The Note 8 is perfect. I could not be any happier after first impressions (12 hours)

S-pen works flawlessly. Perfectly detects what I am writing despite my atrocious handwriting. Have definitely missed the S-pen

Light interaction with Bixby so far. Everything I have tried has been quick and accurate.


Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

What do you use the S pen for? Just curious.

Do you have any experience with either Google assistant or Siri? Would be interested to know how Bixby compares since I think it's the slight differences between the 3 that matter, they all seem to get 95% of it right.

When I'm at home at my desk I use the S-pen for probably 95% of the interaction with my phone. At work I use it occasionally, normally just to jot quick notes about a job I'm on. I found myself using it a lot more for live writing texts last night at my desk than I thought I wound.

I have no experience with Siri so I can't comment there. I haven't used Bixby enough to say if it's better or worse than Google's assistant. So far the experience with it seems about the same. It's very smooth and quick when opening apps and performing a function in those apps so far.

My only gripe so far is that I use the "textra" app and I cannot get it to understand textra vs text. If I tell it to open textra and send a text to "X" it opens the original default messages app despite me setting textra as the default.

Weird. In my mind it would be significantly slower than standard typing. And why is it better than your finger when it's on the desk? Not arguing just generally want to understand your use.

Textra thing is weird. I've been using Textra for forever and it works with both Android Auto and Google Assistant for me.

Wait the new Samsung assistant is called Bixby? Lol.

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk

It is slower than typing. It's more comfortable for me personally to use the pen when my phone is on my desk. It's also a lot more accurate than my fat ass fingers. I regularly view spreadsheets and other documents on my phone so accuracy can be important for my touches.

Yea, Google assistant is still on the phones tho

People are much more accepting of you taking notes on a tablet with a pen than they are of you thumbing it in on keyboard.

I had the note 4 but the hand writing recognition seemed poor and I eventually stopped using it.

Yeah that definitely is true. I fat finger everything when I type on a phone keyboard no matter what kind of phone it is.

The note 4 was the last note I had prior to this one. I rarely used the handwriting feature on it but I honestly couldn't tell you why.

My hand writing is atrocious. I mean it's close to doctor bad. Half normal half cursive garbled together. Every once and a while it will get a letter or two wrong but 99% of the time so far it's been able to decipher everything I've put down. Definitely very impressed with that so far.



Battery life has been great. I'm probably near the top in terms of phone usage/screen on time for users and it's still getting me through an entire day. Unplugged at 5am yesterday and it hit 17% at 1030pm. Very heavy internet usage, several GBs of music downloaded, QWHD+ enabled, screen always on enabled. Any other phone I've used would have been dead by 5pm easy. My droid turbo 2 I just switched from? I would have had to plug it in by noon.. I'm also noticing the note 8 gets significantly better service signal than my turbo 2. Some rooms at work where dead zones with the turbo..note 8 has full 4g, albeit a little slow.

I have a pixel

Worth it to bump up to Android 8??

My pixel upgraded this week, it's not much different so I say sure.

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk

I have been reading stores that Android Oreo is using mobile data while wifi is ON. Anyone here have any personal experience with this issue?

Pretty sure there's a setting somewhere to make it use both at once to turbo-speed downloads, that's probably it.

Dave is correct. There is a "download booster" setting that will use mobile data along with Wi-Fi for large downloads to speed them up

Where is this setting? I wanna make sure it's on lol, unlimited data ftw

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk

Settings > connections > more > download booster on

Well, not a fan of Oreo so far. The only changes I've noticed are changes for the worse, which is annoying:

- the status bar and notification drop down are light grey instead of black. I greatly prefer black theme
- notifications have become all ****ed up. Every single contact of mine has become a notification "category" in messages, so I can't globally override all of their notification settings (e.g. to turn off vibrate). Really f annoying

I'm hoping I've just overlooked something, but I've spent at least an hour clicking around the phone and searching Google with no luck.

FWIW I'm on Pixel. Any tips are appreciated.

(pixel here too)

The drop down thing is like a bright white which is even worse than grey lol, you should be able to set between dark and light themes or something.

I haven't noticed anything like what you're talking about with the contacts. Are you using Android messages or Textra? I use textra.

Other than the color change I honestly don't see much difference. There's the "background task is running" notification thing that people complain about but I honestly see it very rarely.

I'm pleased with mostly under the hood changes at this point, I really like the UX of Android these days and it's one of the big reasons I stay with Android over switching to iPhone.

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk

I use the stock messages app and like it quite a bit, other than this strange change. Hopefully since it's stock they'll fix it soon.

Another minor complaint is that one of my favorite apps no longer works properly. It's called Energy Bar, and replaces your battery icon with a thin bar that goes across the top of the screen, retreating to the right as your battery depletes, changing color along the way (it's great). It no longer appears above the notification bar when the phone is on battery saving mode (when the bar is orange), which is when I pay the most attention to my battery life. Sigh. Hopefully the app devs can fix this and it's not a OS limitation.

Funny, I'm on 8.0.0, can't find this setting. (I'm on Fi fwiw.)

How in god's name did you get the Note a week before it's released?

Pre-order. Mine comes tomorrow. Was planning just to flip but might have to upgrade from my s7

Oh yea I couldn't find it either.

There is no "connections" menu. There's "network & internet" or "connected devices". Neither has a "more" or a "download booster".

Same

Another setting in having trouble finding in 8.0 is how to turn off the Auto Add Apps to Home Screen option. Used to be in Google Play settings but can't find it now. Another incredibly minor inconvenience, but frustrating how many of these there are.

Long press on your home screen & go to the Settings menu, they moved it there.