Galaxy Note 8 review: Samsung throws down the gauntlet to Apple in style

An explosive return to form? Back with a bang? A blisteringly good phone? 12 months after the doomed launch of the fire-prone Galaxy Note 7, Samsung is still the butt of plenty of jokes.

Last year, after the company was forced to recall millions of hazardous Note 7s, many people thought the Note brand was finished. But Samsung has bounced back recently (and put a lot of work into making its batteries safe).

First it released the excellent Galaxy S8 and has not skipped a beat in bringing out the Galaxy Note 8, the S8’s bigger, squarer and stylus-packing cousin.

With Apple's iPhone 8 just around the corner, Samsung has to impress with this one. So thankfully for them, the Note 8 doesn’t disappoint.

What's new

In truth, the Note 8 has little that is revolutionary. It looks like a cross between last year’s Note 7, with its boxy glass design, and the Galaxy S8's edge-to-edge infinity screen design, which dominates the front of the phone and leaves no room for a physical home button or Samsung logo.

Instead there's a touch-sensitive virtual home button and the fingerprint scanner sits at the back of the phone, to the left of the camera. This is a slightly irritating placement (especially for the left-handed) but the Note boasts alternatives in the form of facial recognition and iris scanning.

It has a dedicated button for Bixby, Samsung’s virtual assistant, below the volume buttons on the left hand side, and mod-cons like wireless charging, water resistance and fast charging that are now standard on high-end Samsung phones.

Key specs | Samsung Galaxy Note 8 vs S8

The Note 8 is different in boasting a dual-lens camera, a first for a Samsung phone, and the hallmarks of the Note series, its screen and "S-Pen" stylus. The original Galaxy Note was the first true big-screen phone, and made the stylus a key selling point even after Steve Jobs had declared them obsolete.

Then there’s the price. While the Note 8 hopefully won't catch fire, it's £869 retail price will burn a hole in your pocket. If you ignore luxury brands, it's just about the most expensive mass-market smartphone of all time: enough to buy you an iPhone 7 and an Apple Watch, or 17 Nokia 3310s.

Is it worth it? Indeed, can any phone be worth that much cash?

The best screen I've seen on a phone

Six years after the first Note, most phones have caught up to Samsung by adding big screens, but Samsung still does them better than anybody. The 6.3-inch display on the Note 8 is glorious, probably the best screen I’ve ever seen on a phone, with everything looking bright and clear.

Like on the S8 before it, Samsung has squeezed such a screen into a relatively svelte handset by curving it over the edges and making the handset taller, rather than wider.

This means the phone’s easy to hold in the hand and fantastic for vertically scrolling through web pages and feeds, but the 18.5:9 aspect ratio differs from the 16:9 standard, so you can’t take advantage of the entire screen when watching photos or videos without cutting off the edges.

It also makes reaching the top of the screen a little difficult. In my opinion it’s a worthwhile trade-off for having more screen real estate, but the smaller-handed may beg to differ.

Samsung also points out the tall screen’s multitasking potential, but I remain unconvinced that split-screening apps is ever going to be a thing on mobile phones - it's just not that difficult to switch between apps.

More important is that the screen just looks great. As with the S8, the borderless display means photos really come to life when flicking through Instagram or Facebook, and I watched an entire episode of Narcos on it without feeling I was squinting.

Do you need a stylus?

The stylus, or in Samsung's terminology the “S-Pen”, is stored at the bottom of the handset, and is removed with a satisfying click. I’ve always been a little sceptical about styluses on a phone. Their screens are too small to really make notes, handwriting is slower than typing, and do you really want to draw with it?

Regardless, Samsung has done a lot of work on the S-Pen and its capabilities in recent years. When you take out the pen, it triggers a wheel of possible functions such as creating notes, translating foreign languages or annotating screenshots. Removing it while your phone is locked lets you immediately write a note on the screen and save it if you’re really so busy that you can’t unlock your phone.

The biggest new function this year is “live messages”, which let you draw animated patterns on photos or plain backgrounds which are then turned into GIFs. As well as the obvious adolescent fun in defacing photos of your friends, there are some useful ways to use this - drawing directions on top of Google Maps screenshots, for example.

Note 8 live messages

Apple introduced a similar feature to iMessage last year, but Samsung’s implementation of it is superior - the editing controls work better and you can choose to send them through whatever channel you like instead of being confined to iMessage.

I’m not sure how much I would use Live Messages once the novelty wears off, and I remain sceptical about styluses in general, but they're nice when you need them. Plus, using your stylus on the train makes you look like you're working on important business even if you're hunting for Pokémon.

The dual camera is superb

The Note 8 is the first Samsung phone to feature a dual lens camera, which made it to the iPhone 7 Plus last year and is rapidly becoming the standard for high-end smartphones.

Dual lens cameras offer two key features: a 2x optical zoom effect that allows you to zoom in without sacrificing image quality, and a “bokeh” mode that blurs the background behind a subject.

I’m a big fan of the cameras on Samsung's phones, and the Note 8 is no exception. Colours look superb, if very occasionally bordering on the over-bright, and photos have an excellent level of detail. The camera also deals well with tricky light situations, and Samsung’s app is a lot snappier than it used to be.

The new “live focus” mode that lets you take portrait-style photos easily recognises subjects and distinguishes them from their backgrounds, similar to the iPhone 7 Plus' Portrait Mode. A nice touch is that you can adjust the level of blur in the background, even after the picture has been taken and saved.

samsung note bokeh

Samsung’s camera app has no shortage of options, from Snapchat-style face masks to a food mode, all of which you’re likely to ignore. The good news is that as a straight point and shoot camera, the Note 8 is among the best in the business.

It’s still a Samsung

Samsung has always made some of the best phone hardware in the world. Where it has always let people down is the software. Phones are loaded with both Google’s Android apps and Samsung’s own, leading to complaints that they are clogged up with irritating duplicates. 

Samsung has thankfully pared back some of these instincts in the last year but using its phones can still feel like a battle between Google and Samsung. Do I use Chrome or Samsung Internet? Google Photos or Gallery? Android Pay or Samsung Pay?

The introduction of Bixby, Samsung’s smart assistant, demonstrates this dilemma perfectly. The Note 8 gently encourages you as much as possible to use Bixby to open apps, check the weather so on (it even has a dedicated physical Bixby button), and while it actually works perfectly well, it feels like overkill, especially since I expect many would prefer to just use Google’s.

Exactly how much of a turn off Samsung’s software is seems to vary from person to person. Some people hate it, I don’t mind it too much. Some features, such as the always-on screen and apps edge (a drawer of apps and contacts found by swiping from the right edge of the screen) are genuinely useful. Besides, with a bit of tinkering you can delete and rearrange these apps.

Other points

• Battery life: In initial testing, I found the battery life to be perfectly adequate without really impressing me, although I was using it a lot. The 3,300 mAh capacity suggests it should be at the top end of the market, but the big screen could affect that.

• Set-up: Samsung bundles a little dongle with the phone that lets you plug in your old phone and move contacts, photos and so on across. It worked really well and was one of the easiest set-ups I've ever had, even porting across my iPhone's wallpaper.

• Security: The facial recognition introduced in the S8 is really quick and works well for me. 

• Headphone jack: Yes, it's got one

Verdict

It was always going to take a lot for Samsung to extinguish the memory of last year's Note 7 horror, but if anything can, it's the Note 8.

Samsung has taken the best parts of last year's doomed device and this year's S8, fitted it with a spectacular new camera and a world-class screen. The result is the best Android phone on the market, as long as you can live with the software quirks that Samsung insists on.

The downside? It is just so expensive. The Note 8 may be the phone of the year, but it's not the one I would part with my cash for - that would be the S8, which comes in significantly cheaper while sacrificing only the S-Pen and dual camera.

If money's no object, you can't do much better. At least, perhaps, until Apple shows what it's got up its sleeve.

Pros: Gorgeous screen and design, brilliant camera, speedy

Cons: Price, questionable value of S-Pen, everyone will hilariously ask you if it explodes