Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 Tablet

Product: Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 Tablet
Provided By: Samsung Canada
Price: ~$299 Online at time of publication

Introduction:

It’s been a while since I reviewed anything at BCCHardware as I’m usually the PhotoShop and Android App Pick girl.  When it comes to touch screens and Android devices I am quite familiar with these products.  I’m a hardcore Android user and Apple products just confuse me and leave me wondering why anyone would choose such a closed platform.

Christmas is not really all that far away and Samsung has recently give us the Galaxy Note 8.0 Tablet to play around with.  It’s a little early to open Christmas gifts, but I think when you get to play with gadgets for a review – it’s almost like Christmas morning.

I know they don’t need much of an introduction, but Samsung (a South Korean Company in "Samsung Town", Seoul) has branched out to many parts of the world and made many products over the year. Their products range from appliances to TV’s, computers, laptops, point and shoot cameras, phones and several lines of tablets.  Samsung makes a ton of different products.  They want to produce products that “take the world to imaginative new directions.”  I think the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 Tablet fits right in with their product line for mainstream, affordable technology.  Samsung has also made a couple of Nexus devices, and believe it or not, a lot of parts for Apple over the years.  They play a part in the products from many other companies.

Last spring Samsung had sent us their Galaxy 7.0 Tab Plus 16GB tablet. This time around we have their Galaxy Note 8.0, and it has a handy dandy S-Pen available to use. The tablet is obviously an 8” tablet running android 4.1.2 and has up to 14 hours of battery life if you're not using Wi-Fi heavily.  Wi-Fi is power hungry and can make a difference in battery life, but even with the Wi-Fi on it seems to be pretty decent.  My year-old Nexus 7 also does pretty well on battery life.  You shouldn’t have to charge this tablet everyday as you do with most smartphones.  The Galaxy Note 8 is white with silver trim and is very sleek.  Again, one of the big features is the S-Pen that is tucked nicely in the bottom corner.  It also has a micro-SD card slot on the side, allowing you to up the storage.  It has a pair of cameras and the back camera is located right smack-dab in the middle – not off to the side as was the case on the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus.

MicroSD Slot

There are three buttons on the front of the tablet; two “soft keys” and one physical one.  The buttons perform basic functions such as Menu & Back (soft keys) and the physical button acts as your “Home” button – or with a long press, it brings up your task manager.  The main home button can also be configured to activate “S-Voice”.  There is also a headphone jack on the top.  This is a very innovative idea Apple. [/edit sarcasm]  Power and volume are located on the side on the tablet – as well as the microphone.  Speakers and a charging connector are on the bottom.

My Nexus 7 has five different home screens on which to put widgets and apps, but the Note 8 has a total of seven pages to party on.  Samsung’s TouchWiz UI is pretty nifty as the pages rotate in a circle in any direction - it just keeps going and going and going - well you get the idea. Of course you can download from Google’s play store, but Samsung also lets you download from their store that comes installed on the tablet.   You’ll need a Samsung account to use this feature.  

Home Screen

On the next page, we'll take and compare the Galaxy Note 8.0 to a couple other devices and then talk about the specs before we continue.