Samsung Galaxy Note 8 mini review

Let me just start by saying that I love this phone, and even though I already had a Galaxy S7 edge, the Note 8 feels like a real upgrade. TL;DR: The battery is great, the camera is great, the pen is great but Samsung Notes is confusing and mostly worthless, and Bixby is a-whole-nother story.

First of all, I want to talk about the battery life, which everyone is worried about because Samsung scaled way back on battery size after the Note 7 debacle. But my battery life is amazing. Way better than it was on my S7, even though the Note is brand new and I have been using it for hours every day since I bought it. I'm putting the phone on the charger late each night, usually with battery to spare. Maybe only 10-15% but that only leads me to another thing. That last 15% burned up so fast with my S7, but now it'll get me at least an hour of active use. Probably closer to two. I put it on the wireless charger a couple nights ago under 5%, and only realized that it wasn't seated properly and hadn't charged at all when my watch buzzed that it disconnected after the phone died - 10 hours later, the next morning. Battery life is amazing.

The other thing people are talking about is the camera, and it really is amazing. I'm just the worst photographer, so phone cameras are mostly all way past my level to judge capabilities, but there are a couple things I've noticed about it. First is the live focus which allows you to take cute pictures with a blurred background to draw focus to your subject. What's especially cool is that if you take a live focus picture, you can adjust the background blur after you snap and save the picture. Here's a pic of some flowers, both with (top) and without (bottom) live focus. This is the same picture, just with the background blur at maximum in the top and turned all the way down in the bottom.

The other great thing about the Note 8 camera, that I haven't heard much about, is that it supports 2x optical zoom. They accomplish it by using two cameras, instead of the standard moving lens. If you don't know any more about photography than I do, I'll tell you that what that means for me is that zooming is actually a possibility. On my S7, as soon as I even started to zoom, the picture started to get grainy. Because the Note 8 has optical zoom, I can actually zoom in to 2x the standard magnification before losing quality. This will come in handy all the time. If you're like me, you might think "Why does that matter? I never use zoom on my smartphone camera anyway." But then after a few memories come to you, you'll realize that the reason you never use it is because the picture quality is terrible. This feature basically brings the ability to take pictures from far away to your smartphone. (and yes, the iPhone already did it)

I'm loving the S-pen too, but I'm having a hard time using it just because of software issues. The Note 8's S-pen is designed with the intention of forcing you into the new Samsung Notes app - the replacement app for S-note. Now, neither one of them are sufficient to replace something like Evernote or OneNote. The organizational level is just not there, nor is there a desktop client for Mac. I hear there's one for Windows, but I haven't tried it yet because I do my writing on my Macbook. Which means my Samsung Notes are trapped on my phone, making it pretty useless. I have no regrets regarding buying the Note, but this does cut about 20% into how I was really hoping to use it. I can still use it for Evernote (or OneNote), and I can install S-note which will sync with Evernote (which can then send new notes to OneNote using IFTTT, but how clunky is that?), but all the built-in functionality is for Samsung Notes, which doesn't support any sync except to their own cloud service - which I suspect is not an accident…

Now this is already long, so I'm going to leave out our friend Bixby for now, but rest assured that one is coming. It's worth a whole post of its own. In summation: This phone is fantastic and I love it, but it's definitely not without some sadly self-inflicted flaws that could hopefully be solved via software updates, if Samsung ever feels generous enough to do so.

P.S. The Live Message feature is so unnecessary, yet so fun.