 Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 was such an incredible step forward for Android phone design as a whole that I, like many people, couldn't help but get wrapped up in a whirlwind romance. But like the bad girl who lights your world on fire, then lights your house on fire, our relationship was over as fast as it began. So is the Note 8 a Note 7 with the arsonist tendencies removed? And is that even enough a year later? Let's find out. iBuyPower and MSI's new lineup of gaming laptops feature Intel 7th generation Core i7 processors. Check them out at the link below. The most immediately obvious feature of the Note 8 is the same nearly bezel-less design and 18.5 by 9 aspect ratio OLED screen as the Galaxy S8, but bigger. Indeed at 6.3 inches, this is the biggest screen they've ever crammed into a Note device. And I want to get this out of the way very early in the video. Whether you prefer the default more vivid color profile or the more true to the original content developer mode sRGB tweaked one, content consumption on this device is an unbelievable experience. If you love scrolling vertically, then whether it's photos or text, you'll be seeing more of it and bigger than ever before. And I'm not sure if they planned it this way, but the perfect black levels of the OLED screen makes 21 by 9 content appear as though it has a perfectly even frame around it that's super small. It's less like watching a movie on your phone and more like holding a movie in your hand. Unfortunately, you'll also be holding the audio in your hand. Even Apple has finally implemented earpiece assisted stereo sound. So what's the excuse Samsung? Is this just a courageous move to assume that most users who give a crap about sound are using Bluetooth or headphones at this point? That's possible, but it still really detracts from what could be what I would describe as the near perfect mobile movie watching experience. Let's talk about handling. I praised the Note 7's holdability with my fun-sized hands and some of the same ergonomic tweaks return here. Notably, haha, the two-sided curved glass and very similar 75 millimeter width with nice flat sides that give you a little bit more edge to hold on to. But the taller screen comes at a cost here. The Note 8 weighs so much more than its predecessor that even though I haven't held one of those in months, it was obvious to me the first time I touched it and it hurts accessibility of both top of the screen UI elements like the compose button in Samsung's SMS app and the rear-facing fingerprint sensor from a natural holding position, which is another disappointment. Every Note device has had something Note worthy about it that has set it apart from the S line. A balls-to-the-wall CPU, epic expandability, something. With the Note 7, it was the iris scanner, which is back and it's pretty handy when I'm not outside and it works. But what I was really hoping for was the rumored underscreen fingerprint sensor to bring that back to the front of the device and instead of that I got... I don't know. What did I get? Well compared to the S8 Plus, it's the same 10 nanometer CPU, same GPU. We got 6 gigs of RAM versus 4 on the micro SD expandable 64 gig storage version and I guess we got a dual camera system. So it better be a pretty amazing camera then, right? Well, I'm not going to complain because the S8 and iPhone 7 are already as good as I feel is reasonable to ask of a cell phone at this point. Anything else is icing and to be clear, it's better. Samsung's color science still isn't as true to life as Apple's, but in a way that will probably appeal to lots of mainstream folks and I definitely appreciate the easy configuration and advanced control options available in their app. Finally, as a daily Samsung user, their lightning-fast double tap camera launch continues to allow me to capture precious moments with my kids and pets that I would otherwise miss. It's just that I'm not an artistic photo taker, meaning that their post-processing blur effect on top of looking unnatural next to true bokeh doesn't do much for me. I super appreciate the 2x optical zoom and the optical image stabilization on both of the 12 megapixel rear cameras, but overall a dual camera system wasn't enough to sell me on the iPhone 7 Plus, so it's not enough here and in Samsung's case the photos from the zoom camera are significantly softer than the wide, so a fair bit of the difference can often be made up with digital zoom anyway. Okay, then what about the styla- excuse me, S Pen? Well, what to say about that? It's cool. You can highlight text for translation, sketch or jot down difficult to input things like math formulas more accurately and with less latency than ever before and they've added a whack of cool features for it including, notably, the ability to jot down up to a hundred pages of memos without ever turning your screen on thanks to the always-on OLED display. I just personally find that not all, but much of what it does can be easily accomplished with my fingers in the time that it takes to remove the S Pen from its holster, adjust my grip and start using it. It's certainly not something that I would personally give up 200 milliamp hours of battery life for it if given the choice, which is a drag because getting back to our S8 Plus versus Note comparison, that is one difference along with price that favors the S8 Plus. Battery life on the phone that can do it all is just not that impressive. Something Samsung seems to be aware of given that it ships with a battery-saving resolution downscaling tweak enabled by default, raising the question of why they bother putting a 2960 by 1440 screen on it in the first place. And speaking of things I wish they hadn't included, a non-reprogrammable dedicated button for their digital assistant Bixby. Let's say for a minute that I love Bixby. Let's say I was blown away by the way that you can basically execute macros on your phone. I would still understand the point of view of people who think that a computer vision based shopping feature that can't recognize a bloody iPhone, doesn't need a dedicated button, and I would still lobby Samsung to look past their own arrogance to the demands of their customers, a significant percentage of which have gone out of their way to download some janky third-party app in order to be able to remap the thing. So then, nutshell time. I still mostly like the tweaks in the latest iteration of TouchWiz. Screenshot and clipboard management is epic and Samsung's keyboard prediction is actually better than ever. But especially at this price, I can't help but notice that Samsung played it really safe this time. No squeeze input, no Dolby Atmos, no built-in sundial, no quantum leap forward in industrial design. The Note 8 is not bad. It's arguably the most versatile phone on the market. It does everything. It just feels like for some reason when Samsung removed the fire from the Note 7, the spark of our love went out too. One thing I probably should have mentioned in the main video is how freaking slippery the back of the Note 8 is without a sexy dbrand skin. It's just something that didn't really occur to me until I was shooting this dbrand integration after the fact. With dbrand, you can not only protect your device from incidental scuffs and scratches, but you can make it look better and hold better too. I personally recommend their dragon skin, but they've also got a wide variety of different vibrant colors and textures that are all authentic 3M vinyl. The best part of dbrand's site is that it takes out the guesswork. You just go through their configurator, pick out the skins that you like, they ship it to you affordably worldwide, not to mention extremely quickly, and the whole installation process just takes a few minutes. So go check them out at the link in the video description and skin up your device today. Or like in a couple days when it arrives. So thanks for watching guys, if this video sucked you know what to do, but if it was awesome get subscribed, hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join.