When you unsheath the S Pen (which I will forever call the Spen, and thus assume it's a Swedish stylus), the Note 8.0 makes a noise and immediately jumps to S Note (Snote), a note-taking app. The app reminds me a bit of OneNote, letting you draw or type or annotate screenshots, and providing a handful of templates to help you do so without making a mess. S Note is in theory a great app, but it actually lends a falsely negative sense of what the S Pen and Note 8.0 can really do. In S Note, the app quickly starts to lag behind the stylus, which means that instead of scribbling quickly you have to draw pretty deliberately for the app to keep up. Luckily it's just S Note, and even heavier apps like Photoshop Touch work much better — it's a shame Photoshop Touch doesn't come bundled like it does on the 10.1, but it's worth the $9.99 if you really want to take advantage of the S Pen and its 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity.

Productivity tool? No. Awesome drawing fun? Yes!

Nearly every software feature from the Note 10.1 shows up on the smaller model as well, except for one I quite liked: the "mini apps" that pop a video player, calendar, or notepad over top of whatever app you're using. The feature's made mostly redundant by the dual-windowing feature, but in some cases I like being able to pin a video player in the corner while I deal with full-screen Gmail.

When we reviewed the Galaxy Note 10.1, we found software problems basically everywhere we looked, from odd UX noises to constant lag and awkwardness. In almost every case, Samsung has fixed those problems – with a much-too-late software update for the Note 10.1, and from the getgo on the 8.0. This device is smooth, fast, powerful, and consistent no matter what it's doing. It surely doesn't hurt that the Note 8.0 is runs a more recent version of Android — 4.1.2 Jelly Bean — and a more powerful 1.6GHz quad-core Exynos processor, either. (This is basically the same spec sheet as the Note II, which is something to be happy about.) But the Note 10.1's development over time makes it abundantly clear that with Android, it's all about the software, and if you're going to customize the software you'd better do it well. After swinging and missing pretty badly, Samsung finally figured it out.

Mostly, anyway. I still can't stand the incessant bloops and ripples that make up the Nature UX, or Samsung's constant instructions — if I'm told one more time to tilt to scroll the browser, I'll lose my mind. (That's the fastest I've ever checked the "Don't show me this again" box, ever.) Almost every action involves some strange sound effect — they can mostly be turned off, but it's a pain, and in all likelihood that terrible chirping noise is going to end up being your notification sound as well. I muted my Note 8.0 early and resolutely, and I'm a happier person for it.

I also can't stand that so many of Google's apps are replaced by Samsung's universally inferior versions, like the hideous S Planner and Music Player. I'd hold out hope that Samsung will make like HTC and begin to scale back its overbearing Android customizations, but the company appears clearly headed the other way — it's creating a "Samsung experience" that is completely separate from what Google offers.

There are a lot of apps and services involved in that "Samsung experience," most of which I don't particularly care for. There's the Samsung Apps app, which exists for reasons beyond my understanding, as well as apps actually called Screen Saver and Samsung Cares Video. S Voice demotes the much more useful Google Now, the Hub apps are mostly just ersatz Play Store competitors — I just wish Samsung would tone it all down a bit. I do like the Peel app, which works as a visual TV Guide and integrates with the IR blaster to let you control your TV and cable box; the new WatchOn app gives you some useful search and discovery features to help you find stuff to watch. If only Samsung had kept the international Note 8.0's ability to make phone calls, I might say the good outweighs the bad, but as is it's a close call.

When the Note 8.0's battery first died on me, I thought I had done something wrong – it couldn't have died after only a day and a night of mostly sitting in its box, not when my iPad mini and Nexus 7 both last the better part of a week. Even now, I'm still a little confused. I got about 36 hours of use when I used it heavily, including one roughly six-hour stretch when I never put it down, which is solid longevity for any tablet. But even when I used it much less, it only lasted about two days. On the Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of popular websites and high-res images with brightness set to 65 percent, it lasted just about six hours, which would be a great score for a cellphone but for a tablet is a bit lacking. Basically, no matter how heavily you use the Note 8.0, expect somewhere between a day and a half and two days of battery from it.

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