With deep pen integration, remote control capability and superior multitasking, the Galaxy Note 8. Between the Galaxy Note tablet and phone lines, Samsung has single-handedly made pen computing relevant again.

While you must pay extra for the Apple Pencil, the S Pen is included at no extra costs. It does have some downsides but no huge weaknesses. Samsung galaxy tab a 8 0 with s pen drawing Galaxy Book. Want a tablet that can pretty much do anything?

However, neither the relatively compact 5. Enter the Galaxy Note 8.

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With a host of pen-enabled apps and custom Android features, TV remote control ability and Samsung’s multitasking prowess, the Note 8.

Click to Enlarge Roughly the size of a steno pad, the Galaxy Note 8.

The 7. While not particularly attractive, particularly in comparison to the iPad mini’s premium metallic design, this functional chassis has room for a few key ports.

The bottom right corner has a bay for storing the stylus, something many competitors’ pen-based tablets have lacked, and the bottom surface itself has a standard microUSB charging port.

In addition to its power and volume buttons, the right side of the tablet also holds an infrared port that allows the Note 8.

Classic samsung galaxy tab a 8 0 with s pen drawing a510

Click to Enlarge Though the Galaxy Note 8. When we played a p trailer for the Avengers on the Note 8.

When we watched the same trailer on a Galaxy Note II, which has the same resolution on its 5. Click to Enlarge Though the Note 8.

At lux on our light meter, the Galaxy Note 8. With its brightness turned up all the way, we were able to view the screen in direct sunlight, but just barely.

Viewing angles from left to right and top or bottom were solid, but the highly reflective screen bounced light back at us when we were viewing darker scenes in a movie.

Rnd samsung galaxy tab a 8 0 with s pen drawing vibe a7020a48

Click to Enlarge The Galaxy Note 8. When we played Patrice Rushen’s bass-heavy “Forget Me Nots,” the sound was flat, distant and lifeless.

Motley Crue’s guitar and drum heavy “Shout at the Devil,” was so tinny that it was almost painful to listen to.

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Even worse, the speakers are mounted on the bottom of the tablet when held in landscape mode, causing our hands to muffle the speakers.

Unlike stock Android, which uses virtual navigation buttons, the Note 8. Where regular Android has a task switching button and puts a menu button into the apps themselves, Samsung’s use of a dedicated menu button requires you to press and hold the home button to get a list of running tasks.

To get Google Now on the tablet, you must press and hold the menu button rather than swiping up from the home button like you would on stock Android.

We found these shortcuts to be quite convenient. Samsung provides five desktops, which come default with a time widget, a calendar widget, a Flipboard widget and a widget that makes it easy to create new notes in the bundled S Note app.

By long pressing the back button, we launched a menu bar on the left side of the screen with shortcuts to the web browser, Gmail, Email, contacts, the gallery and several other key apps.

If we dragged an app from this bar onto the desktop, the app would launch at full screen. However, if we already had one of these Multi Window-capable apps running and dragged over a second one, the screen would split in two, with each app taking up half of the space.

We could then drag the separator bar between the two apps to make one app take up more screen real estate than the other. Click to Enlarge We particularly appreciated having the our corporate email open right next to the browser so we could write a message while doing research on the web.

P200 samsung galaxy tab a 8 0 with s pen drawing password

With the Galaxy Note 8. We also enjoyed using pop-up play, a different multitasking feature that allowed us to play videos in a draggable, resizable layer on top of the desktop.

However, unlike LG which has a similar feature called QSlide on its phones, Samsung doesn’t let you change the opacity of the playback window so you can see through it.

As with its other Galaxy Note devices, Samsung has built pen support into many areas of the user interface. The Air View feature provides previews of many types content when you hover over objects with the S Pen stylus.

When we held our pen above thumbnails in the gallery app, they expanded to show larger versions of the images.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 8. There’s USB and Bluetooth mouse support, too, so you don’t have to rely on the touchscreen for navigation. Samsung galaxy tab a 8 0 with s pen drawing Time names climate activist Greta Thunberg its Person of the Year. This one offers much better performance, a full metal body, better speakers, and a fingerprint scanner.

And when we held the pen tip on top of a video playbar, we got a thumbnail of that moment of footage. In the email inbox, we were able to see attachment file names without opening individual messages, just by hovering over the paperclip icon.

Samsung galaxy tab a 8 0 with s pen drawing tablet

Even third-party apps now support Air View previews, such as Flipboard. We could preview stories just by hovering over brands’ respective buttons in the app.

Click to Enlarge If you see anything on the Galaxy Note 8. After clipping, you’ll be able to decide which app to send the graphic to or you can just keep it in your clipboard to paste into the document of your choice.

We particularly enjoyed clipping a piece of a web page and then dragging it into the email client where it became a PNG attachment and we were able to email it out.

It almost goes without saying that you can use the S Pen to navigate around the operating system without touching the screen. However, on the Galaxy Note 8.

Click to Enlarge Instead of using the stock Android keyboard, Samsung includes its own virtual keyboard, which features large, well-spaced keys.

You also get a number of powerful options, including trace typing and handwriting recognition. Typing in either portrait or landscape mode, we found the light gray keys easy to target, and we appreciated the keyboard’s strong next-word prediction ability.

For example, when we started typing the sentence “What do,” it correctly prompted us correctly with “you” and “think” as the next two words, correctly guessing that we wanted to write the sentence “what do you think.

We also appreciate Samsung’s support for haptic feedback. Once we enabled Key-tap vibration in the settings menu, we got a small amount of tactile response when we tapped the keys.

However, we wish that the feedback was a little stronger. Disabled by default, the keyboard has a trace typing feature that, like Swype, lets you form words by drawing a line between the letters.

As is often the case with trace keyboards, we found the word prediction lacking on uncommon nouns. The keyboard incorrectly suggested “Abrams” when we typed “Avram,” but it got other words like “mother,” “Intel” and “Kenneth” right on the first trace.

Click to Enlarge This wouldn’t be a pen-enabled tablet without a handwriting recognition keyboard, and Samsung includes a really accurate one.

Tapping the pen icon on the keyboard replaced the keys with a yellow, ruled drawing area where we could write letters and watch as the keyboard turned them into characters and inserted them into our document.

As we scribbled a variety of words including uncommon nouns like our name, the keyboard usually converted them correctly, even though our handwriting was absolutely terrible.

We were particularly pleased to see that the app had palm rejection, which prevented us from accidentally drawing or tapping the back button with the heel of our hand.

Click to Enlarge Samsung includes several powerful note-taking and drawing apps to help you make the most of the S Pen. The app has a list of several templates, ranging from a lined sheet of blank paper to a happy birthday card to a meeting notes form with fields for date, location, attendees and agenda.

On any page you can either draw whatever you want and leave it as a graphic, draw text and convert it to ASCII, draw a shape and let the program turn it into a perfect square or circle or draw a mathematical formula and let S Pen find the solution.

You can also insert audio, video or photos. Click to Enlarge Perhaps our favorite new feature of S Pen is Idea Sketch, which provides clip art based on a word you draw.

When we activated Idea Sketch from the “insert picture” menu in S Note, we were presented with a blank box where we could scribble in a keyword.

When we scribbled the word “dog,” the software connected to the cloud for a moment then suggested a line art graphic of a dog, which we inserted in our document.

We got several line art results when we drew the word “man. Click to Enlarge Paper Artist is a simple drawing app that lets you take any image and color it in or sketch over it with a pencil.

Different effects let you make the photo look like a pastel sketch or water color. We particularly enjoyed taking a photo of a baby and coloring it in comic book style.

The app features a dizzying array of functions, including the ability to write a diary, keep a calendar, maintain a to-do list or even jot down ideas or a shopping list.

Though the app is primarily designed for keyboard text entry, we love its Free Draw feature, which let us draw an image write into our Word doc.

Setting WatchOn up was a breeze. The app first detected our location using GPS, then prompted us to enter our cable provider, TV manufacturer and cable box manufacturer while testing to make sure those devices responded to the infrared signal.

One we completed the WatchOn setup, the app delivered a very attractive program guide with a list of current titles viewable by subject matter or by channel lineup.

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For each title, we had the opportunity to either tap a button to watch it now or to view a detailed description.

When we looked under the Action-Adventure genre and clicked on G. Joe, one of more than two dozen recommendations, WatchOn changed the channel on our cable box so we could watch that movie.

Unfortunately, in our experience, the results were way too broad for the searches we conducted. A search for Captain America returned 2, TV listings which contained either the word “Captain” or “America” but not both, a list of 67 movies which did not include the Captain America movie, and a few YouTube videos that actually were about the topic we searched for.

Enclosing our search term in quotes did not change the results. When we did click through to a movie listing, we were given the choice to buy or rent it from Samsung’s Media Hub or BlockBuster On Demand.

Purchase options and prices varied depending on title. Though WatchOn is based on Peel technology, Samsung also includes a standalone Peel SmartRemote app, which provides just the TV listings without the universal search option.

Click to Enlarge Available as a setting in the notification drawer, Samsung’s Reading mode improves the legibility of text in apps you use primarily for reading.

With the mode on, text appearead crisper and the white background looked more off-white than white, making it slightly easier on our eyes.

Click to Enlarge While Apple’s iPad mini has access to over a hundred thousands of apps that are optimized for a tablet display, Android tablets like the Galaxy Note 8.

We particularly appreciated apps that added extra columns like the Email client, which puts a list of mailboxes in a pane on the left side of the screen while the list of messages sits on the right.

When we opened an individual message, the left pane showed a list of all messages in that mailbox while the right showed the open email. The S Planner Calendar app shows the calendar on one side of the screen and detail about the day’s meetings on another while the Music Hub and Games Hubs both have tiles that stretch across the screen.

Several third-party apps in the Google Play market are also tablet-optimized.

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Rhapsody shows an album cover on one side of the screen while the playlist is on the other. TweetCaster puts a navigation column next to your feed.

When we shot images of the New York skyline on a sunny afternoon, colors were accurate and details like the brick lines on a building were sharp.

We got similarly solid results when we captured photos of a baby in a very sunny room. However, when we shot the same subject in dim lighting, colors were washed out and the image was noisy.

Most disappointingly, the camera takes a long 2 seconds to fire, making it difficult to catch those fleeting moments when your toddler is doing something cute; there’s also no burst mode.

When other mobile devices like the HTC One take the first shot in.

Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8 (2019) with S Pen: Unboxing, Hands On and First Impressions!