Samsung Galaxy Note 8 review

There are two types of smartphone users: Those who love the stylus and those who hate it. The former (a camp which famous includes Steve Jobs) believe the stylus to be outdated and redundant; a relic of the Palm Pilot days. The latter swear by their pen-based note-taking and doodling to a fanatical degree. There appears to be no in-between.

This makes the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 purchase decision simple. If you want a stylus, the Note 8 is the only mainstream phone on the market that has one, and since the Note 7 was quickly yanked off store shelves after some batteries started catching fire, you’ve probably been waiting a while for a new one. If you, however, are like Jobs and chuckle at the notion of using a stylus in 2018, then the Note 8 is easy to ignore, considering Samsung make a near-identical phone that costs less in the shape of the Galaxy S8+.

The Note 8 features a gorgeous 6.3-inch OLED screen that spans almost the entire front of the device, curving at the left and right edges to meet the back glass plate for a seamless feel that’s unrivalled in the industry. It’s a really cool design that looks and feels great (images look like they’re spilling off the screen like water off an infinity pool) but sacrifices a bit of usability: The curved parts of the screen increase erroneous palm touches. Under the hood is either a Snapdragon 835 or Exynos 8895 (depending on region), the flagship Qualcomm or Samsung processor of 2017. Whichever CPU you get, it still holds up well today, though both are noticeably inferior to Apple’s A11 and Huawei’s Kirin 970. There’s also a whopping 6GB of RAM, adding up to a whopping spec sheet full of awesome features… that are more or less also on the cheaper Galaxy S8+.

Is the pen mightier?

The stylus, which Samsung calls “S Pen”, can sense up to 4,096 levels of pressure -- enough to tell the difference between light tracing or hard strokes (some will disagree, however). Personally, I still found the Note 8’s display too small to do any real sketching or note taking. Instead, I found the stylus most handy when used as a navigation tool around various apps: For example, when editing videos in the Power Director app, it’s easier to drag the timeline slider with a stylus’ fine tip than with my chubby fingers.

Samsung also gave the Note 8 software a few software tricks that are tied to the stylus, such as the ability to create a gif from any part of the screen, or sending animated written messages. But there seems to be no reason why these features need a stylus to work -- unless Samsung needed more reasons to justify the S Pen.

Dual Cameras

Other than the stylus, why is the Note 8 more expensive than the S8+? There is actually another difference between the two handsets, but its impact is so limited that I haven’t needed to mention it until now. Samsung gave the Note 8 a secondary rear camera to keep up with industry trend, but unlike Apple, LG or Huawei, the Note 8’s dual camera set-up doesn’t bring much notable improvement over the S8’s already excellent camera. In a nutshell, Samsung’s approach to the second camera is the same as Apple’s, but inferior. The secondary telephoto lens can shoot “2X” zoom photos and bokeh effects, but to less impressive degree than the iPhone X or even the iPhone 8. In my opinion, using the second camera for wide-angle shots like LG’s V30 or to soak in more light like Huawei’s devices bring more tangible usability.