SAMSUNG GALAXY NOTE 8 REVIEW
Both beauty and the beast, the gorgeous Note 8 has an extraordinary feature set and magnificent performance. It's expensive, but can you really afford not to consider it? Find out what we made of Samsung's brand-new flagship, which is now on sale.
UK PRICE AND AVAILABILITY
The Galaxy Note 8 was announced in a special Unpacked event on 23 August 2017. It became available to pre-order the next day at £869 inc VAT, and began shipping on 15 September.
That’s really quite expensive for a smartphone even by today’s standards - it’s £180 more than the £689 Galaxy S8 (which is now available for as little as £550), for example.
It's cheaper than the iPhone X, which starts at £999 and is likely to be one of the Note 8's biggest rivals.
However, based on previous Samsung pricing, we’d expect the RRP to quickly fall in the first few months following the launch, so if you can’t afford it just now then it might be worth waiting a little while. The same can't be said about the iPhone: Apple doesn't reduce prices until a new model is on sale.
And, of course, many readers will choose to buy the Note 8 on a contract rather than SIM-free - we’ve rounded up some of the best Note 8 deals.
Buying the Note 8 SIM-free is still the cheapest way to buy it, of course.
If you decide to buy the Note 8, don't forget to check out the best Note 8 accessories.
BUILD AND DESIGN
Samsung's Note 7 was a gorgeous handset, but the Note 8 is in a different league with its Infinity Display. It's not entirely bezel-less, but it's close enough, with a screen-to-body ratio of 83 percent and an 18.5:9 aspect ratio.
In real terms, there's about a centimetre of frame visible above and below the display, but the rest is all immaculately polished and largely fingerprint-free glass, with a load more space for enjoying media and games, and for working with multiple apps at once.
On either side the panel curves right round to the frame edge, leaving only a minimal bezel top and bottom in which to house the selfie camera, speaker and various sensors. It's a different - and much preferred - design to the first 'bezel-less' phone we saw, the Xiaomi Mi Mix, which has only a bottom bezel and requires you to turn it upside down to use the bizarrely placed selfie camera.
To achieve these slim bezels Samsung has removed the physical home button, moving the fingerprint scanner round to the rear beside the camera, and incorporating a pressure-sensitive home button within the display itself.
The latter takes a little getting used to, but you can always wake up the phone using the power button (don't get it confused with the dedicated Bixby button, as we often did) or popping out the S Pen stylus.
Samsung has come a very long way from the days of dimpled plastic covers, and it does not compromise on design.
You'll have heard all about the 'awkward' positioning of the fingerprint scanner on the Galaxy S8, and people will no doubt be concerned by the fact this has not changed for the Note 8. But while we'd one day like to see this functionality embedded into the Note's panel itself, for now it's not at all as bad as you may have heard.
The main concern with the Galaxy S8 was that those reaching for the scanner would accidentally smudge the camera, but the heart-rate scanner and flash now separate the two and make it unlikely that this will be the case.
We found reaching for the scanner is not too much of a stretch for the finger, and we've quickly got used to it on the Galaxy S8. Of course there's also an iris scanner, should you want to bypass the fingerprint scanner altogether.
Despite having so much going on at the rear - two cameras, a flash, a heart-rate scanner and a fingerprint sensor - it all lies completely flush with the phone's chassis, and that is evidence of the company's meticulous design. Even with the addition of the Samsung logo - pleasingly low-key in grey text - it doesn't look at all overcrowded here.
Our only real criticism from this angle is the legal info slapped on the bottom, which is virtually invisible on the Midnight Black option unless you catch it in the right light, but more obvious on the Maple Gold version we saw ahead of the launch.
Screen
By increasing the room available for the panel Samsung has been able to increase its size. Previously 5.7in, which is no longer considered huge for a smartphone, the Note 8 now has a 6.3in panel. That's only 0.1in larger than that on the Galaxy S8+, but there are other differences such as the stylus and dual-camera, too.
It has also added the best part of a centimetre to the phone's height, and the most obvious difference when viewing the Note 8 next to the Galaxy S8 is how much taller is this handset. Both phones are narrower than you would expect, given the curved edges, which makes them surprisingly comfortable to use in a single hand. But the Note 8 towers over the Galaxy S8.
The screen has the same technology as Samsung's Galaxy S series, with a super-high resolution Quad-HD+ Super AMOLED display (though in common with the Galaxy S8 it's set to full-HD by default to preserve battery life). Some people prefer the more realistic colours of IPS, but we love the saturated, vibrant colours and deep, rich blacks of AMOLED.
It is impossible to fault this display, which is crazy bright at a maximum 1200 nits (the iPhone 7, for example, is 'just' 705 nits), guaranteeing outdoor visibility in all conditions. According to DisplayMate it's 22 percent brighter than the 1000-nit panel on the Galaxy S8.
There are some features people might argue are gimmicky, such as the new Live Message feature that lets you create and share animated GIFs, but actually we love that feature and were we able to keep the handset a little longer our friends would be well and truly fed up with all the GIFs we'd sent them over WhatsApp.
Video Review
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