The Galaxy Note 8 release date was Friday, September 15 2017 in the US and UK, while Australia got the new phone on September 22.

It’s ironic that we have a phone that looks like it comes from the future, yet it’s been designed with a fingerprint sensor that’s become a textbook design misfire on smartphones. We had feared Bixby would be an unnecessary extra feature, given that the Note 8 also supports the Google Assistant, but it is arguably easier to invoke with the press of a dedicated button rather than having to say “Okay Google. Live Message is a cool new feature that wittily gets around Samsung's lack of an iMessage-like messaging platform. It’s a multimedia powerhouse visually, but its bottom-firing speaker still had us cupping the bottom of the phone to get better audio. There are now two cameras on the back, a first for a Samsung flagship smartphone (the new S9 Plus and Samsung Galaxy Note 9 has this too).

The phone supports the full cadre of gigabit LTE technologies to extend coverage and speed; it shares that, right now, only with the Moto Z2 Force and other new Samsung devices. Camera Features Portrait Mode Phase Detect Auto-Focus (PDAF) Motion Photo Motion Panorama Depth of Field (DOF) Phase Detect Auto-Focus - PDAF (Dual Pixel) HDR Dual Pixel Camera Focus Tracking Panorama RAW Recording Auto Focus Selective Focus Voice Control Face Detection Smile Detection Burst Mode Timer 1.

Samsung’s own voice assistant was introduced with the Galaxy S8, although it wasn’t until the day before the Note 8 announcement that an English version of Bixby Voice became available. It’s not entirely bezel-less, but it’s close enough, with a screen-to-body ratio of 83 percent and an 18. In real terms, there’s about a centimetre of frame visible above and below the display, but the rest is all immaculately polished and largely fingerprint-free glass, with a load more space for enjoying media and games, and for working with multiple apps at once.Second, the big screen also comes at the cost of the Note’s usual oval-shaped fingerprint sensor home button. The Note 8 has plenty of storage for all your files, with 64GB internal as standard and expansion up to 256GB posible via microSD.

Lit up, the all-screen Note 8 feels like we’re carrying around a piece of light when we’re out and about. We took a look at some of them on a trip to Korea before the Galaxy S8 launch, but I think the best proof of these procedures is the success of the S8 and S8+. With 6 GB RAM to work with and a Mali G71 MP20 GPU, it tears through any task you set it, from multi-tasking to multimedia, gaming to productivity apps. Tap the button on its side to open the S Pen menu, which can optionally appear onscreen at all times via a floating icon. Colours are natural and true to live, and there’s no evidence of blurring even at the extreme edges of the image.Where Samsung has the leg up here, is that you can adjust the amount of blur both while taking the picture and when viewing the image in the gallery. This feature is great for letting you see the time, date and whether you have any notifications at a glance, potentially saving battery life as you won’t need to wake the display. You also get the assistant Bixby, which Samsung claims can handle anything that you can do with touch.