If you're any kind of visual thinker, the S Pen unlocks all sorts of creativity. My daughter uses a Galaxy Note 4, and her S Note app has dozens of pages of notes, ideas, drawings, and cartoons.
The Galaxy Note 8 has an S Pen with a very narrow, pressure-sensitive tip: it's 0.7mm and supports 4,096 pressure levels. When you pull it out, you can draw on the screen even if the phone is locked, a feature Samsung calls Screen-Off Memo. Screen-Off Memos can now take up to a hundred pages; you're not restricted to one screen.
Another S Pen addition, Live Messages, tries to enhance Galaxy Note messaging with fun features like the ones you find in Apple's iMessage. You can draw a handwritten note using regular, sparkling, or neon ink, and have it turned into a GIF to be sent through any messager you want, like SMS, Facebook, WhatsApp, or anything else. It's a cool feature, and I love the interoperability. But to really lead, it needs to support stickers and graphics.
Two other, smaller new enhancements: the included PEN UP app now has coloring books in it, and you can use the S Pen to swipe text to do language translations.
Conclusions
It's easy to get excited about the Galaxy Note 8. It takes one of the best phones of the year, the gorgeous Galaxy S8, and makes it better. Of course, we loved the Note 7, too, and then it set itself on fire, but Samsung really seems to have learned its lesson there.
Samsung didn't give us a price for the Note 8, but we assume it'll be $100 more than the S8+. That makes it a very expensive phone. The two differentiators here are the S Pen and the dual cameras. If you're an S Pen lover, there's going to be a major processor, camera, and modem performance jump here over the Note 5. You're going to pay a stiff price for the Note 8, but you'll get elegant, top-of-the-line everything, plus your beloved pen. If the S Pen doesn't entice you, mull over whether the dual cameras are worth the premium.
There are two big competitors looming for the Note 8, neither of which we feel like we have a good handle on yet. The Google Pixel XL 2 and the Apple iPhone 8/X/Pro/Edition could both be very good phones. We're not sure that either will include an active stylus, though, which places the Note 8 in a class of its own.
The Note 8 will go on presale August 24, and on sale with all five major US carriers, plus an unlocked version compatible with all carriers, on September 15. If you buy the phone on presale, you can get either a wireless charging pad and a 128GB microSD card, or a Gear 360 camera, bundled in free. Check back for a full review ahead of the phone's release.
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