The S Pen

If you're looking for a smartphone that comes with a stylus worth a damn, your search begins and ends with the Galaxy Note. Being able to scribble all over the screen has been a mainstay since the Note's earliest days, but the S Pen picked up a few more handy gimmicks when the Note 8 hit shelves last year.

Screen Off Memo -- you know, the feature that lets you whip out the S Pen and start writing immediately -- was updated to support 100 pages of notes before you had to unlock the phone. Translating text became much more valuable, too, since you could use the S Pen to convert entire sentences and paragraphs from one language to another. The Note 7 only let you do that for individual words. And let's not forget Live Message, which I still use to whip up flashy GIFs that I blast around my social circles when I want to be obnoxious. (Needless to say, I get a lot of use out of it.) Throw in all the other S Pen features that have been added to the Note experience over the years and we're left with the most elegant stylus experience for a smartphone, period. Well, until the Galaxy Note 9 finally shows up.

With all that said, I've never been much for writing on screens -- or even with pens and paper, for that matter. If you're like me, the biggest benefit of having an S Pen stuck in the bottom of a phone is always having something to mindlessly click while thinking through a problem. (If Samsung got into the fidget-gadget business, I'd be one of the first to lay my money down.)

What hasn't

The camera

The Galaxy Note 8 was the first Samsung device to ship with a dual camera, and considering the company's skill with sensors, it's no surprise that the Note 8's camera is still one of the stronger options you'll find out there. That said, it didn't take long at all for the Note 8 to be largely outclassed by some of its fiercest competitors.