Samsung Galaxy Note8: Phablet par excellence

The 6.3-inch screen is a tad tall, though it stayed true, even in direct sunlight

The Samsung Galaxy Note8 (Rs 67,900) is bigger than the S8 and S8+, but only slightly. It’s also a tad heavier. But the real differentiator is the dual cameras on the back. 

I set the phone to unlock both by face recognition as well as iris scanning; the two can’t be used together. Iris scanning worked well for me indoors, but when I asked my wife to set it up, she had to remove her contact lenses for this feature to work. The face recognition feature worked accurately, too. 

In the limited time I used the phone, I didn’t face any lag. The phone, with 6GB RAM, didn’t heat up while playing Real Racing 3 and Asphalt 8: Airborne.

The 6.3-inch screen is a tad tall for my liking, though it stayed true, even in direct sunlight. While the speaker is tiny, the bundled AKG earphones are quite good.

Samsung has cut down on the bloatware in this iteration of Nougat. But one customisation I really liked was being able to create a single shortcut on the edge panel to open two apps in split-screen mode (like I set the browser and note-taking app). The S Pen is as good as ever and I loved taking notes while the screen was off. Samsung is also offering a whole lot of options to customise the phone.

The smartphone comes with dual 12-megapixel (MP) primary cameras — one with a wide-angle and the other with a 2X optical zoom. Using the Live Focus feature, one can adjust the level of blur. This feature works well when the light is just right. And whenever you shoot a picture in this mode (with the zoom lens), the wide-angle camera also takes a back-up shot. The 8MP front camera is fabulous for video calls and “groupfies”. 

The phone, even with heavy multimedia usage, lasts through the day on a single charge.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 is a workhorse phablet par excellence. But if you can do without the dual cameras and S Pen, the S8 is a value proposition.