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Introduction
While some phones are inspired by the 'less is more' mantra, Samsung's Galaxy Note family has always proudly claimed that 'more is more'. More features, more options, more settings, more ways to interact with your handset, more choice made possible by the use of the best components adding up to the biggest and baddest spec list. To paraphrase a well known cliche, a Note comes with everything and the kitchen sink.
The Galaxy Note8 arrived on the scene last fall as the first model in the line with a screen curved on both sides, as Samsung carried over the iconic Infinity Display from its S8 duo launched earlier in 2017. It augments its distinctive design with the S Pen stylus and the Korean company's first dual rear camera setup.
Given how Note-starved certain parts of the world have been in the past couple of years, this smartphone has a lot of hype to live up to. On paper it is definitely the best and most feature-packed handset Samsung has ever produced, and yet you may be wondering how that translates into real life, day to day use.
You've seen all the usual tests in our normal review, but now it's time to take a deeper and more subjective dive into what makes the Note8 tick.
Let's find out if the phone is as nice to handle as it is easy on the eyes, how disturbing those display curves really turn out to be, whether performance is all lag-free, and how the Note8's battery handles a power user's average day. We'll tell you about the quality of snaps its dual camera delivers when you use it all day everyday, and you'll also get an idea of what aspects of the device can get frustrating once you've set it up as your own.
Five of us have used the Galaxy Note8 for extensive periods of time, and if you want to know more about what it feels like to carry it around as your one and only smartphone, join us on the following pages as we combine our impressions to draw a well-rounded picture of what sets this model apart from the competition and where it falls short.
This is our fifth article in a series of long-term reviews - a format which is still quite new on our website. While our regular reviews are focusing on assessing every aspect of a device's performance in the most objective way possible, the long-term review is where we will give you a more subjective look - an outline of what it's like to live with a specific smartphone every day. We would appreciate your feedback on this new format in the comments section, and we'll do our best to incorporate your suggestions into the next iterations.
Design and build quality
There's really no way around this - the Galaxy Note8 is a looker. Even months after its release (and many more after the S8 duo came to market with a very similar aesthetic), it still feels as beautiful as ever, especially on the front. The minimal bezels, the display curves, the way the glass seamlessly meets the aluminum frame - they all add up to a very pleasing visual elegance.
Pixels curve into metal and then into glass. If jealous looks are what you crave, the Note8 will deliver when you put it on a table somewhere. Even with most cases it remains perfectly recognizable and stands out in the contemporary crowd of boring 'slab' smartphones.
The back of the phone might be more controversial, as the rounded rectangle that houses the two cameras, LED flash, heart rate monitor, and fingerprint sensor isn't the most aesthetically pleasing construct. Perhaps that has something to do with the sheer density of things it includes, or with how much of the handset's width it occupies. And then there's the Samsung logo which for some reason isn't symmetrically placed towards the bottom of the back, but just crowds the top half even more.
Aside from these elements there's literally nothing on the Note8's back except glass - beautiful to look at, until you pick up the phone even once. After that it becomes an oily fingerprinty mess, but we're getting used to this new status quo in a world now dominated by the glass and metal sandwich design for high-end phones.
The Note8 seems incredibly well built. It obviously won't withstand nasty falls, given how much of it is made out of glass, but so far it has proven to be surprisingly resilient in another area - we can't find any scratches on our units, not even after weeks upon weeks of use. That's something to be commended, as scratch marks would deter from the otherwise stunning looks of the handset, perhaps even more than the visible fingerprints on the back already do.
Handling
Handling the Galaxy Note8 is a mixed bag, to put it nicely. The device is certainly thin enough, but it's weirdly top heavy. That makes using it with one hand more frustrating than it ought to be. Sure, this is unashamedly a phablet, and there are some people who can only conceive of using these with both hands. Then again, some of us are already accustomed to the finger gymnastics required to cover a large screen diagonal, but even so the Note8 proved to be a challenge in this regard.
When you combine how top heavy it is with the tall 18.5:9 aspect ratio of the display, it makes for a constant struggle against gravity. It's as if all the device wants to do is plunge onto a hard floor and end its life - that's how unbalanced it feels, especially while you try to execute that specific up and down shuffle motion with the hand you're holding it in, say if you want to reach the notification panel (or the navigation buttons).
On the other hand, the sharper edges and wider frame of the Note8 really make a world of difference in handling compared to the likes of the Galaxy S8 and S8+, which some of us literally can't even get off the table in one fluent motion. In this context, the Galaxy Note8's design is the best of both worlds. It has slightly rounded edges for a modern look but not so much to totally hamper usability. Although the screen is only marginally larger than the S8+'s, they feel like very different phones due to these differences in the design, which make the Note8 easier to use.
Unfortunately, even when you do end up getting a good grip on the Note8, your thumb is prone to end up at an extremely awkward angle relative to the navigation keys. That bottom chin Samsung insisted on thinning out so much in the name of form is now really impacting ease of use. In other words, the navigation strip is way too close to the bottom and requires some real finger stretching to reach. It's a real chore and one that would only have been avoided by a bigger bottom bezel - or a not so tall screen aspect ratio.
As expected given the materials used, the Note8 is quite slippery, so you might want to use a case (we're particularly fond of Samsung's own Alcantara Cover). Replacing the screen is an expensive endeavor, so perhaps a screen protector is advised as well.
Display
In the Android world, this phone has the best display there is at the moment, truly in a league of its own. Everything you see appears to be printed directly onto the screen - icons, text, and pictures don't seem to come from underneath the layer you're touching. Additionally, the sheer size of the 18.5:9 panel is unmatched by any of its rivals.
Colors, contrast, sunlight legibility, brightness, high dynamic range support - the Note8 checks pretty much every box available with little to no compromises to the visual experience. Well, the ultra-wide aspect ratio does take some getting used to, but that is an industry-wide issue, rather than a Samsung-specific one.
On the flip side, the curved panel won't be to everyone's liking, with the way images look on those edges and the occasional accidental touch triggered by the palm of the hand you're holding the phone with. Those curves do help Samsung's recent flagships stand out in the crowd, though, so don't expect them to go anywhere anytime soon.
If you're not a fan of the oversaturated default screen mode, you can always jump into Display settings and alter it to something more accurate - AMOLED Cinema matches the DCI-P3 color space, AMOLED Photo is for fans of Adobe RGB, and Basic represents the sRGB color space most faithfully.
Samsung's implementation of automatic brightness is worthy of praise, because first of all it seems much better tuned from the get-go than some of its competitors' systems. What's more, when you manually adjust the brightness slider the phone will remember that as your preferred setting for that specific light level, and apply it automatically going forward. We wish every smartphone out there would employ this tactic, it would save us a lot of time spent manually upping and lowering the brightness on that infamous slider.
Camera
The great camera from the S8 series has been carried over and it has been improved by adding a secondary zoom lens. It's really nice to have a zoom camera on board. It allows for snapshots which have a very unusual perspective. Some of us wish the camera on the Note8 provided an even bigger zoom factor.
Galaxy Note 8 photos: Wide • Zoom • Wide • Zoom • Wide • Zoom • Wide • Zoom
Zoom or not, the camera is super snappy to start and yes, it takes great pictures. Compared to most other phones, one particularly neat aspect is that when you have HDR On (HDR is traditionally a POST-processing routine), it instantaneously renders a live preview of what the photo will look like BEFORE you've snapped it. As a result you never really notice the dynamic range limitations of this small camera like you would on other phones.
Galaxy Note 8 photos: Zoom camera
Both of the Galaxy Note8's cameras are among the sharpest around. Scenes with textures or foliage are handled beautifully, no matter the light. Detail retention is helped by the fact that Samsung's noise reduction algorithm is class-leading. It smooths out noise in solid colors but retains textures and edges where other phones produce jagged lines.
Galaxy Note 8 photos: regular camera
It's not all sunshine and rainbows, though. While the Samsung Galaxy Note8 features what is definitely among the best camera hardware packages on the market - 12 MP resolution with a large sensor and bright f/1.7 aperture and the 12MP 2x zoom camera with optical stabilization - we can't help but feel that in some ways Samsung's software holds it back.
Some of us have found that pictures of people tend to have yellowish skin tones that are not very true to life and there's a softness in faces, especially obvious in selfies. You may also generally encounter yellow represented as a darker yellow, going on orange.
Galaxy Note 8 photos: Portrait mode
Take a look at our assortment of samples above in order to judge for yourself how the Note8's camera performs. Don't get us wrong, this is definitely one of the best smartphone shooters of the moment, we're not saying it isn't. But it could have been even better had its performance not been hampered somewhat by the Korean company's strong-minded color science.
Performance
Spec-wise, the Galaxy Note8 is a beast. And day to day performance accurately reflects that. The problem with this device isn't performance per se, it's smoothness, and that's where it doesn't always deliver.
The Samsung Experience UI is definitely miles ahead of the old TouchWiz in this regard, but it's still not the snappiest around and doesn't deliver Google Pixel-like levels of fluency. Although it's undeniably the fastest Samsung smartphone to date, it isn't even as perceptibly fast as some other near-stock Android phones like the OnePlus 5T (or even 3T), not to mention the iPhone - 7, 8 or X.
Speed-wise you'll be fine 99% of the time, but then you will encounter the odd interface stutter here and there. We're talking general phone use activities, where a slowdown or two will show their faces over the course of a day.
If you want a stutter that's always reproducible, just try quickly double tapping the Recents button if you have vibration feedback on for touches. This move will switch between the last two apps you used - akin to Alt+Tab on Windows. Naturally, the phone will vibrate twice, once for each touch of the button. While the first vibration will be nothing special, the second one is always delayed. It's just a small example of a prevalent problem with Samsung's interpretation of Android.
On the other hand, compared to the S8 duo, the Note8 seems to be noticeably faster, despite having the same chipset. In fact it feels like a different phone (for the better) in terms of everyday performance and responsiveness. Maybe that's the extra RAM at work, or perhaps Samsung has just paid a little bit more attention to such details in the Note8.
Software
If you like Google's minimalist view of Android, Samsung's version with its own cartoony UI aesthetic irreversibly stamped over the entire software will not float your boat. Despite what you may read on the internet, no amount of font replacement, stock Google apps, launchers and theming will disguise the fact that you're using Samsung's software. And let's not even mention the weird contour-like navigation buttons and icons.
However, Samsung Experience has, over the years, grown into one of the most feature-rich customization suites to ever run atop Google's mobile operating system. And many of its value-add features have eventually made their way into stock Android as well, their usefulness thus being confirmed by Google itself.
If features are what you're after, the Note8's got plenty of them. If you enjoy making a dive through the Settings menu a day-long activity, then this is certainly the phone for you. Thankfully, Samsung has managed to tone down Settings in recent releases compared to the tab-filled chaos from a few years back. Even so, there's still a lot of stuff in there, including features we're assuming at most 1% of owners ever use (Smart Stay, anyone?).
Samsung's philosophy when it comes to mobile software seems to boil down to "the more options the better", and that's interesting because it comes across as the exact opposite of what Apple has been doing. Yet having loads of options means you're constantly forced to make decisions when you encounter them, and that can actually become quite tiring and annoying.
Case in point: you're on a phone call with another contact on hold, you end the first call, and then the phone asks you if you want to resume the call that was on hold. Why can't it just automatically switch? That's the behavior in Google's version of Android and in 99% of the time it will be what 100% of the users expect to happen.
Samsung's Bluetooth implementation on the Note8 remembers the last used volume level per accessory, so you don't have to adjust that every single time after the phone connects to a speaker. This is one of those small things that can get overlooked but is very nice to have if you use Bluetooth for your music listening needs.
Battery life
Since the Note8 is similar in size to the S8+, you'd expect it to fit a battery at least as large. But it doesn't, and that's because of the space required for the S Pen. So the Note8 with its slightly bigger screen gets a 3,300 mAh cell, which is nothing to write home about in this day and age (and for a phone with its dimensions). The battery life we've encountered wasn't record-breaking by any stretch of the imagination, but for most people the Note8 should last through an entire day off the charger.
With data connectivity on Wi-Fi only during such a day, we've constantly managed 5 or more hours of screen on time, with auto brightness, Bluetooth always on, and an hour or two of music streaming. The best result in this scenario was just over 6 hours of screen on time by the time the battery hit 8%. When we added in 2-4 hours of 4G use we got down to around 4 hours of screen on time (or a bit more), and we assume that with a 4G-only scenario you'd be even worse off.
Our Screen On Time record
Bottom line: if you're even remotely a power user, this isn't one of those phones on which you won't even need to peek at the battery level indicator throughout the day. You will want to do that from time to time, just to be on the safe side. Of course the Note8 has wireless charging support, so when you aren't using it you can just leave it on a pad to top up.
Interestingly, in our day to day experience the Note8 managed to achieve marginally better battery life than the S8+, despite its smaller capacity. It feels around the same in this regard as the Huawei Mate 9 with its mammoth 4,000 mAh cell, so Samsung must have applied some heavy optimizations in this area.
Duplicate apps and duplicate app stores
Bloatware isn't as big of a problem as it used to be (remember ChatON?), but it's still a very prevalent issue on Samsung smartphones. For some reason, the company seems convinced that having its own duplicate for almost every Google app and service will help it in the long run somehow.
The Galaxy Note8 ships with two app stores, the Google Play Store and the Galaxy Apps store. Amusingly and bafflingly, some of the dozens of preinstalled Samsung apps update through the former, while most use the latter. We've given up trying to understand the logic here.
Speaking of preinstalls, there are fewer of those than there were a few years back, with Samsung now offering an assortment of apps through the initial setup - when you can choose to install them or not. That doesn't mean that the Note8 ships only with the mandatory Google apps and nothing more - thanks to its partnership with Microsoft, Samsung even throws in Excel, OneDrive, PowerPoint, and Word on top of everything else.
Clearly this isn't a company that understands the value of simplicity in software - when you aren't confronted with options you may not care about, you're given two of each kind of app just because Samsung can't admit that the Android ecosystem is Google's, not its own.
Bixby and its button
Bixby isn't identical to the Google Assistant in what it can do, both have their strengths and weaknesses - Google's wins at anything that requires going online to fetch an answer or tapping into the data in your Google account, obviously. Bixby's main focus seems to be having a voice-driven alternative way to navigate your phone and its options.
All that aside, in concept having a virtual assistant of its own is yet another attempt by Samsung to duplicate functionality that Google already provides in the base Android OS. There still aren't many people who use any one digital assistant multiple times a day, so how much sense does it make for a phone to ship with two? On the other hand, if you're a fan of such assistants, keep in mind that you can add Cortana and Alexa to your Note8 as well, for a grand total of four - because having just two isn't confusing enough, surely.
Then there's the Bixby key. Clearly, Samsung put this in there to signify how serious it is about Bixby, but it is a button you will find yourself pressing by mistake a lot of times. And when you do, you'll be reminded that Bixby exists. How troubling that is for you depends on whether or not you've found any use for it.
The fingerprint and iris scanners
You probably knew this was coming, but it's well deserved criticism. The position of the fingerprint sensor in the Note8 is bad, there's no way around that. Surprisingly, the biggest problem isn't even with the fact that it's not centered - it's how high up on the back it is. The fact that it's quite narrow doesn't help things either.
Long story short: you will constantly have to hunt for it. And of course you may end up smudging the cameras in the process. Samsung is rectifying this mistake with its 2018 flagships, but if you buy a Note8 you're just going to have to live with it. It also feels slower than sensors in competing devices, even ones that are already pretty old, such as the OnePlus 3, iPhone 6s, and the Huawei Nexus 6P.
Using the iris scanner means you don't have to do any finger gymnastics to reach the awkwardly placed fingerprint sensor, but this comes with a downside or two of its own. The iris scanning isn't faster than using your fingerprint to unlock, and you're also required to hold the phone at a certain distance and angle from your face.
To add insult to injury, some of us have found the iris scanning tech found in Samsung's 2017 flagships (the S8 duo and the Note8) less reliable than it was in the ill-fated Note7. Overall none of these secure unlock methods that the Note8 employs are as fast and easy to use as we'd like them to be. Many of us have ended up using the less secure Face Unlock. Not that it's fast either, but it's at least reliable.
Samsung Pass
Samsung Pass is a centralized keychain for all your login credentials, which enables automatic web sign-in. However, that 'automatic' part is a bit exaggerated. In reality, you do have to use either an iris or a fingerprint scan each time Samsung Pass fills in credentials for you.
Samsung could have at least implemented some time-out logic to have the keychain verification valid until you close or minimize the browser. Since having to scan your eyes to log into a food ordering website probably isn't worth the hassle, you might end up using Samsung Pass only for important passwords that should be encrypted. Samsung's excellent internet browser can already save credentials for all the other websites.
And yet there is a slight issue with that approach as well, especially if you have a password backup saved on Samsung's cloud from using previous Galaxy devices. Each time the browser fetches one of your old, unprotected logins and fills it in, Samsung Pass pops up a notification asking you if you want to move that username and password combo to its secure storage. You can either agree to move it or deny forever. There is also a third option, to temporarily ignore it, which means that you will get the same message every time you open the site.
Settings search
The sheer amount of settings on the Note8 can be overwhelming. So it's a bummer that the Settings search, while definitely a godsend and a necessity to navigate yourself around, is far from perfect. Especially now that Bixby is part of the mix, with its deep integration in menus and UIs.
It's quite annoying that, with all the AI floating around, there is no sign of any kind of dictionary, natural language or fuzzy search implemented in this vital search bar.
Also, for one reason or another, some options can't be found through search at all. One that especially ticks some of us off is the Fast cable charging toggle. This might be open to debate, but some say quick charging, in the sense of charging a Li-ion battery at a higher voltage, is not ideal for it in the long run. That's why you may prefer to keep this option off, if you only charge your device at night anyway. Yet the Settings search can not take you to the toggle. It is only reachable by manually going through Device maintenance > Battery > Advanced settings. And it's not the only option you have to hunt down for yourself.
Smart Switch, "fast" charging
The Smart Switch app is supposed to help you seamlessly migrate your apps and data from your old phone to the Galaxy Note8. We found a wrinkle, however - if you try and use a cable with USB-C connectors on both ends in order to grab that data, the process simply doesn't work. It wants you to use the USB-C to USB-A adapter for some reason, even though we have previously connected two Google Pixels to each other with a USB-C to USB-C cable and successfully transferred everything over. So this doesn't seem to be a limitation of the hardware, but something Smart Switch just isn't able to do at this time.
Samsung's fast charging definitely isn't as fast as what some of its competitors have been offering for a few years now, yet the company insists on not challenging Huawei, Oppo, OnePlus, or Essential in this area. Sure, Samsung's tech will juice up your device faster than if you use a regular 5W or 10W charger, but in this day and age it should do better.
Conclusion
The Galaxy Note8 is without a doubt the best Samsung smartphone ever. It's also the most powerful and most beautiful S Pen-wielding device in history, and that's important to note for fans of the stylus. You don't get such a built-in accessory with any of the Note8's competitors, and frankly we're a bit perplexed as to why nobody is challenging Samsung with a great stylus solution.
Sure, it's a remnant of a bygone era in mobile tech. One that, pretty ironically, stuck around on a device that quite adamantly prioritizes looks over functionality. Reasoning and justifications aside, the S Pen can be supremely useful and is practically implemented - ideal for creative work, as well as precise power user tasks on the go.
Even if you choose not to ever use the S Pen (as some of us have), the Note8 represents the ultimate in smartphone versatility and advanced functionality at the moment. And if that's what your nerdy personality and lifestyle crave, there is really no viable alternative out there. It's a real do-it-all device. The combination of a huge screen that happens to be the best around, Android's full power user pedigree, expandable storage, and the S Pen is unmatched anywhere in the smartphone world. You know that whatever needs to be done, this is the perfect tool to do it with.
For example: you can draw on maps to give better directions, binge watch TV series, have a bunch of emulators for games, edit RAW photos, have private files in the Secure Folder, and use two Facebook Messenger apps (thanks to Samsung's dual messenger feature) on the Galaxy Note8. Oh, and all of this can be done in the bathtub or in the shower thanks to water resistance! Let's not forget that you're also able to listen to music on wired headphones while charging at the same time, something that's unfortunately becoming quite rare in the mobile world nowadays.
The Note8 isn't perfect however, because there's no such thing as the perfect smartphone. Every handset out there comes with its own assortment of things to rave about and compromises you'll have to learn to live with. Samsung's propensity for giving you multiple options everywhere may tick some people off.
Additionally, its continued development of more and more apps and services that mostly duplicate functionality that already exists in Android or Google's app suite can make for a pretty annoying experience if you enjoy the 'less is more' concept. It's also rather frustrating that many of the things the company inserts into its vision of Android, be they apps or settings, will simply go unused (or unchanged from the defaults) by many, if not most owners of the phone.
For the minority that is unashamedly into having manual control over as much of the smartphone experience as possible, the Galaxy Note8 is a godsend. Likewise for the people who prioritize sheer number of features on offer over software smoothness. A true power user will probably love this phone, while for everyone else it might just be too much.
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