Samsung has silently started rolling out the Android 8.0 Oreo update for its flagship phablet, the Galaxy Note 8, in the United States. There has been no official announcement from Samsung regarding this and the rollout also appears to be particularly slow right now. It is possible that Samsung is waiting for users who have already received the update to confirm that everything is working fine before it starts a wider rollout and makes an official announcement about it as well. This approach does make sense since Samsung had to pull the Oreo update for the international Galaxy S8 due to a random restart issue. For now, there have been reports of Oreo rolling out to Galaxy Note 8 from subscribers on AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. T-Mobile Note 8 owners have not reported seeing any update yet, but it is expected to land any day now. If words of a moderator on Samsung’s forum are to be believed, the Oreo update for Note 8 should be out within the next few days. Samsung had started rolling out the Oreo update for the international variants of the Note 8 earlier this week. The Oreo update for the Note 8 does not bring much to the table. Samsung has further refined its software by tweaking and enhancing existing features. This is complemented by all the new Oreo features introduced by Google like notification dots, notification channels, ability to snooze notifications, Autofill, Picture-in-Picture, and more.
Our Take
Despite the Note 8 being Samsung’s flagship phablet, the Korean company took almost six months to roll out the Oreo update to the device. If anything, it shows just how slow Samsung is when it comes to updating flagship devices to the latest version of Android.
