Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 review

Small tablet doesn't have to mean short battery life. We've been able to put our iPad Mini down and pick it up four days later to find it still has juice.

When it comes to the Note 8.0, it's sadly not the same story. Battery life on the Note 8.0 isn't terrible - but it's not going to win any awards.

During the course of our review, we played with it a fair amount, though we tried to do this over the a couple of days in the same way we would with our regular tablet, so that we could give figures relevant to the real world, rather than the feverish activity of a reviewer.

We turned the screen on and off a fair bit, we surfed on it for hours in total, we streamed a bit of music, we watched a bit of video, took a few photos, read a bit of a Kindle book and probably gave it just a little more action than it would see in an average situation.

Overnight, sat on Wi-Fi with a weak signal, it lost 2 per cent of battery (we took it off full charge just before bed.) And almost 24 hours later, it was still around 44 per cent.

It took the best part of two days to exhaust the 4600mAH battery and die. We'd say similar usage in an iPad Mini or Nexus 7 would have yielded more like three days in the same usage circumstances.

However, this isn't necessarily an Achilles heel. Remember, this is a device that will primarily be used in the home, and charging it up most nights won't be as much of an issue as it is for a phone where you'd use it all day and then risk running out of power in the evening when you popped out.

It's also worth noting that this was without the power saving mode enabled. We didn't want to hinder our experience by choking the CPU, making the display deliberately darker or turning off haptic feedback.

However, if you are desperate for some reserve funds in the bank, this will increase performance around 15% in some situations, and could be your lifeline.