4 photos
Last year I spent two straight hours in a Sprint store on the day before I had to board a flight home for Thanksgiving. The Galaxy Note 7 had just been deemed contraband; to take one on a flight was a federal offense. Some payment issue had made exchanging the device an unmitigated headache. What’s worse, the Note 7 was the first phone to ever inspire my unrestrained enthusiasm — and the s7 Edge that replaced my Note 7 received no such praise from me. I had a phone I didn’t want, and I was back to keeping a well-loved but poorly organized collection of pocket notebooks.
So, I’ll level with you and say that there is an inherent bias to this review. Which is to say, despite my post-traumatic skepticism, a week with this phone brought me crawling back to Samsung.
I know that the Note line, with its S Pen, is tailor made for my somewhat specific needs. I love jotting down notes without having to unlock and navigate to a specific app; I love having a dynamic reading tool with pixel-perfect precision for highlighting and engaging with passages; I love having a powerhouse processor that lets me not just multitask, but pair apps that work together as a seamless unit. Other Note loyalists with particular needs will likely follow suit, here, as no other phone on the market offers precisely what Samsung does with the Note line — and, no other Samsung phone has a dual-lens camera, which lets the Note 8 match the iPhone 7 Plus in quality and surpass it in editing functionality (adjustable bokeh FTW). But, other than the camera, if you’ve never had anything beyond a passing interest in a phone with a stylus, your opinion likely remains the same — probably because you can’t honestly think of anything you’d use it for, at least not consistently. And that’s perfectly fair.
The uses for the S Pen are small and numerous. So are the criticisms.
On the other hand, maybe it’s a lack of imagination, or you simply can’t fathom what you’d use a stylus for without having ever owned a phone that had one. When I have to answer some notification on my phone while I’m on the computer, I much prefer to do it with a stylus than to clumsily pick the phone up off my desk. When I want to take notes on a YouTube video I’m watching (s/o to John Green’s Crash Course series), doing so with the S Pen is the only thing that makes sense. When there’s a particular detail in a picture I’m looking at that I want my friends to see, I draw an arrow and a note with the S Pen before sending it to them. (The Note 8’s best-in-its-class AMOLED display makes the case for this kind of functionality all on its own; the ample room it provides makes me wonder how I’ve ever used split-screen view on anything else, and this is the first time I’ve used a Samsung phone without immediately installing a replacement for Samsung’s chunky TouchWiz app launcher.) It’s not that you need to have that One Big Thing you’ll definitely use the S Pen for; it’s that the uses for it are small and numerous.
Granted, that does mean that most of the criticisms (aside from a couple big ones) will be equally small and numerous pet peeves unique to your experience. For example, while the S Pen’s Translate function is satisfying and easy to use, in my experience, it couldn’t seem to single out individual words. When one word tripped me up while reading a blog in Spanish, I’d have to sift through the entire translated paragraph to find its analogue. Elsewhere, while making GIFs with Smart Select is, hands down, one of my favorite features on any phone, ever, Smart Select isn’t a particularly effective GIF editor, where GIF length and cropping are concerned. The people who share these specific criticisms may be few and far between — but with the number of features on this thing, everybody’s bound to have something they wish were different.
