The Samsung Galaxy Note8: Beauty & The Beast

By Samrat Amatya

Samsung, the South-Korean tech giant, is back with their Note line up of smartphones. And they are back with a bang! The Samsung Galaxy Note8 is a perfect marriage between art and technology. It builds upon the foundation set by its cousin the Galaxy S8 and brings to us something that is truly beautiful yet very powerful. But is the phone worth the staggering price of Rs 1,02,990 here in Nepal? Is it the best phone money can buy right now? Well, let us find the answers to those questions in this full review.

Design

The Samsung Galaxy Note8 is a milestone in smartphone design. It breaks all barriers on how a traditional smartphone should look like without sacrificing the functionality. Everything is where it should be except for the placement of the fingerprint scanner. The metal chassis and the glass back give the phone a premium look and feel. It, however, makes the phone very slippery and prone to smudges. The phone, this time around, is also a bit boxy in nature causing a slight sacrifice in the ergonomics of the phone. That being said, the Note8 still manages to look discrete in an IP68 rated dust and water-resistant body.

Display

The Samsung Galaxy Note8 packs a massive 6.3-inch S-AMOLED Quad-HD edge display with an aspect ratio of 18.5:9. It is the best display in the market right now with 1240nits of brightness and Mobile HDR premium. The display itself is tad sharp with punchy colors and deep blacks. Watching movies and catching up TV series over the festive holidays was a pleasure on this phone. Playing games too on the Note8, with native 18.5:9 resolution, was a surreal experience. Overall, the display on the phone is phenomenal and probably is its crown jewel.

Performance

The Samsung Galaxy Note8 was easily able to tear through everything that I threw at it. It is a true beast of a phone! It didn’t break a sweat even while performing heavy multitasking or while playing graphics intensive games. Speaking of games, it was a delight playing graphics hungry titles like Nova3, MC Versus and Asphalt Xtreme. I didn’t notice any visible lags or stutters while doing so either. The phone also stayed relatively cool even under such heavy load, thanks to the octa-core Exynos 8895 processor and the whopping 6GB of RAM the phone comes with.

Software

The Note8 runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat with Samsung’s own custom skin overlaid on top of it. This iteration of Samsung’s UX is clean, minimalistic and functional. Being a Note device, the phone comes with some neat software tweaks to make full utilisation of the S-Pen. Features like the app-pairing, always on display, Bixby and secure folder are also here. All in all, the software experience on the phone has been great and I am quite pleased with it.

Camera

The Samsung Galaxy Note8 packs a dual-camera set up with a combination of two 12MP rear cameras with f/1.7 and f/2.4 aperture. In compliance with the trends of today, the secondary rear camera is a telephoto lens which allows the camera to optically zoom 2X times. This also aids the phone to get a live focus feature enabling the camera to take some bokehlicious pictures. The image quality of the camera is phenomenal. The snaps taken from it are crystal clear with high dynamic range, sharpness and punchy colours. And thanks to the built-in OIS and Dual-pixel AF the images comes out to be blur-free with a bulls-eye focus.The phone also has an f/1.7 8MP front camera for all your high-res selfies. The image quality from here too was top-notch with great details and vibrancy. Overall, the Note8 has one of the better if not the best smartphone cameras in the market right now.

Biometrics and Others

The phone is packed with a lot of biometric options. It has an awkwardly placed rear fingerprint scanner, an iris scanner and face recognition.  All the sensors work superbly but the one that I applied the most is the facial recognition. It is faster than the other options and also is a bit hassle-free. Being a Note device, the phone comes with an S-Pen, Samsung’s proprietary stylus, which is its most defining feature. The S-Pen, in this iteration, is more useful and feature packed compared to its predecessors. It definitely will give the people-on-the-go a productivity boost!You no longer require a paper and a pen to jot down ideas, scribble notes and information.

Connectivity

Connectivity-wise, the phone supports dual nano-sim cards or one nano-sim card and a Micro-SD card up to 256GB. Other connectivity options include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, GPS, 4 Gand USB Type C.

Battery

The phone packs a 3300mAh non-user removable battery. Battery life on the Samsung Galaxy Note8 has been good but not great. I was able to get 4-5 hours of on-screen time with my medium to heavy usage of the phone. Being a Note device I expected it to give me more battery life than that. Casual users, however, will easily be able to get a full day worth of battery life out of this device. And if the battery does run out, there is the inclusion of adaptive fast charge and support for wireless charging.

Conclusion

The Samsung Galaxy Note8 is a true beauty and a beast! It packs all the right feature sets that make it stand ahead of the competition. It also offers a lot of productive tools giving people like business personnel, journalists and artists an easy access to a pen and a notepad when needed. The Samsung Galaxy Note8, without a doubt, is the best phone money can buy right now. It is not just a smartphone but a productivity powerhouse!