Samsung Galaxy Note 8 (SM-N950F) - SIM-Free Smartphone - 64GB - Midnight Black

Product Information

Those who are willing to pay more for the best smartphone they can get their mitts on already know exactly where to turn. Her specialty is everyday electronics, be that a cheap laptop for uni or an easy-to-use smartphone for an elderly parent. There are some nice touches in the box, though, including a Micro-USB to USB-C adaptor, an OTG adaptor, some spare S Pen nibs, and some AKG-branded earbuds. These phones use the same processor as the Note 8 – in the UK you’ll get the octa-core Exynos 8895 with integrated ARM Mali-G71 GPU but in other areas Samsung specifies the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, the same chip that has featured in multiple 2017 flagships. Samsung, annoyingly, refreshes its phones with new colors after a few months, much to the chagrin of loyal early adopters.

Obviously, Samsung could be playing safe with their battery – after all, the Note 7 hit a ludicrous 22 hours in our original testing, and you know what happened there. You’re going to need a Note 8 case to confidently hold this unwieldy glass beast, and two hands to operate it. The Note 8 is possibly the classiest-looking phone we’ve ever clapped eyes on, and our Midnight Black review sample is stunning. Nougat (with Oreo coming soon) the Note 8 has almost exactly the same software setup as the Galaxy S8, with the addition of some S Pen features.In our tests it outperformed the OP5 in Geekbench 4, which looks at sheer processing power, but in the benchmarks that include graphics components the OP5 took the lead.

The phone has come a long way since its fire risk furore from a few years back, and has come back bigger, better and safer than ever. Flipping from WQHD+ to FHD+ moved on-screen frame rates in the GFXBench car chase test from 13 to 23, while the offscreen frame rate result stayed steady at 25. It takes the Galaxy S8, the best phone of the year so far, and adds dual cameras, a better screen, and the beloved S Pen stylus. While we spent most of the time using this phone naked (that’s without a case), we did test several Note 8 cases and instantly felt more confident carrying it around. The extra tenth of an inch doesn’t really matter, but loyal Note fans adore the S Pen functionality, power users are going to benefit from the 6GB of RAM, and we loved the superior dual-lens camera in our tests – you will too.We’ve not spent enough time with the Note 8 yet to accurately assess its battery life, though it should get you through a full day with moderate- to heavy use. But it would have been good to include a little silica gel packet to absorb any moisture during transit, in the box. However, there is one major problem: voice recognition is poor, and Bixby kept misunderstanding what the testers were asking for. Among other things, handwriting and doodles can also be converted to GIFs and emoji should you so desire, and you can now hover the S Pen over any text or sentence to translate it, or use it for currency conversions.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Compared with the S8, it offers a noticeable improvement in sharpness, clarity, and texture, and considerably less artifacting. We pointed the camera at a bottle of Evian, for example, and it was able to show us photos of other bottles of water when we selected Images. Live Message is a cool new feature that wittily gets around Samsung's lack of an iMessage-like messaging platform.

If you want top-of-the-line specs, the most advanced camera, a stunning display, and streamlined multitasking on a phone, you’re really going to pay for them. Tap the button on its side to open the S Pen menu, which can optionally appear onscreen at all times via a floating icon. That built-in heart rate monitor you forget still existed on Samsung phones now serves a purpose again.

profile and you get a device that’s not only exquisitely elegant but also comfortably snug in the palm of your hand. After all of our hands on time with the Note 8 it has us convinced: this is a true redesign of not just the Note series, but of the average smartphone from top-to-bottom, edge-to-edge, and rear camera to, well, rear camera. Our partners are electronics experts who test and verify that each product is 100% functional before it leaves the factory. This is likely because of the Note 8’s larger screen – and the fact we use the onscreen variants of GFXBench tests. iFixit has taken apart the Galaxy Note 8 (as shown in the video below) and found it will be difficult to repair given that all access is through the glass rear, so to replace the screen you would have to remove both pieces of glass.

Signs of wear on the body and screen, may have visible dents and scratches that do not affect the performance of the phone. The Galaxy Note 8 doubles down on that, delivering everything previous Note phones have – and even upping the ante. 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. App Pair, for instance, lets you group two apps together and open them both at the same time with a single tap of your finger.