The Note brand has always been aimed squarely at geeks. It was a huge phone before huge phones were cool, and powerful enough to replace not just a tablet, but maybe a laptop as well. Samsung has a lot to prove with the Note8 following last year's recall, and for the most part the the phablet delivers. The dual camera system is impressive, the pen is greatly improved, but flaws of the last flagship Galaxy S8 are still here too.

Once again, Samsung has built a beautiful-looking phone that is almost all screen. The display wraps right up to the edges, with small slivers of bezel top and bottom. Samsung's AMOLED displays are the best in the business and with HDR built in, it has better specs than my TV.

It's impressive that the Note8 can be used one handed, despite its size. This is thanks to the phone being relatively narrow, just a few millimetres wider than the S8. But it was still just a little too big for my tiny hands, not so much in size but in weight.

When holding the Note, my hand only covered the bottom third of the device, making it feel top-heavy, and ready to topple out of my grip. I haven't dropped the phone yet, but I always felt I would, and that made me nervous. I doubt Note fans care — they're attracted to this phone because of its size — but I prefer the S8 in the hand.

Samsung's Galaxy S7 had probably the best camera in an Android phone at the time, but they hadn't bothered to upgrade it until now. The Note7 and S8 inherited the same camera. With the Note8, Samsung has joined Apple and Huawei in adding a second telephoto lens to the standard wide-angle lens, allowing you to switch to a two-times zoom close up, or combine the lens in software, to mimic the depth of field look available from a DSLR.

Samsung's implementation — called Live Focus — is closer to Huawei's than Apple's, in that it allows users to adjust the depth of field on the fly while taking a picture. You can adjust the focus after the fact, too. It works well, there's no bleed in the focus of the subject, and portrait shots look amazing.

Both lenses have optical image stabilisation which allows for better low light shots and smoother video. All in all, this is one of the best cameras in a smartphone.

The S-Pen has dramatically improved. It now supports 4096 levels of pressure with a much smaller tip, at just 0.7mm diameter. That makes for much more detailed drawing and note taking, allowing you to fit more scribbles on the screen. You can even jot down notes on the lock screen, handy for quick reminders or to-do lists.

Inside the phone is a modest 3300mah battery, which struggles to make it through a day powering the massive screen and very powerful processor, under heavy use. I needed to switch to battery saving mode to get a full day's charge from the device. I'm a power user for sure, constantly staring at my screen while streaming music and podcasts via Bluetooth, but I'd say most Note users would classify themselves as power users.

As with the S8, the Note8 has a dedicated Bixby button that can't be mapped to any other function. At the launch of the S8, Bixby wasn't ready, but now it's available in Australia I've found — in both function and reliability — it lags behind Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Assistant (which is also available on the Note).

Finally, I still find the biometric security of the Note8 frustrating, as it was in the S8. The retina scan to unlock offers excellent security, but isn't fast enough to use on a device the average Australian unlocks 56 times a day. Face scanning is less secure and much faster, but even then I couldn't rely on it, because wearing glasses seems to confuse it. Samsung needs to allow you to save your face with glasses on and glasses off. And the rear-mounted fingerprint reader, which was always just out of reach on the S8, may as well be in another postcode here. I had no chance of reaching it.

The Note8 is a solid update for the true believers of Samsung's massive phone line. I hope next year's Galaxy S9 inherits the dual camera system, but I really hope Samsung rethink their biometric security — and Bixby — before then.