Proving all the rumors and leaks right the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 was officially launched last night at an event in New York. Now the main challenge will be for Note 8 is to clear the image of the company because of last year’s Note 7’s debacle.
Well design wise the Note 8 looks like an enlarged version of Galaxy S8 with minor changes and a Stylus S-pen. The Note 8 has slighter bigger screen size than that of bigger Galaxy S8 Plus with 6.3 inches compared to 6.2 inches of S8 Plus. With bigger display Note 8 is less curvy on front and slightly flatter, which makes the device a bit heavier than S8 Plus. On the specification, it’s got a Snapdragon 835 processor, 64GB of storage (with microSD support), and 6GB of RAM. The battery is 3300mAh, talking about the battery the company has followed 8 step safety following last year’s incident.
Following the industry standard, Samsung has equipped the Galaxy Note 8 with two 12-megapixel cameras. The regular/wide-angle lens has an aperture of f/1.7, and the telephoto lens is f/2.4. But in what Samsung claims to be an industry first, both sensors offer optical image stabilization. That should allow the Note to utilize its telephoto camera more often instead of defaulting to the regular camera in low-light conditions. Unfortunately, the Note 8 retains the same awkward position for the fingerprint scanner as the Galaxy S8.
The Note 8 ships with Android 7.1.1 and the overall software experience is basically identical to what’s on the Galaxy S8. Bixby has a big presence, and yes, there’s still a dedicated physical button for Samsung’s digital assistant. Samsung is also bringing DeX to the Note, so if you buy the required dock, you can plug it into a monitor for a desktop-like experience with a mouse and keyboard.
There are a few fresh S Pen tricks, though: you can now take up to 100 pages of notes in the Screen Off Memo mode, which activates when you pull out the S Pen with the display turned off. A new Live Messages feature is more or less a ripoff of Digital Touch in iMessage. You can handwrite a message or picture with the S Pen, send it to someone in a message, and it’ll play back animated just as you drew it. Live Messages are saved as GIFs, so they’re a bit easier to share across different apps and social media than Apple’s approach.
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