As soon as a major smartphone comes out, you can expect a lot of unboxing and endurance tests and video reviews to come out in the next few days. Usually, it’s bloggers and YouTubers, etc, but also, T-Mobile. They’ve done a few unboxing stunts in the past and so we expected that they would come out with something for the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 which was unveiled yesterday. Sure enough, we got a live unboxing video at Times Square just a couple of hours after the announcement, and then a more “formal” unboxing video uploaded on their YouTube channel later on.
However if you were expecting some spectacular stunt video like what they did for the Galaxy S8 (with sharks!) or the HTC 10 (at 10,000 feet!), this was a much simpler, straightforward drawing and writing on a whiteboard video. Des of T-Mobile is still your unboxing guy and he opted to go for a still interesting way to unbox the new phablet, despite the lack of spectacle. They probably chose the market and whiteboard approach to give attention to the S-Pen of the Note 8 or because that’s what a lot of YouTube tutorial and product videos are doing nowadays.
Aside from showing off what is actually inside the box (the usual suspects), the video also runs down some hardware specs (Snapdragon 835 processor, wireless fast charging, fingerprint scanner). And of course, the “smarter” S Pen takes a bow as it can write when your screen is off and locked, directly on apps like Maps, and you can even create a handwritten animated message. The Note 8 is also Samsung’s first device with a dual camera, so they show it off too.
The only “stunt”-like thing they do here is to immerse the device in a fishbowl for 30 minutes (fast forwarded of course) and of course it survived because it’s IP68 dust and water resistant. Lastly, they shared that the Note 8 is compatible with the Gear 360, Gear VR (the new one), and DeX. Oh, and there is a shark, but just a short video clip in the beginning to show off that it has the “largest infinity screen to date.”
