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Samsung’s biggest flagship yet could also be their greatest phone yet, coming in with a feature list that’s a mile long, and a hefty price tag to boot. Retailing at launch for €999/$929/£869, or basically the equivalent no matter where you live, the price of the Galaxy Note 8 is substantially higher than the Galaxy S8 or Galaxy S8 Plus can be had for, so just how much of a jump in abilities is this one? Sporting the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset or Samsung Exynos 8895 Octa SoC as the Galaxy S8, it’s pretty clear that more than just the design is shared between these two major Samsung flagship phones.
You’ll find an upgrade to 6GB of LPDDR4x RAM, as well as dedicated UFS 2.1 grade internal storage offered in 64GB, 128GB or 256GB flavors, all packing in microSD card support and dual-SIM card support as well. The Galaxy Note 8 packs in a slightly different body design as the Galaxy S8, although it has the same IP68 water and dust resistance rating. This more boxy design packs in a slightly larger 6.3-inch Super AMOLED display, capable of some incredible brightness levels and HDR playback that looks simply amazing on either Netflix, Amazon Prime Instant Video or even YouTube as well. Samsung is also packing the first dual camera system in a flagship phone for the company, placing both of those sensors on the back next to the fingerprint reader.
Then of course there’s the S-Pen; likely the most important part of a Galaxy Note purchase, since that’s of course the thing that immediately separates the Note series from anything else on the market. The Wacom powered digitizer underneath the glass is solely responsible for the magic behind the pen, which features only passive instrumentation inside of its plastic casing. As such you’ll never need to worry about charging the pen or making sure it’s paired; just pull it out of its holster and get to jotting notes, and it’s here where Samsung continues to excel at the speciality of the device as a whole. Where did this one stumble and where does it triumph? Find out in our video review below!