degen It was more flat, less punchy whites and it is a very large screen, something like 6.7". I hesitated because I thought there needed to be a smidgen more vibrancy but I am thinking now that it is just the screen calibration combined with improper tagging of images on webpages making them look less saturated. App icons looked fine. This is just from hands on testing at a Samsung store which my city has. I'm sure they will price drop it again soon now that the iPhone 11 is out and the Pixel 4 is on the way in October. It's currently priced at $670 or something and the special was $550 or so. (8+ I got at 734+tax)
I was playing with the 8+ some more this afternoon, noticed it has a new phone smell and also that the home button gets warm. Dialed in the colours a bit better. Instead of colour tint, I now recommend instead the tritanopia option for blue/yellow colour blindness using the second test pattern to balance the blue boxes against the red and the other colours. I am not colour blind at all but this slider will help balance the panel because usually the complaint is that something is too blue or too yellow, and frankly the blues needed a bit of a boost, which you can see on the home screen icons as well as test photos. Battery life at full brightness is around the 4 hour mark so it is not like those Android monsters coming out now with 4000-6000 mAh batteries. I'm pretty done with colour calibrating it now that I have dialed it in.
Definitely missing a bunch of the Android options (e.g. no option to tell you the image resolution in the stock photo app) but also enjoying how fast the CPU is.
A bit of a headache now, as I am a little sick this weekend. Not clear how much is from getting used to it and how much is just from being sick. I might keep this device but I will decide after iOS 13 is out and after I look at the newest devices in the store. And after I check my bank account balance.
I do think this is one of the devices one can get used to once they adjust the colours, bold fonts and adjust the zoom as well as the dynamic text size which I took down a notch. I did get used to the 1803 build of W10 at the office after awhile on the hardware combo (Thinkpad 480, displayport, Samsung s24e650 office monitor) which I am on. I was pretty pissed about at first because the older build was better.
I read that the XR is using a newer type of edge lit backlighting. I imagine the future will have a bunch of changes. Micro-leds, violet LEDs, etc. Will always be something new to check out.