The IT Nerd

Samsung has been giving Apple a real run for their money as of late. One of the ways that they’re doing that is to roll out products that people want. An example of this is the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 which is provided by Telus. It’s purpose in life is to go head to head against the Apple iPad line up by being in between the iPad Mini and the full sized iPad. If you have large hands, you’ll have no problem holding it in one hand. But if you have smaller hands, holding it one hand is not going to happen. It feels solid and well put together.

Tucked away in a corner is Samsung’s S Pen Stylus. You can use it draw, click and navigate. I should note what when you pull it out, it makes a kind of gimmicky sliding sound when you pull it out or put it back into the slot and when you pull it out when the tablet is off, it will come on. Thankfully that pen sound along with a bunch of other sounds that are equally as gimmicky can be disabled. An an aside, clicking on anything generates some haptic feedback. Speaking of the pen, this tablet comes a range of extra apps. Take out the stylus and the home screen offers up 10 templates for jotting notes, making a birthday card, writing a recipe, and more. You can also use the S Pen to cut out screenshots and hovering the S Pen slightly above the screen shows you previews of emails, text messages and video.

When it comes to the screen, it’s a 8″ screen and it has a resolution of 800 x 1280. This is slightly higher than the 768 x 1024 resolution of the iPad Mini. It is sharp and clear for both text and pictures. While it did attract fingerprints like crazy, it never affected the image on the screen.

Let me detail the other key specs of the Galaxy Note 8:

• Quad core, 1600 MHz, ARM Cortex-A9
• 2GB of RAM
• 16 GB Storage
• Micro SD Card Slot
• 5 MP Rear Camera, 1.3 MP Front Camera
• Micro USB port
• Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean

This tablet speaks WiFi in the form of 802.11 a/b/g/n as well as LTE connectivity. In terms of the latter, I got an average of 20Mbps upstream and downstream when tested with Speedtest.net on the Telus 4G LTE Network which is pretty good.  Battery life is pretty good. It gave me a couple of days of usage.

The tablet comes with a couple of built in apps that stand out. Peel Remote is one app where you can control your TV and DVR so that you can not only find programs to watch, but tell your PVR to record it. There’s also a copy of Polaris Office so that you can work with Microsoft Office files on the tablet as well. The rest of it is the standard stuff that comes with the Samsung products I’ve reviewed lately. Which means those of you who are familiar with Samsung’s other offerings will feel right at home.

Now when it comes to the camera, the 5MP camera doesn’t sound earth shattering, but here’s a shot taken outside of Pearson International Airport.  Just to set the stage for this photo. I had to spin around and click the shutter quickly to get this picture. So I was expecting to get some motion blur. Click the picture below to see the picture at full resolution.

As you can see, the picture has no motion blur and is perfectly focused. Now for the video, I took a three minute video of two planes taking off. The video was actually four minutes long, but I had to edit it down to get three usable minutes. The editing functions on the Galaxy Note 8.0 were easy to use and intuitive. Here’s the result at 1280×720 resolution. Make sure that you run it at full screen and at max resolution to get the full effect:

Gripes? Much like other Samsung products, it has an eye tracking feature. Called Smart Stay, it is designed to keep the tablet on while you’re looking at it. But it never worked for me while I was wearing my glasses. That’s something for Samsung to work on. Other than that, the only other complaint that I had was the fact in bright light, it took the tablet a while for the tablet to adjust. When It did, it never perfectly auto adjusted. The image that was on the screen was usable in bright light, but the iPad that I compared it to did a much better job adapting to bright light.

So, here’s the big question, what is the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 going to cost you? It’s $579 at Telus outright with on-contract deals available from Telus including their Easy Tablet program. To put that into perspective, The HSPA+ version of the Nexus 7 (not the one that just came out, the previous one) is $50 more and the LTE version of the iPad is $130 more. For someone who wants an always connected tablet, this is a good option. It’s worth a look at your local Telus store.

This entry was posted on July 30, 2013 at 8:07 am and is filed under Products with tags Samsung. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.