Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

Well, it’s late August 2017 and the new Samsung Note 8 is out.

1/ Disclaimer, for years I have had an all you can eat data and minutes contract with Hutchinson (the only phone company in the UK that owns their own towers and infrastructure) which meant an automatic “free” new phone every 2 years, *any* phone you liked.

Reviews and shit aside, I have now seen and tested one in the flesh.

I have two Note 4’s, one Note 3 and an old S3, the note 4’s are both used, the Note 3 and S3 is just emergency spare unused.

I’m not a big guy, and I have square stubby hands, my pick your nose finger is 75 mm long, ring finger 82 mm long, spare finger is 71 mm long and pinky is 61 mm long.

I say all this because I have been able to use the Note’s one handed with no problem at all.

The new Note 8 has a 162.5 x 74.8 x 8.6 mm overall size, the Note 4 153.5 x 78.6 x 8.5 mm and while that may not seem like much difference at all, an extra 10 mm in height while losing 5 mm in width makes the new screen ratio displeasing to me, I just do not like it, and I find the advertised measuring diagonal screen size misleading as a result, according to the numbers the Note 8 has a bigger screen, in my hands compared to the Note 4 it looks and feels like a smaller screen.

I should also add a disclaimer here that I have never run a phone without some sort of protective case, so all these “naked phone” pics and specs and reviews mean nothing to me… I have also never had a cracked screen or any other kind of phone damage ever, in fact all my phones even the old S3 (I sold on the S1) look brand new.

The Note 8 screen didn’t blow me away visually either, yeah, I can see it is an incremental improvement over the Note 4 amoled beauty, but enough to make a difference? Not really.

The Note 4 has an excellent camera for a phone, the Note 8 camera may be technically better, but it’s still at the mercy of the optics, and if I actually want to take a proper picture I put down the Note 4 and pick up the Canon SX50, one of the best bridge cameras out there, Ok the sensor isn’t as good as a pukka DSLR, but, I always have the right lens already attached.

For situations where “the best camera is the one in your hand” the fact is the Note 4 is pretty damn good most of the time, and again, any incremental improvement in the Note 8 is an “is it worth it?” and for me the answer is no, not all by itself.

Now come all the hero’s running benchmark software, who will tell me that the Note 8 is literally twice as fast and powerful as the Note 4, maybe so, but considering I never pause at anything using the Note 4, and considering that I always enabled developer mode and disabled animations, it’s actually a toss up if the Note 8 is as fast as the Note 4 at opening applications like the aforesaid camera…

The extra RAM in the Note 8 would be nice, but the 3 gig of the Note 4 has in practice been enough, and to be fair 6.01 isn’t the latest cutting edge, but I’m not sure what 7.xx does that 6.xx doesn’t that I will actually need and notice…. not that I could not install 7.11 on my note 4 if I really wanted to.

My Note 4 I can pull the back off and swap the battery, the last Note device to be able to do this, why would I want to? Well, it’s a 3 year old phone, so forgetting all those (valid) arguments about swapping batteries with charged spares, the fact is my 3 year old phone has a brand new genuine battery, therefore it works like new, if it was a fixed battery I would not be in that position…. I’d be in iphone territory, device endurance / run time running down a slope as it aged.

No removable battery and the stupid narrow/tall screen aspect ratio are together what kills it for me, I do not discount any of the other improvements, I think they are all good and valid improvements, but taken all together they still do not outweigh the (to me) huge retrograde step with the new screen aspect ratio and the integral battery, not even close.

Remember, I am someone who can get a “free” Note 8 at will, I was already paying this premium to my provider, I could have cut back to a sim only deal months ago, and did not, waiting to see for myself what the new note would actually be like.

Having seen it, it’s an iphone running android, and most of the things I hated about the iphone weren’t just the we know best software walled garden, it was also the built in obsolescence of the integral battery… in fact I’m surprised the Note 8 retains the extra micro SD card slot, that is really the only thing that remains from the old phones.

So, it is now late 2017, and I cannot see a single argument to “upgrade” my 2014 Note 4, please note (sic) I am not saying I cannot see any arguments to upgrade, I am saying I am not seeing anything that I personally consider a significant upgrade, and I’m seeing a lot of things that I do think are significant downgrades.

At this point I’m off next week to downgrade my contract with my provider to sim only, saving myself 30 quid a month.

If Samsung is listening, the Note 9 better be;

• 16:9 aspect ratio screen
• 4,500+ mAh battery, removable, trivially…. ideally hot swappable with a small supercap.
• dual sim
• 16 Gb RAM w 256 Gb internally for storage
• Bloatware free… do NOT fucking bundle fucking fuckbook as part of the fucking ROM image

That’s it, that’s all you have to do to sell me a new thousand buck phone, I’ll take all the other CPU upgrades and so on as a given, but the fucking base hardware needs to not suck donkey balls, and making an iPhone clone that runs android sucks donkey balls big time.

Or don’t.

The Chinese will.

So 2017 and I’m still using a Note 4, no idea what or when I will be upgrading to in the future, but willing to bet money it will be something out of China with a name that nobody had heard of when this Note 4 came out.