[Huawei Honor Note 8 Questions & Answers] Nitemare3219:
-I just got my phone today, and on the 4th floor at work, my Pixel XL is pulling 8 Mbps download on LTE, and the Note 8 was pulling 7 Mbps on HSPA+, so certainly a serviceable connection, which is great. Still, LTE is the future and the fact that this phone doesn't support it in the U.S. is kind of disappointing.

-I haven't used the Note 8 enough to say it's really all that slow... actually it seems perfectly adequate. If you check benchmarks, the performance is actually on-par with the Snapdragon 820, especially with multi-core performance. Graphics performance is where the Note 8 falls on its face... terrible, really. It's too bad Huawei didn't make this a more premium device (hence the Honor branding) and tossed in all the new stuff on the Mate 9. Not as smooth as my Pixel XL, but it's not bad

-I haven't really touched the camera either, and likely never will. It seems like it'd be an average shooter at best.

-Rooted and unlocked, are you running B027 or have you managed to update to B029? I thought I read that root/TWRP was not compatible with B029 yet, but if it is, that'd be great. How exactly have you been doing "manual updates?"

-I tried to use the beta registration website for the Note 8 to get my hands on the Nougat beta... wasn't happening. Looking at the translated comments, it actually looks like this is a closed beta test and they already have the number of testers they want. Short of someone from China posting the update for download, I don't think we'll be flashing Nougat until it hits open beta at the very least, if that even happens.

Taking the phone out of the box, I was really shocked at how big it is... calling the Note7, V20, and Mate 9 "phablets" is meaningless now. THIS is a phablet, truly. In fact, I'm going to end up using it as more of a small tablet with cell connectivity instead of a phone at all. I have zero plans to put my primary SIM in it and use it as my daily driver. I'll use it for browsing and media... that's about it. And that's okay, considering the low price, great hardware, and top notch display. I do wish the display got a little brighter (my guess is it tops out somewhere near 400 nits which is great, but not the best for outdoor visibility). It's very close in brightness to my Pixel XL until I use the kernel/root brightness boost mode that blasts the Pixel XL up to 600-700 nits. The whole reason I dumped the Mate 9 for this phone is because it's AMOLED... and it does not disappoint! Plus it has what appears to be an sRGB mode (or close to it) so you don't have to deal with over saturation if you don't want to. Getting it set up was a little tricky at first due to all the app security features built in to EMUI and having to download all the Google stuff, but it's essentially running perfectly fine now. The "small" display scaling option is still way too large to make use of the display, so I used "adb shell wm density 400" and it looks pretty good to me.

I think my only complaint is not being able to disable the stupid brightness reducer that automatically kicks in when you open some apps like your browser (you can force the brightness back up, but it's annoying to say the least, especially when going in/out of Chrome via Google Now). It also seems like a some apps can't use full immersive mode and hide the on-screen buttons?