Galaxy Note 8: The phone to keep you busy

Having set up the phone quite easily and quickly clapping a case on it while still letting its beautiful back show, I decided to first luxuriate in that big 6.3-inch screen. The colours on it are beautiful. So nice, in fact, that I spent hours just changing wallpapers. I kept the home screens minimal and instead used the swipe-up to get to apps or slipped out the edge panel for the most-used apps, tasks, contacts, weather and agenda. I also permanently set the blue light filter to make the screen a little warmer, which is how I prefer it.

I fully expected to find the skinny bezels leading to accidental touches and glitches while holding the device — but that didn’t happen, even though I switched to the Note 8 as my primary device and used it to the hilt all day. The display is nice and responsive; at least at this early stage in the phone’s life. Despite the display being that large and my intensive usage, by late night, I invariably had 45 per cent of battery life left with no charging during the day. I think those who are worried that the 3,300 mAh battery may be too little for this phone should put that worry aside.

The S Pen, unique to Samsung’s Note line, works as well as it ever did. If there are improvements in smoothness, it’s difficult to detect as it was already quite smooth. As with the Note 7, you can actually hear the sound of the pen on the screen as if it were paper, which is an interesting touch. I’ll admit I don’t find myself using the pen as much as is warranted but used it more like a bonus feature. Not being an artist, I only occasionally felt the need to write by hand and only now and then pulled the stylus out to create a live message, see how good it is at selecting things and translating text or just using it to write on a photo. It’s a rather good thing that Samsung has associated many features besides writing with the S Pen because everyone has moved on from handwriting. But the one thing that disappoints me is the note application, which has actually lost functions since its early days. You can’t change paper styles, for example. Or easily convert handwriting to text. Luckily, for those who like to write by hand, one feature that Samsung doesn’t talk about is the fact that the keyboard has a mode for handwriting that does convert to text — very accurately and quickly — as you write by hand. Writing on the sleeping display is fun — but I don’t always remember to, plus if I’m talking on that phone, the display is on and I reach out for a memo instead.

If you swipe from the left on the home screen, or press the dedicated button on the left of the device, it triggers the left screen, which is full of Bixby content such as your agenda, activity level, weather, news and so on. But after the novelty wore off, I didn’t really find the Bixby page useful and its voice feature isn’t working yet in any case. There have been no accidental touches on the large Note 8 screen except for with Bixby, which either appears because one unwittingly touches something or presses the special key instead of volume. It’s obviously an annoyance users are complaining about because Samsung has now released an update for the key to be disabled should one choose to do so. Meanwhile, Google Assistant is available on pressing the home button. How many assistants can one have on one device, even if they do slightly different things?

Samsung’s flagship cameras have always been among the top in the business and this time there’s going to be quite a fight among the new iPhones, the Pixel 2, LG’s V30 and even some less expensive phones for camera smarts.

The primary cameras on the Note 8 have an f/1.7 and an f/2.4 aperture. One tap of a button takes the camera to full vision, using the entire large screen as a viewfinder — which of course is enjoyable. The dual camera setup has a Live Focus mode, which not only lets you blur the background, adjusting the amount of blur manually, but results in a normal plus wide-angle shot, both available for use after the capture.

You can also go back and adjust the blur later. No phone camera handles every colour accurately but the Note 8 does rather well with most and with full attention to detail and highlights and shadows. The 8 MP autofocus selfie camera is rather over-flattering, but selfie lovers are unlikely to complain about that. Low light photography is great.

All the modes, Pro, Hyperlapse, etc work quite nicely. Food mode seems to warm up the image a few notches. You can save as a RAW file and there are lots of other settings for photo buffs.

The single front speaker on this phone sounds a little better and a bit deeper and fuller than previous Samsung flagships but it doesn’t really match up to the brilliant display and the rest of the phone.

All the software tricks on this phone worked rather well. You can pair two apps on the edge panel so that when you tap, both open in a split screen. Face recognition worked very well. Making GIFs and fun live messages were a lark. But make no mistake about it:

This is a high involvement device. While many may buy it just for the display and the lovely design or just because it’s overall a classy device, the Note 8 is in a sense wasted if one is not going to explore its many many features. But.. to each their own.