Samsung Note 8

I'm still waiting patiently for my Oreo update. In the meantime, this phone just keeps rocking. And surprising me. Yesterday, I got over 8 hours SOT on a single charge. Screenshot as promised.

ChronoReverse said:

People should put their money where their mouths are if they want timely updates. The current market is proof that they don't care.

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There was a "report card" on some site that showed Google with an A (obviously), OnePlus with a D, and literally everyone else got an F. Clearly, it's not just a Samsung problem, but a "damn near every Android OEM" problem, though I've heard that HMD/Nokia and Sony have pushed some updates since then while LG and Samsung are still twiddling their thumbs as usual.

That doesn't make for a lot of options, and I don't think I need to go over the Pixel line's hardware shortcomings for its price range once again. It's quite frustrating, really. Even worse is that the LineageOS team took quite a long while to push 15.1 out the door, meaning that even custom ROMs need some time to catch up (because let's face it, the vast majority of them used CM/LOS as a base).

exlink said:

Hoping that Treble will resolve this issue on the Android side finally.

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See, this is what I'm banking on for the future: get that sweet, sweet Galaxy Note hardware with the Wacom pen that no other manufacturer offers (no, seriously, it's the one reason I can't leave the Note line, though still having a headphone jack is another big one and impressing people with Samsung Pay while also getting rewards points for it never gets old), let Project Treble Generic System Images and XDA-developers take care of the software updates.

Except that to take advantage of this going forward, I'd have to pay out the nose and import the Note 9 or whatever comes next because of LOCKED BOOTLOADERS here in the US. That alone kills any viability Project Treble has for the end user if they can't just flash a Treble GSI to their hardware whenever they want, because I somehow doubt supporting it is going to make the OEMs speed up their glacial feature update pace any more.

Getting the hardware you want with the software you want should not be a problem for a computing device. We don't have this problem when custom-building our gaming/workstation desktop rigs; it's about high time smartphones took the same page from the IBM-compatible revolution (and in more recent years, all these ARM-based OSes running on Raspberry Pi boards, including a descendant of the very same RISC OS that ran on the original Acorn Archimedes machines for which ARM was designed).

Well, I have the Essential phone. Often times, I get the monthly security update before the even Pixels do.

So I've had another thought about the Note line as of late: is it time for their delayed update cadence between S and Note models to end?

Everyone thinks the Note 8 is old hat now that the S9(+) is out, with the usual generational improvements and the next-generation SoCs. It just doesn't feel right; it used to be that the first four Notes were sensible in-between steps, with the Note 4 in particular borrowing from the sleek Galaxy Alpha rather than the much-maligned S5, but ever since the Note 5, they've just been bigger S-series models with a Wacom pen for the most part - complicated by the fact that Samsung actually started releasing upsized S-series models.

It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me; they're sorta cannibalizing themselves here, what with people already going "just buy the S9+!" and all. I mean, I can't blame them: the S9+ has most of the screen size, better SoC, camera upgrades, earpiece speaker finally serving as a second media speaker, Project Treble (as if that means anything with a locked bootloader), other little refinements... but not the Wacom pen experience I expect, and which a lot of people frankly don't understand how to utilize it, or even care about it.

This shouldn't have been a trade-off. You want small, go S-series; you want big, get a Note. But with big S-series models happening and the Notes not being enough of a step forward, I figure that maybe Samsung should just release the corresponding Note alongside the S-series flagship in the beginning of the year, no S+ silliness, so that both devices feel reasonably modern and up-to-date instead of the Note being pushed out the door with a high price tag and an already aging SoC late in the year when that year's S-series models are already established.

Yeah, it might mean an even longer wait for the next Note at some point, but I figure it'll be worth it in the long run, maybe even a lot easier on Samsung since they have one less smartphone for their software teams full of sloths to update to the latest Android version. (And even then, word is that they're pushing out Oreo 8.0, not 8.1. What nonsense is that?)

Oh, and before anyone gets the wrong idea and thinks I hate my Note 8, I still quite like it. It's just that using it as a daily driver makes me acutely aware of any flaws, and if Samsung decides to kill off the Note line for whatever reason, welp, there goes PDA 2.0 for all of us. (Unless Apple or Google do the completely unexpected and make their tablet/Chromebook pens work on their flagship smartphones - like that'll ever happen!)

NamelessPFG said:

So I've had another thought about the Note line as of late: is it time for their delayed update cadence between S and Note models to end?

Everyone thinks the Note 8 is old hat now that the S9(+) is out, with the usual generational improvements and the next-generation SoCs. It just doesn't feel right; it used to be that the first four Notes were sensible in-between steps, with the Note 4 in particular borrowing from the sleek Galaxy Alpha rather than the much-maligned S5, but ever since the Note 5, they've just been bigger S-series models with a Wacom pen for the most part - complicated by the fact that Samsung actually started releasing upsized S-series models.

It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me; they're sorta cannibalizing themselves here, what with people already going "just buy the S9+!" and all. I mean, I can't blame them: the S9+ has most of the screen size, better SoC, camera upgrades, earpiece speaker finally serving as a second media speaker, Project Treble (as if that means anything with a locked bootloader), other little refinements... but not the Wacom pen experience I expect, and which a lot of people frankly don't understand how to utilize it, or even care about it.

This shouldn't have been a trade-off. You want small, go S-series; you want big, get a Note. But with big S-series models happening and the Notes not being enough of a step forward, I figure that maybe Samsung should just release the corresponding Note alongside the S-series flagship in the beginning of the year, no S+ silliness, so that both devices feel reasonably modern and up-to-date instead of the Note being pushed out the door with a high price tag and an already aging SoC late in the year when that year's S-series models are already established.

Yeah, it might mean an even longer wait for the next Note at some point, but I figure it'll be worth it in the long run, maybe even a lot easier on Samsung since they have one less smartphone for their software teams full of sloths to update to the latest Android version. (And even then, word is that they're pushing out Oreo 8.0, not 8.1. What nonsense is that?)

Oh, and before anyone gets the wrong idea and thinks I hate my Note 8, I still quite like it. It's just that using it as a daily driver makes me acutely aware of any flaws, and if Samsung decides to kill off the Note line for whatever reason, welp, there goes PDA 2.0 for all of us. (Unless Apple or Google do the completely unexpected and make their tablet/Chromebook pens work on their flagship smartphones - like that'll ever happen!)

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The issue, I suspect, is that Samsung is afraid of not having a new high-end model around to draw attention away from the usual fall iPhone launch and boost sales a bit. Apple can afford to do a yearly cycle because its phone sales tend to be consistent after the initial rush; Samsung's sales are more volatile and tend to languish if it doesn't have something new every six months. Hence why the Galaxy S line tends to go from "$750 up front" to "we'll practically pay you to take one" in the space of half a year.

At the same time... like you said, the Note has less and less reason to exist with each passing year. The dirty truth is that most people buy Notes for everything but the pen, and that's particularly true now that the S+ is more than just a larger version of the S. I don't think Samsung will kill the Note line in the near future, but it's going to need to be more aggressive about its design (pushing for more frequent CPU updates, new form factors and the like) if it wants to keep the Note relevant.

Aurelius said:

The issue, I suspect, is that Samsung is afraid of not having a new high-end model around to draw attention away from the usual fall iPhone launch and boost sales a bit. Apple can afford to do a yearly cycle because its phone sales tend to be consistent after the initial rush; Samsung's sales are more volatile and tend to languish if it doesn't have something new every six months. Hence why the Galaxy S line tends to go from "$750 up front" to "we'll practically pay you to take one" in the space of half a year.

At the same time... like you said, the Note has less and less reason to exist with each passing year. The dirty truth is that most people buy Notes for everything but the pen, and that's particularly true now that the S+ is more than just a larger version of the S. I don't think Samsung will kill the Note line in the near future, but it's going to need to be more aggressive about its design (pushing for more frequent CPU updates, new form factors and the like) if it wants to keep the Note relevant.

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One thing I noted was that up through the Note 4, each Note got a somewhat significant SoC upgrade from Qualcomm in the US (well, not the Note 2, that was actually Exynos here) over its S-series equivalent for the year. The Note 4's Snapdragon 805, for instance, had a beefed-up GPU over the older Snapdragon 801 in the S5, an important thing to have when pushing a 2560x1440 screen and launching Gear VR, and ironically wound up better than next year's 808 (which had a weaker GPU) and 810 (whose overheating reached Prescott-level infamy) despite being just 32-bit.

That ended with the Note 5; what the S-series got that year is also what the Note got, which just makes the SoC feel that much more outdated when next year's S-series shows up with the expected upgrade under the hood. And of course, I don't have to go over all the features the Note 5 lost coming from the Note 4, which ticked off a bunch of people like myself who wanted a power user phone and not just an S-series with Wacom support.

What's not helping with this whole situation is that Qualcomm basically has the entire smartphone industry by the balls, even outside of the US. Samsung has their own in-house Exynos SoCs, of course, but they only seem to resort to those in the US with the Note 2 and S6/Note 5, the latter being understandable because of the aforementioned SD810 fiasco. It's proof enough that Samsung could go Exynos worldwide if they felt like it.

Other than that? Huawei has Kirin, but there's no way the US would open up to a Chinese brand like that. NVIDIA has Tegra, but we only see those in tablets and set-top boxes nowadays. I can't even remember the last smartphone to be Tegra-based, and I'm pretty sure the manufacturer swore off NVIDIA after that due to lack of software support holding up Android feature updates. (More reason why I say Project Treble was several years overdue, really.)

As for all the other stuff? Well, most of what sets modern smartphones apart from older models in recent years that isn't the SoC is just incremental improvements in camera and screen quality. (Or screen downgrades if you're like me and have a distaste for notches and nonexistent quality control.) Sure, everybody wants to be Ansel Adams now that DxOMark scores are somehow a major selling point on smartphones, but it's like that one-two punch we had a decade ago in the PC market with the proliferation of multi-core, single-socket CPUs and SSDs that made them good enough for general computing purposes that one could feasibly stave off upgrades for anywhere from two to five or even ten years and still get a good experience.

Even the S9s have a hard time upselling themselves against the S8s despite the improvements, just because like you said, the S8s are already stupid cheap for what are still very high-end phones that would serve anyone well, soon as they get their long-overdue Oreo updates.

Oreo update landed on my device yesterday on ATT.

Same here. Note 8 on ATT got the update. 1.4gb

New update seemed to wipe out anything my keyboard has "learned."

Here's me typing "duck" instead of "fuck" for the next month...

Still waiting on Oreo here... I think it's because the unlocked versions here in the US don't get it until all of the carriers do, since it has to be verified compatible on all of them first. T-Mobile's the remaining holdout, from the looks of it.

Tyrsis said:

New update seemed to wipe out anything my keyboard has "learned."

Here's me typing "duck" instead of "fuck" for the next month...

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Hey, at least look at it this way: you'll be less likely to get featured on http://damnyouautocorrect.com/ for a while! (Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of auto-correct or predictive keyboards in general and tap out all my words manually.)

Forgive the double post, but:

• Checked yesterday (April 2): no update, still on RA5.
• Checked today (April 3): Oreo RC1!

I'll keep you all posted with my impressions on the upgrade - whether it's smooth sailing or if it's like the Note 4 getting Lollipop 5.0.1 where performance got worse than KitKat until later 5.1.1 releases many months later actually made it better. Obviously, it's not something I can assess in just one day.

So far, the first ones:

• Only 56 apps to upgrade! Gotta say, that's massively slimmed down from the 170-300+ I recall on the Note 4 using a TouchWiz stock ROM (AOSP-derived custom ROMs obviously trim a lot of that out).
• Just Oreo 8.0, not 8.1? You'd have thought they'd skipped a version with how long this took to release!
• I was looking forward to that new autofill API, which Keepass2Android already prompted me to enable (and I did), but it doesn't seem to work in Samsung Internet like I thought.
• This persistent system notification telling me Keepass2Android is using battery in the background sure gets annoying already, and this is one of the reasons I was hoping for Oreo 8.1; apparently, it wasn't until then that Google realized that such a notification that cannot be dismissed can be a real waste of screen space.

I have a VZW note8 and im now on Tmobile. They won't update the phone OTA because they're petty (even if on wifi).

I downloaded a desktop application that does it, first update worked fine. Now it says theres an RC2 update, but i've tried it 5 times, it says successful but doesn't actually update anything.

Huh, been nearly two months since I last posted in this thread.

So far, that's because the experience has been largely unremarkable - security patches toward the end of the month they were dated in, nothing showstoppingly irritating in the meantime, it's just a smartphone that works fairly smoothly and does its job.

I suppose it's worth mentioning that all versions of Autodesk SketchBook went freeware for full functionality, with a catch; you need to log in with an Autodesk account. That and they still don't allow single-finger panning on penabled devices like a Galaxy Note, a test that literally every art app on Android that isn't Clover Paint has failed in my experience. Still, given that Clover Paint costs money, I'd be more than happy to point people toward SketchBook as far as free options go.

If I wanted something new to report on, I could try to get my hands on the DeX Pad now that it's out and Oreo's already rolled out to the Note 8 all around, but $100 is a lot of out-of-pocket change for someone who doesn't get paid to review tech and would rather use a proper desktop or laptop when the need for a bigger screen arises.

Even with S9+ being out, I still think Note 8 is Samsungs flagship. S9+ is nothing special.

Nebell said:

Even with S9+ being out, I still think Note 8 is Samsungs flagship. S9+ is nothing special.

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I'm very familiar with both.. honestly neither are stellar. Great screens on both and off you use the stylus then the note is obviously better. If your on T-Mobile then the S9 wins because it has band 71 support.

bastage said:

I'm very familiar with both.. honestly neither are stellar. Great screens on both and off you use the stylus then the note is obviously better. If your on T-Mobile then the S9 wins because it has band 71 support.

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I love my Note 8. No other phone comes to its brightness level. That screen can be seen from space.

Nebell said:

S9+ is nothing special.

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Using that logic, the Note 8 is negligibly as special as the S9+. The screen can get negligibly brighter on the Note8, while the S9+ is negligibly faster, has a negligibly better camera, battery, and band support. I'd take the S9+ just for the better design (FP scanner placement), stereo speakers, and band 71 on T-Mo (my carrier). But I'm with Bastage in that neither do much for me. I got my mom a S9+ (she's on my account) since they were half price on T-Mo (for military/veterans) and after setting it up and comparing side by side with my Pixel 2 XL, I'd take my Pixel any day still for better/more consistent performance, noticeably better battery life (at least with her usage compared to mine; she gets around 4 hours SoT to my 5-6 hours), durability (no glass back or vulnerable curved edges) and much better software support (how dafuq are the S9s still on the same Feb patch they launched with?!).

So at the 1 year mark is this a great phone? Solid? If I bought it depreciated.

singe_101 said:

So at the 1 year mark is this a great phone? Solid? If I bought it depreciated.

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Quite possibly the best phone I've ever owned. I thought the same about my Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 6P, but those required a ton of tweaks to get the customization I wanted. The Note 8 has it all baked right in the stock ROM. A year later, running plenty fast, no issues with the stock ROM.

Worth it. I don't see myself getting another phone till the Note 10.

singe_101 said:

So at the 1 year mark is this a great phone? Solid? If I bought it depreciated.

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So far, it's been pretty solid in my usage. Maybe once in a while, I'll get force reboots, but that's maybe once every one or two months at most, so infrequent that I don't really think about it.

The important thing is that the surprising responsiveness for a Samsung ROM (which even XDA-developers has an article on) hasn't utterly tanked with Oreo. Here's hoping they can keep at it whenever they get around to bringing Pie to these things - not until March 2019 at the earliest, if their track record is any indication.

NamelessPFG said:

So far, it's been pretty solid in my usage. Maybe once in a while, I'll get force reboots, but that's maybe once every one or two months at most, so infrequent that I don't really think about it.

The important thing is that the surprising responsiveness for a Samsung ROM (which even XDA-developers has an article on) hasn't utterly tanked with Oreo. Here's hoping they can keep at it whenever they get around to bringing Pie to these things - not until March 2019 at the earliest, if their track record is any indication.

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I myself have gotten a few forced reboots, but that's the fault of Magisk, which was still going through its growing pains. I get none anymore.

Honestly, I see the reason Samsung delays the OS updates. I'm not saying I like it, but it's the nature of things. Android Pie is very badly broken in a lot of aspects, and in some cases, it's like that because it seems Google is doing their best to actively sabotage the ROM and make it more like iOS. So I guess in order to stabilize things and make sure they work with the plethora of features the Note has to offer, Samsung takes time to test and work around the BS that Google pushes with their X.0 releases. They (Samsung) are pretty up-to-date with their security patches. I'm on the latest release for my ROM, which has the July patch. Expecting them to push out the new August security update any moment now.

I got this phone in January I believe and it's been rock solid for pretty much anything.

One of the only flaws is the ever so common lack of speaker volume these android phones put out.

And only one speaker at that. Watching movies on this is without headphones is a waste of a movie.

jyi786 said:

I myself have gotten a few forced reboots, but that's the fault of Magisk, which was still going through its growing pains. I get none anymore.

Honestly, I see the reason Samsung delays the OS updates. I'm not saying I like it, but it's the nature of things. Android Pie is very badly broken in a lot of aspects, and in some cases, it's like that because it seems Google is doing their best to actively sabotage the ROM and make it more like iOS. So I guess in order to stabilize things and make sure they work with the plethora of features the Note has to offer, Samsung takes time to test and work around the BS that Google pushes with their X.0 releases. They (Samsung) are pretty up-to-date with their security patches. I'm on the latest release for my ROM, which has the July patch. Expecting them to push out the new August security update any moment now.

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I actually keep forgetting about that part - that Nexus/Pixel owners seemed to be treated like beta testers for Android releases at times when you check the right forums, and even they get hit with updates that make the phones lag and stutter like crazy. Even MKBHD stopped using his Pixel 2 in favor of a OnePlus 6 because of it, which is quite telling. A Pixel shouldn't be getting blasted for something everyone accuses of being one of its biggest advantages over the typical Samsung fare.

Too bad feature updates are still a necessity for later API versions - something that no amount of security patches can bring. I guess that's why everyone else is tired of most of the Android space lagging behind by up to a year with any given Android feature release. "Oh, you just got Oreo? I'm on Pie now!"

It's also easy to overlook that a lot of things integrated into AOSP were usually done by Samsung years in advance. Multi-windowing, for instance (which is still superior to the Oreo PIP implementation).

Also, that adaptive brightness feature in Pie that tries to take into account your preferred brightness settings relative to the current ambient light? Samsung's been doing that since at least S8 and its launch on Nougat, and the difference between how the Note 8 and Note 4 handle ambient brightness adjustments is quite an improvement. Hardly anyone even called attention to that little touch, though; even I hadn't realized it until seeing an article on it.

Android being made more like iOS, though... are you hinting at dumb design decisions like how Google apparently won't allow Pixel 3 users to go back to the old-school nav buttons, instead being forced to use the gesture pill? That is pretty dumb, as is the new limit on notification icons even when the phone doesn't have an ugly notch on top. Whatever happened to "Be together, not the same", anyway?

Eshelmen said:

I got this phone in January I believe and it's been rock solid for pretty much anything.

One of the only flaws is the ever so common lack of speaker volume these android phones put out.

And only one speaker at that. Watching movies on this is without headphones is a waste of a movie.

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To be fair, I don't think it's really possible to have good speakers in the constraints of a smartphone. It's like they say with car engines - "no replacement for displacement!" Hence huge floorstander speakers and beefy amps to drive them.

Then again, I've never heard the Razer Phone in action, which is said to have the best front-facing stereo speakers by far in the smartphone market. Part of that's because it's too obscure and not on display in any store I know of, not even Micro Center.

NamelessPFG said:

Android being made more like iOS, though... are you hinting at dumb design decisions like how Google apparently won't allow Pixel 3 users to go back to the old-school nav buttons, instead being forced to use the gesture pill? That is pretty dumb, as is the new limit on notification icons even when the phone doesn't have an ugly notch on top. Whatever happened to "Be together, not the same", anyway?

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Yes, not to mention them specifically doing things like preventing Substratum from working, the stupid gestures pill thing, and blinding white everywhere.

NamelessPFG said:

To be fair, I don't think it's really possible to have good speakers in the constraints of a smartphone. It's like they say with car engines - "no replacement for displacement!" Hence huge floorstander speakers and beefy amps to drive them.

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I was spoiled with my Nexus 6P since it had front firing dual speakers. I thought it would be a massive downgrade with my Note 8 since it had a single firing speaker at the bottom. Believe it or not, there are many times I find myself turning the volume down on my Note 8. It's plenty loud in most cases, and sometimes downright annoying.