by Daniel Bader on (#57RQX)
The right tool for the wrong time.At one point, I was going to start this review with a sentence like, "Samsung's never really screwed up the Galaxy Note; every version has been better than the last." I got about halfway through writing that sentence and then it all came flooding back — the summer of 2016, when reports of Note 7s catching fire started trickling in. Then came the recall, then the reissue, then the second recall, then the bans. How could I have forgotten, even briefly, something that fundamentally changed Samsung, and the wider smartphone industry, so dramatically?I forgot it for a moment because Samsung's done such a profoundly good job helping us forget it. In the wake of the Note 7 debacle, the company returned the following April with the Galaxy S8, which turned out to be its best-selling flagship ever (and retains that title today), followed by the Note 8 a few months later. A year later, the Note 9 was the first premium Android phone to justify its thou...