Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Review

Interface and Functionality

S Pen support adds a welcome new chapter to the Samsung Experience

If you've already played around with the Galaxy S8, Samsung's interface on the Note 8 is going to feel very familiar: it's the same Samsung Experience software on top of Android 7.0, and just like it was on the GS8, here it also manages to strike a nice balance between power, flexibility, and ease of use.

That said, there are some real improvements here. Part of that has to do with timing, and the Note 8 lands with fully fleshed-out support for Samsung's Bixby virtual assistant. When the GS8 got off the ground, Bixby wasn't quite ready for prime time, a situation that's slowly been improving over the last few months. Now with the Note 8's debut, Bixby's finally ready to show what it can do right when you take the phone home, making for a much more satisfying user experience. And if you're in the US, that also includes Bixby Voice, giving you some powerful tools to control the Note 8 just by speaking to it.

The syntax that uses can take a little while to learn, as it's just different enough from the Google Assistant that you'll have to think about crafting your requests properly, but Samsung goes to some effort to help train users and get them on the right path.

Multi-window support has been a mainstay of the Note series since even before it was integrated into standard Android, and here with the Note 8 Samsung continues to stay ahead of the curve. With App Pair, you can choose a set of two apps and configure a one-button shortcut that will open them both at once. It's not exactly revolutionary, but it's just so convenient that it has us multi-tasking more than we ever did when we had to jump in and out manually.

With its curved-edge screen, the Note 8 also gets access to Samsung's Edge Panels, a deceptively powerful tool for putting app shortcuts, contacts, news, and information all just an easy screen-swipe away. It's deceptively easy to take for granted, and new Note 8 users owe it to themselves to spend a few minutes customizing those panels to their tastes, in order to get the very most out of the phone.

Camera

A secondary zoom-lens camera adds a welcome new dimension to Samsung's already solid camera package

So much of the Note 8 feels like a logical extension of existing Galaxy flagships that Samsung could have really phoned things in for this phone: pair a GS8-style extra-wide Infinity Display with an S Pen, and, boom: Note 8. But to its credit, Samsung is continuing its practice of using Note device to introduce new hardware, and this year that means joining the world of dual-camera smartphones.

In the past, Galaxy phones have given us some really strong cameras, but only ones with single rear sensors. Even as other manufacturers experimented with what dual cameras could do, Samsung was delivering image quality that put those more complicated-looking setups to shame. But now with the Note 8, we're finally ready to witness the next evolution of Samsung camera hardware, as the company pairs one standard 12MP camera with a secondary 12MP telephoto one. Samsung gets major credit for giving both those cameras proper optical image stabilization.

Image quality

Samsung cameras have been producing such great-looking pics for so long that this already feels like a forgone conclusion, but just in case you need some reassurance: the Galaxy Note 8 shoots some beautiful-looking pics. Really, what you're getting is a camera that's every bit as good as you got on the Galaxy S8, but with the addition of a 2x hardware zoom.

As expected for a company doing dual cameras for the first time, Samsung can't help but play with all the standard dual-camera special effects, like a variable bokeh portrait mode (here called Live Focus) with the ability to adjust focus after the fact. That's fun, but maybe more useful there is the ability to zoom out and switch back to wide-angle mode even after you've taken the shot, which Samsung calls Dual Capture.

Much as we've seen with earlier Samsung cameras, low-light performance is strong, and here that's helped out by the very wide-aperture f/1.7 main camera. The telephoto lens is understandably a bit less flexible, with an f/2.4 aperture. Still, keep in mind what you're shooting and what your lighting conditions are like and you can get some great pics out of this hardware.

Extras like Snapchat-style stickers and animations are a fun touch, but nothing that's really worth impacting your phone purchase.

Live Focus (Portrait mode)

Call Quality

Modern smartphones are great for all kinds of things – but honestly, using them as telephones really isn’t one of them. Their shapes are optimized for their role as portable touchscreens, and not to be making calls on them all day. And it's really felt like that, over the years, we've been moving further and further away from the idea that something with the word “phone” in its name needs to be well-made for making calls.

But then there's the Galaxy Note 8. Now, we've already talked about the phone's unusual size and shape from a couple different angles – and how it's relatively successful in some respects, while making a misstep or two with others. But in the end, it's a tall, relatively narrow handset. You know what else is that shape? A proper old-fashioned telephone receiver.

The Note 8 may not be the very most comfortable phone we've ever made voice calls on, but it's totally a step in the right direction. And that calls also sound good is only the icing on that cake. Would we trade all that for a fingerprint scanner that wasn't such a pain to reach? Absolutely, as we're unlocking our phone far more often than we're using it to call people. But we'll take these wins where we can get them.

Battery Life

The Note 8 doesn't kill it with day-plus battery life, but it shouldn't leave you high and dry, either

Calling a phone “Galaxy Note” means several things: obviously a big screen and the presence of an S-Pen stylus, and usually also hardware that goes a little above and beyond what the most recent Galaxy S phone offered. But what's a little less consistent is what Samsung will be giving users in terms of a battery. Over the past few generations, we've seen battery capacity dip up and down, usually hovering in the low-to-mid 3,000mah range. With the Note 7, we got 3,500mAh but – well, we all know what happened with the battery there, and when the phone returned as the Fan Edition, capacity was cut back to 3,200mAh.

For the Note 8, Samsung again seems to have come to a compromise, squeezing a 3,300mAh battery into this hardware. That sounds good, but don't forget we've also got a humongous screen on this phone, just itching to consume all the power it can get. Luckily, CPU tech is also becoming more efficient, and with chips based on a 10nm process here, the Note 8's able to get more done while making less of an impact on the phone's battery.

In the end, we were able to clock just under eight hours of screen-on time from the Note 8 in our custom tests. That's very close to what we were seeing from both the Galaxy S8 and GS8+, so it feels like Samsung had the same sort of endurance target in mind, and chose a battery capacity that, when paired with the rest of the Note 8's hardware, would offer similar run-time.

That figure's decent, and similarly equipped flagships have done both better and worse, so we're not going to criticize Samsung much there. And that we get bonuses like flexible support for wireless charging is only sweetening things for the Note 8.

Don't go out and buy the Note 8 specifically because you want a phone with really long battery life (there are quite a few better options there), but at the same time we don't think anyone will be too disappointed by how long the Note 8's going to last between charges.

Conclusion

The Galaxy Note 8 is at once a safe, almost obvious phone, and one that still manages to show Samsung reaching out into new, untested waters. By taking the look of the Galaxy S8, scaling things up a bit from the GS8+, and adding in S Pen support, the Note 8 feels like the Galaxy Note phone Samsung was always going to make. But by giving us dual cameras for the first time, it still shows that Samsung is willing to use the Note platform to test out new features.


Even those dual cameras, though, are valid targets for criticism, and should we really be rewarding Samsung for taking this long to catch up with what feels like almost every single other smartphone manufacturer out there?

While there's a healthy handful of issues like that we could pick at, none of those are worth ignoring that this is a powerful, attractive, feature-rich handset that is exactly what the next Galaxy Note needed to be. It's enough to get you to move past the Galaxy Note 7 and finally start feeling secure again about Samsung's stylus-equipped phablets.

But even though this comes together as a well-done phablet and a worthy new addition to the Note family, it's also an expensive phone: a really, really expensive phone. The Galaxy Note 7 was already a pricy phablet in the mid-$800 range, but with the Note 8 you could be paying $950 or more, depending on your carrier.

That's asking a lot from smartphone shoppers, especially with the very similarly equipped Galaxy S8 going for $200 less. The S Pen, larger screen, additional memory, and telephoto camera have to cost something, but there's a big psychological barrier as we start approaching that $1000 mark, and for as good as the Note 8 can be, it's not clear that it's the sort of exceptional phone that has the right to demand such lofty sums.

If you're a die-hard Note fan, and already like the new look Samsung introduced with the S8 this year, then maybe the Note 8 makes a lot of sense. But if the most attractive thing about this handset for you is just the dual cameras, maybe wait until the Galaxy S9 and see if you can't get some similar imaging hardware in a more compact package for a lot less money.

Update: Read our Galaxy Note 9 review!