HTC guy on the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 day 4
Will once again preface this with I’m not casting aspersions on the phone. Coming from AOSP and HTC’s Sense platforms many of my observations are just me pointing things out.
I’m absurdly busy this week and had not counted on switching brands of phones, let alone switching phones, so much of my observations are probably caused by not sitting down and reading what’s going on.
Day 4 saw some issues. Extremely bad battery life having to be charged twice to get through the day. It was so bad I was wondering if I got a bad one, but doing a little looking showed that Google and SecVideoEngineService had tag teamed to eat through nearly half the battery when I looked. I don’t consider the Google app to be a Samsung issue and I’m not sure what that SecVideoEngineService was.
I rebooted the phone and have had no more issues with that.
Samsung decided to download 20 updates to their products through their own installer. On the HTC platforms they moved all their stuff to Google Play, so this came as a pretty big ol’ “when is this ever going to finish?” to me.
There were 20 updates. I am not exaggerating. Click the image on the left and you can see. Average size seemed to be around 38 megs so that would put that around 700 megabytes of updates.
Between Samsung’s system update, samsung updates, installing my apps from Google Play, I’ve gone through 19.3 gigabytes of data (1.3gig LTE, 18 WiFi.) This feels excessive. Some is from a few pictures I’ve taken but daaaaang.
Day 4 has me realizing the Bixby button’s use. I dig the push to talk. I think it’s on the correct side. I do not dig the volume buttons being on that side. Meh. Still doesn’t understand me well. I’ll see if that’s a me thing or a training thing.
Played with the stylus some. Not finding a use for it yet. I think I used to love the idea of these things but years without have trained me in a new fashion.
I found that most of the bloatware I was removing was Sprint as attested to by some other carrier’s Note 8 users.
Found one of my favorite launcher mods I’ve used fairly regularly on custom ROMs – that being the swipe out dock for your most commonly used items. That’s cool.
The screen on the Note 8 is huge. Just the visible screen area is larger than my HTC 10 and then there’s a quarter inch on top and bottom I’d guess.
I’ve been told bursting pictures is only by holding and not tapping, however this does not appear to be the problem where the camera just doesn’t take photos sometimes. It appears it’s something different in one of the different modes. I’m investigating. Seems like when it’s in live focus mode is when I’m seeing issues. Probably just me.
On body detection and trusted place and device detection seems to be failing. Pretty sure it did for my HTC 10 though too.
The infinity display looks less awesome with a $5 case. I’ll see if anyone wants to send me review cases for this beast, or just pop it off when I want to be wowed.
Nothing bad hardware wise to report. Got some software I need to read up on but otherwise fine. HTC 10 replacement I was given is going into use as wife’s phone and the HTC 10 with the busted screen I’m going to slap some remote desktop stuff on it and see what I can do with a no display phone (with a new battery).
It’ll be Sunday before I manage to do any serious sit down on this. I’ve been reading the rooting forums with the non-knox-breaking root and I think I’m intrigued, but I’m ok so far. I do twitch that there’re 30 or so applications I don’t know what they’re doing and several hundred pages of licensing agreements I haven’t examined yet, but we’ll see.
