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Samsung Galaxy Note8 review (day 2 & 3)

On Friday I posted my first day impressions of the Samsung Galaxy Note8 and I’m back with a few more thoughts after spending the weekend with this phone. So go check out day 1 and then come back for more. 

Day 2

The alarm on the Note8 went off bright (actually, it was still dark) and early at 5:45 am on Saturday morning. Why so early? I had to take Max to the vet for a blood sugar check and we had to feed him well ahead of the vet appointment. When the alarm sounded, I reached over and grabbed the phone off the TYLT wireless charger on my nightstand and tried to unlock the phone with my face. It wouldn’t work because the room was too dark. That’s one area where Apple’s iPhone X Face ID will shine (see what I did there?) over Samsung’s face unlock feature because it uses infrared and will work in the dark.

While I was sitting on the couch eating breakfast, I set up Samsung Pay so I could leave my wallet in the car when I took Max to the vet. In theory, Samsung Pay works in more places than Apple Pay so I planned to try it there first.

At the vet, Jeanne wanted me to ask a few questions about Max. Instead of taking a piece of paper and a pen with me, I popped the S-Pen out of the Note8 and recorded the info. As soon as inserted the S-Pen back in the phone, it showed a message on the screen that the note had automatically been saved to the Samsung Notes app.

I love this feature because you don’t have to navigate to an app to start the note capture or do anything other than reinserting the pen to save the note. I also like that the interface is white on black. So it is nice if you wake up in the middle of the night and have an idea or a dream that you want to write down. The screen shouldn’t completely wreck your night vision although it would be even nicer if there was a way to make the text red on black for those middle of the night writing sessions.

As for using Samsung Pay, I’m happy to say that it worked pretty well with the vet’s small card swipe machine. It did take several seconds to figure out where the NFC tag was located on the machine. But I finally found it and the transaction finally went through. Was paying with Samsung Pay faster than using a traditional credit card? For this transaction, I would say no. I was lucky that I was the only person at the desk trying to check out. If there would have been a line, I would have felt pretty awkward rubbing the phone all over the card swipe machine.

One the way home from the vet, I made a call and am happy to report that the call audio was crisp, clear, and with good volume.

I didn’t do much more with the Note8 the rest of the day other than updating apps and checking email. Speaking of email, for some crazy reason, the stock Gmail app started working all by itself. If you read my Day 1 post, you’ll remember that I’ve always had issues with the stock app, so we’ll see how long it behaves.

Day 3

Right away today I started noticing that the face unlock wasn’t unlocking as quickly as it was the first two days after setting up the phone. Now there is a slight but noticeable delay. So I thought I’d try the iris scanner and the fingerprint reader. The iris scanner worked better than I remembered it from previous Galaxy devices even with my glasses on.

The fingerprint reader, on the other hand, is a lost cause for me. The location of the scanner is horrible and it rarely if ever successfully reads my fingerprint.

Of all three biometric phone unlocking methods, I definitely prefer the face scan most even if it is a little slow sometimes.

We went out for lunch today with friends and afterward, we stopped at Walmart to pick up a few groceries. I went through the self-checkout and tried using Samsung Pay again. The machine gave showed an error on the screen (I wish I would have taken a picture of it…), so I guessed that like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay won’t work at Walmart. I pulled out my credit card and paid like I normally do.

But then when I got home, I noticed that the Samsung Pay app showed that the transaction actually went through. So I logged into my Citibank account and sure enough…

Citibank shows that I have 2 pending identical charges. Grrrrrr… The Citibank website has a real-time chat feature so I was able to talk to a support person.

Although it was automatically fixed (I’ll have to make sure to verify that in a few days), it makes me nervous of trying using Samsung Pay at Walmart the next time I shop there.

That’s all for today. More tomorrow.

Also read: Samsung Galaxy Note8 review (day 1)

 

Product Information

Price: $960.00
Manufacturer: Samsung
Retailer: Verizon Wireless
Pros:
  • S Pen is very handy for taking notes
Cons:
  • Samsung Pay might be problematic at Walmart
  • Face scan has gotten slightly slower

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Samsung Galaxy Note8 review (day 2 & 3) originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on September 17, 2017 at 5:06 pm.

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Samsung Galaxy Note8 review (day 1)

Yesterday I posted a gadget diary entry where I professed my immediate love (lust?) for the Samsung Galaxy Note8. Today I turned off my iPhone 7 Plus, set up the Note8, and started using it as my primary device. Have my feelings changed already? Let’s find out with my multi-part diary style review. 

Day 1 – Random first impressions

Setting up the Samsung Galaxy Note8 is no different than setting up other Android smartphones. You basically enter your Google account info and the rest of the setup happens under the covers and within minutes your calendar and contacts are synced.

I also installed some of my favorite apps like Instagram, Words with Friends, Spotify, Accuweather, and the main app that’s my nemesis – the stock Google Gmail app.

I’m not sure what the problem is, but with EVERY Android device that I’ve used in the past couple of years, the stock Gmail app either works sporadically or not at all. So I crossed my fingers and installed it on the Note8…

Argh, the same old screen I have seen time and time again. What the heck? I have no idea why the Gmail app will not work on Android. I thought it had to do something with my billions of labels, but the Gmail app on the iPhone works flawlessly. Often, it will even show new messages before my MacBook browser does.

After wasting time trying to get the Gmail app to work on the Note8, I did what I usually do with Android devices. I disabled it and used Chrome to make a shortcut on the home screen to the mobile web version. That works fine, but it doesn’t show notifications.

I then ran into Android annoyance #2 which is incorrect icon badges. For some reason, the Words With Friends app will either never show that I have turns waiting, or it will show that I have too many turns waiting.

The icon is currently showing that I have 11 turns when I really only have 2. Grrrrr. It’s always the little things that get under my skin.

But on a more positive note, using the face unlock feature on the Note8 has worked perfectly. I can pick up the phone in my left hand with my thumb pressing on the virtual home button and when I bring it up to my face, it instantly unlocks to where I had left off. If I pick up the phone in my right hand, I press the power button with my thumb and the same is true. It unlocks almost instantly. It even works in some dimly lit rooms. But it won’t work at all if it’s too dark.

Today was a lot of typical phone usage for me. I sent several text messages, made and received several phone calls, listened to some music on Spotify through Winnergear HERO Bluetooth earbuds, played a couple turns in Words With Friends, read and replied to a few emails, installed apps, and took a few pictures.


Speaking of pictures, so far I’m really impressed with the Note8’s camera. Check out the images above. Click to see the full-sized version.

It’s only been one full day, but so far battery life is more than adequate enough to power the phone through a full day and beyond.

That’s it for today. Check back for more updates this weekend.

Source: The sample for this review was provided by Verizon Wireless. Please visit their site for more info.

 

Product Information

Price: $960.00
Manufacturer: Samsung
Retailer: Verizon Wireless
Pros:
  • Gorgeous display
  • S Pen
Cons:
  • Expensive
  • Tall, sticks out of pockets

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Samsung Galaxy Note8 review (day 1) originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on September 15, 2017 at 9:08 pm.

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Samsung’s Gear Sport smartwatch puts fitness first

It was just last week that Samsung launched the Galaxy Note 8, but that isn’t stopping them from launching some new products at IFA 2017. But instead of a phone, they have focused on launching several wearables at the show, and these wearables are all focused on fitness. The star of the line up is their new Gear Sport. The Gear Sport is smaller and sportier than their previous smartwatches, which are both aspects we wholeheartedly welcome.

The Gear Sport touts a battery life of up to 4 days and it’s available in a choice of blue or black in a 42.9 MM casing. Blue or black may not be very exciting choices, but Samsung is coming out with a variety of different color straps from leather to silicon to nylon, as well a hybrid band which is a rubber based product with leather on the top. There will also be lots of color based matching watch faces to choose from.

Beyond its actual looks, the Gear Sport is heavily focused on fitness with an emphasis on nutrition. To that effect, it helps you do things like figure out how much exercise you need to do for the day to burn off the right amount of calories to stay fit. These kinds of practical features go beyond telling you to just go to the gym, and it’s what makes the Gear Sport really stand out. To coincide with these features, the Gear Sport offers continuous heart rate monitoring, GPS, and it’s military grade certified. As a matter of fact, it’s durable enough to take swimming – even in salt water. Speaking of swimming, the Gear Sport can track your swim workouts. Samsung has partnered with Under Armor and Speedo to bring their fitness apps and functionality to the watch. A 12-month premium membership for Under Armor is also included with purchase.

But even though the Gear Sport is considered a sports watch – it’s also a jack of all trades. For starters, Samsung Pay is built in, allowing you to use the watch to make payments NFC terminals – even if the watch isn’t connected to the internet. Another nifty feature of the Gear Sport is that it lets you control Powerpoint presentations directly from your wrist (Windows 10 only). You can even use the watch face as a touchpad to rotate through a VR experience when using the Samsung Gear VR. Samsung has also partnered with Spotify to make the Samsung Gear Sport the first smartwatch to offer Spotify offline playback, which was a heavily requested feature for their Gear S3 smartwatch. The catch for us is that the Gear Sport is running the Tizen OS as opposed to Android Wear, but Samsung emphasized that to date there are currently thousands of apps and watch faces available for Tizen.

In addition to the Gear Sport announcement, Samsung announced an update to their IconX wireless earbuds which brings many improvements, including longer battery life, and the addition of a personal training coach. The Gear Fit2 Pro was also announced as an update to last year’s Fit2 model. The Gear Fit2 Pro tracks laps, distance under water, and now has continuous heart rate monitoring that can work under water.

Samsung’s Gear Sport and new IconX will be available sometime in the fall. The Gear Fit2 Pro will be available for preorder on August 31st and it will be available in store on September 15th for $199.

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Samsung’s Gear Sport smartwatch puts fitness first originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on August 30, 2017 at 12:00 pm.

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24 Hours with Bixby


Unless you have been under a rock, you already know about Samsung’s entry into the Smart Assistant category with the odd name Bixby.  If you have been under a rock, welcome back and we’ll wait while you catch up.

Bixby launched on the new Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus phones back in April, but it was incomplete.  At launch, it only supported a small set of functions (no voice) that made it look a lot like Google Now.  Months later, Samsung is finally preparing to launch voice capabilities for Bixby.  I have been lucky enough to get early access and as I am not under an NDA, I get to tell you about my experience with Samsung’s Smart Assistant.  Is it a worthy competitor to Siri, Cortana and Google Assistant?  Read on to find out…

Samsung is sending odd messages about how Bixby fits into the Smart Assistant landscape.  They pointedly avoid any sort of comparison to any of the other assistants like the Google Assistant or Siri.  Instead, the messaging is around how personal and local to you Bixby is.  It is an intelligent interface to your device, although from a function perspective it is difficult to see how that interface differs from the competition.

Both the S8 and the Plus come with a dedicated Bixby button on the left side of the phone.  That’s important to know later when I get into how to use Bixby, but for now, it just serves to bolster the message that Bixby is part of the phone’s interface.  Installation was pretty simple – an over the air update delivered the necessary modules, and after a quick restart of my S8 Plus, I was ready to train Bixby.

Yes, train.  While both Cortana and Google Assistant offered to improve voice recognition through training, neither actually required me to read phrases into my device like Samsung did.  And the interface for training was particularly laggy – during the training, the phrase to speak would take a minute or more to appear on the screen.  I was not prevented, however, from pressing the Bixby button nor did anything I say to the phone actually get used UNTIL the phrase appeared on the screen.  Instead, I was greeted with an error message telling me the phrase was not understood – and the error message showed before the phrase to read.

Once trained, Bixby sits (mostly) in the background waiting for you to give him something to do.  Bixby is supposed to respond to a trigger phrase (in this case, “Hi, Bixby”), which implies an always-listening connection on your phone.  I have yet to be able to get Bixby to respond to the trigger phrase except for the first time I say it post-reboot of the phone.  After I have used the trigger phrase, Bixby apparently stops listening until the phone restarts.  This is beta software, I guess, but it seems like a big miss.

The only consistent way I can get Bixby to respond is to press the dedicated button.  A quick press of the button launches Bixby Home, which should remind you of a pastel version of Google Now.  Context cards appear on the screen that tells you about the weather, your calendar, and alarms, some “trending stories” categories that take you to a Google news search and Samsung Themes (in case you obsessively want to change the look of your phone).  There are other links to apps like Samsung Health and reminders, but only if the app lives on your phone and you connected it with Bixby via setup.

This chart is the optimistic use case for Bixby.  Home is the Google Now-equivalent page.  Vision is connected to the Samsung Camera app and is supposed to allow you to snap a picture of something and get a translation, identification or other data.  So far, I get about 1 hit with data out of every 5 attempts.  Often the data is wrong – I snapped a picture of a “wet floor” sign at my local Starbucks and instead of a translation of “piso mojado” I was shown a Google search for the phrase “slippery when wet” – granted, it is in the same ballpark, but since the Spanish phrase was all that was visible in the picture, it seems like an odd way to answer what should have been a simple translation.

Reminders are just that – location and time aware reminders to do something.  When you are able to get the reminder into Bixby, they work exactly the same as Google’s reminders (and Cortana’s and Siri’s, I would guess).  Getting the reminder in is challenging, though, because…

Voice is the interface portion of Bixby and primarily how you are supposed to interact.  You can tell Bixby to remind you to pick up milk when you get to Metropolitan Market or to remind you to buy tickets for Chris Isaak tomorrow at 9 AM.  You can tell Bixby, but if there is any noise in the room or anything going on with your phone, Bixby will almost always get it wrong.  Asking Bixby to remind me to get milk while walking towards the store netted me a Google search for the etymology of the word “ilk”.  In fact, about half the time I got something entirely different than the reminder I was hoping for.

Pressing and holding the Bixby button allows you to launch a command or set a reminder without the trigger phrase, which is a very good thing since I could never get the trigger to work consistently.  You can use commands like “Open Messages” and the Messages (SMS) app will open.  For apps that have deep-linking (at the moment, only a handful of Samsung apps like Health and Messages), you can add an operation to the command – like “Open Messages and Send a Text to Beth”.  For the apps which Samsung has deep-linking setup, this works quite nicely.  However, Bixby has recognition problems here, too.  I use Pulse for SMS messaging, and if I use the command “Open Pulse” inexplicably Bixby launches Samsung Health – while I get the “pulse” reference, it would appear Bixby has trouble parsing the syntax of commands and just executes whatever it thinks it is near-matched.

Other than reminders and VERY light phone commands, Voice leaves a lot to be desired.  And even those leave something to be desired.

I would love to tell you of a better experience, but it is truly early days for Bixby.  Samsung must have realized that the assistant is something less than half-baked because not long after the beta was launched Samsung announced the general availability would be delayed until there are more resources (read: apps) available.  Probably a good thing, too, because it gives them more time to perfect something the other guys have right already: voice recognition with consistent results.  It was 24 hours of frustrating near misses, reminders to check my alarms (which I routinely dismissed only to have them reappear a couple of hours later), inability to set reminders for the things I needed, and other quirky results that made me think of Apple’s Newton handwriting fiasco many years ago.  If you want a laugh, go look that last one up.

So for now, back to the Google Assistant where I know it will remind me to get milk.

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24 Hours with Bixby originally appeared on on June 29, 2017 at 7:59 am.

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Julie’s gadget diary – I just held a Samsung Galaxy S8+ and I liked it

Two days ago after Samsung unveiled the new Galaxy S8 and S8+ phones, I wrote that I’d be staying up and pre-ordering one at the crack of dawn the next day. As it turned out, I didn’t pre-order one because I found out that I would not be able to order an unlocked phone until May 9th.

I wasn’t that tore up about not being able to pre-order because I knew I’d be able to test drive one from Verizon at the end of April when they start shipping on 4/21. I also knew that a shiny new LG G6 loaner unit would be waiting for me on Thursday. New toys make it easier waiting for future toys.

Today I decided to stop by my local Best Buy after work because it was on the way to my accountant where I had to pick up my taxes. The reason why I wanted to stop at Best Buy was so I could check out the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 in person. But I got an even better surprise when I walked in and saw a big Galaxy S8 and S8+ display. It didn’t really occur to me that they would already have them in the store.

I got to try both sizes and was really surprised how similar they look and feel. I kept having to check the sticker on the back of the phone to see which one I had in my hand.

I never liked the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge and Galaxy S7 Edge devices because my palm would accidentally touch the curved edges of the display causing weird behavior. I didn’t notice that issue with the S8+ (shown above) or the S8 (shown below). At least not during the few short minutes that I played with each phone.

I will tell you that two things were immediately apparent to me upon holding the devices. One thing I love and one thing I hate.

I love Samsung’s displays. They really do make every other smartphone’s display look anemic in comparison. Some people might not fancy the vivid, almost over saturated displays, but I kinda love them.

I love the displays but I hate the slimy, smeary, fingerprinty feel of the back of the phone. Ick. That said, the LG G6 that I started testing has the same issue. If I do end up buying an S8+ (that’s the one that I’m leaning towards now that I’ve actually held one), I’ll have to put a skin on the back like the “leather” dbrand skin that I have on my Nexus 6P.

Other than not liking the back of the phone, I found the S8 and S8+ to be comfortable to hold and oh so pretty to look at. Where the S8 devices feel like slab of glass in my hand, the Nexus 6P feels more like a slab of steel. I prefer the feel of the 6P, but that won’t keep me from probably buying an S8+.

I really am looking forward to using one for a few weeks when I get the chance to get one to review.

I was disappointed that Best Buy didn’t have a DeX dock because I’m really interested in trying one.

Oh, I also checked out the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 which was my main reason for stopping at the store. Really thin and light. I’m tempted… I wish my current S Tab 10.5 would just die already so I wouldn’t feel guilty buying a new one!

Anyone else had a chance to see and touch one of the S8’s in the wild yet? Thoughts?

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Julie’s gadget diary – I just held a Samsung Galaxy S8+ and I liked it originally appeared on on March 31, 2017 at 4:32 pm.

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