I'm part of the camp that read this thread, saw the usual praise from jamzr, Sevanw, and co., and thought "oh boy finally Samsung looks to have cracked it!" So bought it for cheap-ish on sale, used it for about two weeks, and returned it vowing never to go back again.
I've done this song and dance with the Note 3, 5, was going to do it with the 7 until it started going explodey, Note 8, and finally Note 9. I'm not going to call the Note 9 a bad phone, but it's so far behind in many categories compared to other Android flagships and compared against the XS Max. The gimmicks are fun but the core functionality is clunky and they still haven't figured out how to get rid of the janky nature of it. Bit of an echo chamber in here and it's pretty toxic and not really representative of how people truly feel about these phones in the real world.
I've done this song and dance with the Note 3, 5, was going to do it with the 7 until it started going explodey, Note 8, and finally Note 9. I'm not going to call the Note 9 a bad phone, but it's so far behind in many categories compared to other Android flagships and compared against the XS Max. The gimmicks are fun but the core functionality is clunky and they still haven't figured out how to get rid of the janky nature of it. Bit of an echo chamber in here and it's pretty toxic and not really representative of how people truly feel about these phones in the real world.